Re: [fonc] Alan Kay talk at HPI in Potsdam
On 2011-07-25, at 12:47 AM, Alan Kay wrote: For example, some of our next version of Etoys for children could be done in JS, but not all -- e.g. the Kedama massively parallel programmable particle system made by Yoshiki cannot be implemented to run fast enough in JS. It needs something much faster and lower level -- and this something has not existed until the Chrome native client (and this only in Chrome which is only about 11% penetrated). You don't have to wait for Chrome Native Client to have native levels of performance. Most of the current crop of browsers (i.e. not IE) use tracing JIT compilers to get close to native performance (in this experiment writing a CPU emulator in JS, one emulated instruction took approximately 20 native instructions: http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/roc/archives/2010/11/implementing_a.html). Javascript is fast and getting faster, with array operations coming soon and Web Workers for safe parallelism (purely message-based threads) available now. You can play 3D shooters, edit video, synthesize audio, and run Linux on an emulated CPU in Javascript. I'm not sure what part of that is not fast enough. Some of it is cruft and some of it is less than elegant. But having higher level primitives (like what SVG and Canvas provide) isn't all bad. --Dethe ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Alan Kay talk at HPI in Potsdam
On 2011-07-25, at 9:25 AM, Igor Stasenko wrote: But don't you see a problem: it evolving from simple 'kiddie' scripting language into a full fledged system. First off, JS was done in a hurry, but by Brendan Eich who was hired by Netscape because he had implemented languages before and knew something about what he was doing (and could work fast). JS itself had a marketing requirement to be have C-like syntax (curly braces), but the language itself was influenced more by Self and Lisp than any of the C lineage. And the JS we use today has been evolving (what's wrong with evolving?) since 1995. What is in browsers today was not designed in 10 days, it has been beaten through the wringer of day to day use, standardization processes, and deployment in an extremely wide range of environments. That doesn't make it perfect, and I'm not saying it doesn't have it's warts (it does), but to disparage it as kiddie scripting reeks to me of trolling, not discussion. It is of course a good direction and i welcome it. But how different our systems would be, if guys who started it 20 years back would think a bit about future? I don't think we would even be having this discussion if they didn't think about the future, and I think they've spent the intervening years continuing to think about (and implement) the future. Why all those emerging technologies is just reproducing the same which were available for desktop apps for years? Security, for one. Browsers (and distributed systems generally) are a hostile environment and the ability to run arbitrary code on a user's machine has to be tempered by not allowing rogue code to erase their files or install a virus. In the meantime, desktops have also become distributed systems, and browser technology is migrating into the OS. That's not an accident. Doesn't it rings a bell that it is something fundamentally wrong with this technology? Well, I doubt we could name a technology there isn't something fundamentally wrong with. I've been pushing Javascript as far as I could for more than a decade now. Browsers (and JS) really were crap back then, no doubt about it. But they are starting to become a decent foundation in the past couple of years, with more improvements to come. And there is something to be said for a safe language with first-class functions that is available anywhere a web browser can run (and further). Anyhow, not going to spend more time defending JS. Just had to put in my $0.02 CAD. --Dethe ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Richard Gabriel Guy Steele, 50 in 50 talk
On 2011-06-25, at 3:27 AM, Bob Arning wrote: I concur. It was mildly entertaining at points, but mostly I kept hoping they would speed up the pace while slowing down the camera switching. Since some smart people recommended it, I kept plugging away. I got a bit over half way before bailing. You got further than I did. I've seen them do something similar live at OOPSLA, although that was a debate about OO (and it suffered from Gabriel having a bad cold at the time). This was unbearable, though, in pacing, in presentation, and what little detectable content there was. The whole we're each going to present 50 statements of exactly 50 words seems like it would only result in something stilted and forced, and why should we care? Is that the most important thing about your presentation (I guess so, since that's the title). It's too bad, since both these men are capable of giving great presentations and have inspiring ideas. And it is important to try new things--they don't all have to succeed. This one didn't, at least from my perspective. Nothing wrong with that, but I don't really get why it is so recommended. --Dethe Cheers, Bob On 6/25/11 12:07 AM, Julian Leviston wrote: On 24/06/2011, at 11:42 PM, Bert Freudenberg wrote: They gave that presentation more than once (I saw it a OOPSLA). Awesome :) Here's a version from JAOO'08, streams fine in Germany: http://blog.jaoo.dk/2008/11/21/art-and-code-obscure-or-beautiful-code/ - Bert - I actually thought the presentation was terrible, not very accessible and incredibly cliquey... it was so referential that you had to almost have lived through the things they were talking about to get whatever it was they were talking about - sort of self-defeating if they were aiming at instruction, which their last few words would indicate. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Consolidation and collaboration
On 2011-06-15, at 8:55 AM, Ian Piumarta wrote: If a wiki is the kind of database you had in mind, please feel free to make use of: http://vpri.org/fonc_wiki Thanks for setting this up, Ian. When I go to Log in/ create account I don't see any way to actually create an account. I tried both Chrome, Firefox and Safari on OS X. --Dethe ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Narrative Interfaces
On 2011-06-15, at 2:44 PM, C. Scott Ananian wrote: The talks will be live-streamed and also available for download after the event. I hope the audience here finds the topic of interest. --scott Very interested, thanks for the links! --Dethe ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: Waterbear announcement (was Re: Age and Language (was Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?))
On 2011-06-15, at 3:42 PM, Dale Schumacher wrote: On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 8:30 AM, Dethe Elza de...@livingcode.org wrote: In fact, I'm interested enough in the block structure visualization that I've been porting just the blocks, without the Scratch semantics and runtime, to the web. You can use scratch-like blocks to write and output any language, provided a language plugin. As a demonstration, I'm writing a language plugin for Javascript (plus Raphael, for graphics) and Martyn Eggleton is working on a plugin for writing Arduino code. It is still early days, very alpha, but if anyone is interested there is more here: https://github.com/dethe/waterbear/wiki [info] https://github.com/dethe/waterbear/ [code] https://waterbearlang.com/ [Javascript demo] http://stretch.deedah.org/waterbear/ [Arduino demo] I've been meaning to share this with the group here, but wanting to get it roughed in a bit more, but here it is in all its half-baked glory. Feedback highly appreciated. --Dethe Very cool project. I'd like to see how easy it would be to use it for Humus programs. Thanks! I don't know how easy it would be to use with Humus, but I'd be happy to help explore it and find out. I'm just finishing up a couple of side projects so I can devote all my hobby coding time to Waterbear. One big refactoring is going to be control of (most of) the UI from a language plugin, and multiple language plugins supported from the same version (right now they are separate forks). --Dethe ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: Age and Language (was Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?)
On 2011-06-14, at 12:33 PM, BGB wrote: much younger, and it is doubtful people can do much of anything useful. can you teach programming to a kindergartner?... maybe not such a good idea, so, it is an issue for what a good lower-limit is for where to try. My kids learned to program around kindergarten/first grade. My son started with Scratch when he was six and is now teaching himself Javascript/Raphael and HTML/CSS at age 10. One advantage graphic tools like Scratch have for younger learners is that they don't have to know how to type, just read and write. Having the syntax enforced by the structure of the blocks helps too (no typos, no syntax errors, in addition to the aforementioned enforced strong typing). --Dethe ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: Age and Language (was Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?)
On 2011-06-14, at 9:36 PM, Julian Leviston wrote: The thing that irritates me about this attitude of don't consider kids as equal is that we DO consider them as equal in other frames... we expect so much of them in terms of linguistic and cognitive development... and actually the abstractions (zero-th order abstraction) capable of and exhibited by a 5 year old are used when in the activity called programming all the time... so much so we as adult programmers rarely think about them. Not equal. Children are very different cognitively from adults and it is important to resist the temptation to treat them as little adults. On the other hand, we shouldn't condescend to them, they are like learning sponges and can absorb ideas far beyond what we generally give them credit for. One problem is immersion. They learn language amazingly fast (in large part) because they are immersed in it constantly. Seymour Papert's book, Mindstorms is one of the best reads I've ever had about software, and he discusses creating worlds for math, physics, and other subjects on the computer so that children can be as immersed in those worlds as they are naturally in the world of language. That was one of the guiding ideas behind the creation of Logo. Some of the structural patterns that a small child already has at least some mastership of are connection, fitting, representation, indirection, context, mood, physical relationship. These are all used in simple programming. Perhaps they don't have the meta-words, but that's okay - that can come later at about 12 when they begin their next level of abstract cognitive development (ie proper abstract thought). My flatmate's 7 year old daughter is in the process of mastering addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. These things are quite abstract. My flatmate's THREE year old (!!) understands in a non-verbal way the idea of a pointer and mouse connection. Do you realise how advanced that idea is? Consider that he's only really begun to talk in sentences properly in the last 6 to 8 weeks. It's very simple in terms of our usage of computers, but it's an incredibly complex structural pattern, really... it's representation and indirection... you move this thing, and it represents this other thing, and we can use it to manipulate yet more things... of course the child doesn't realise that the things on the screen aren't real that they're simply further representations... but you get the gist... the capacity is there... and the ENERGY that is there is amazing... There are some pretty subversive tools out there. Reader Rabbit's math software was teaching my kids algabraic abstraction before they started school. It just used boxes where you fill in a value instead of variables like x. Very concrete and they got it right away. --Dethe ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] On inventing the computing microscope/telescope for the dynamic semantic web
On 2010-10-09, at 12:45 PM, Dirk Pranke wrote: [...] it's unclear if one can reasonably hope to see a web browser written from scratch in a new language to ever hope to render the majority of the current web correctly; the effort may simply be too large. I was not aware of Lobo; it looks interesting but currently idle, and is a fine example of this problem. I continue to hope, but I may be unreasonable :) The Mozilla Foundation is creating the Rust language explicitly to have an alternative to C++ for building a web browser, so it may not be that unreasonable, in the medium term. Progress on Google's Go language as an alternative to C, and the addition of garbage collection to Objective-C, show there is a wide-spread need for alternatives to C/C++ among the folks who create browsers. Rust: http://github.com/graydon/rust/wiki/Project-FAQ --Dethe http://livingcode.org/ ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] can't build on osx
On 2-Jun-08, at 2:06 PM, Michael Roberts wrote: Do you have the latest XCode? I don't know if that's relevant. That's an interesting point. I have XCode 3.1 beta so I can test out iPhone development. Perhaps I should downgrade to the latest stable XCode (3.0). If I check out the repository fresh, in trunk/obect 'make boot' fails. However, cd gc-7.0 ./configure OK, I'd been trying make distclean but I have tried with a fresh checkout. then make boot seems to work. (Not very scientific). Then I can make stage1 make stage2 make test2 etc Hey, that seems to have worked, where etc. is: make stage3 cd .. # down to cola root make At least it all went through the compiler OK, will run tests later, got to go pick up my kids from school. Thanks! As someone very interested in this project, but also new to it, the bootstrap is very confusing. The README in svn says it should work on OS X. On this mailing list there are a couple of patches floating, and pointers to the wiki. I didn't even know there was a wiki, saw no sign of it on the web site. On the wiki there are instructions for OS X involving macports and different patches, but for OS X v10.3, so no idea if that info is still reliable. I see a few options for improving this situation, in rough order of increasing desirability: 1. A pointer on the web with current working instructions labelled Start Here 2. Deletion of out of date conflicting instructions (hard to do when they're on a mailing list, I know) 3. Get the bootstrap to the point where typing make does the right thing, or at least ./configure;make 4. (for OS X) have a dmg or zip with a working system (or installer) downloadable Thanks again for the help in getting started. Once I've confirmed that I do have a working system, I will try to update the wiki page with the steps needed. --Dethe -- Dethe Elza http://livingcode.org/ ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
