Re: [fonc] [IAEP] Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)

2012-03-14 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 12:54 PM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: The many papers from this work greatly influenced the thinking about personal computing at Xerox PARC in the 70s. Here are a couple: -- O. K. Moore, Autotelic Responsive Environments and Exceptional Children, Experience,

Re: [fonc] [IAEP] Barbarians at the gate! (Project Nell)

2012-03-14 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Wed, Mar 14, 2012 at 6:02 PM, Jameson Quinn jameson.qu...@gmail.comwrote: If you're going to base it on Javascript, at least make it Coffeescript-like. I also agree that some basic parallelism primitives would be great; it is probably possible to build these into a Coffeescript-like

[fonc] Project Nell

2012-03-13 Thread C. Scott Ananian
Chris Ball, Michael Stone, and I have just written a short paper on Project Nell, which should be of interest to this list: http://cscott.net/Publications/OLPC/idc2012.pdf The paper mentions TurtleScript (http://cscott.net/Projects/TurtleScript/) which I've discussed on this list before.

[fonc] Narrative Interfaces

2011-06-15 Thread C. Scott Ananian
We're having some invited talks this Friday at One Laptop per Child's offices on Narrative Interfaces. Full talk description here: http://cananian.livejournal.com/64747.html I've been working on building a small modular growable direct system along the lines of several others discussed on

[fonc] Improving efficiency of Worlds, in Software and Hardware

2011-06-14 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 11:17 AM, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: For example, take a look at Alex Warth's Worlds work (and paper) and see how that might be used to deal with larger problems of consistency and version control in a live system. I just read this paper for the first time.

[fonc] Re: Improving efficiency of Worlds, in Software and Hardware

2011-06-14 Thread C. Scott Ananian
(As a minor technical note: it appears that the implementation of flattenHistory in figure 4 occurs in the wrong order. Worlds should be committed from the root to the leaves, shouldn't they?) --scott --       ( http://cscott.net ) ___ fonc mailing

Re: [fonc] Re: Improving efficiency of Worlds, in Software and Hardware

2011-06-14 Thread C. Scott Ananian
Thanks for the explanation. I think I was confused originally because your API is: in world { ... } world.commit() where I was expecting: in world { world.commit() } ie, in your API, even though the API occurs in the root context, it doesn't (usually)

Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?

2011-06-13 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 4:02 PM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: Consider what it'd be like if we didn't represent code as text... and represented it maybe as series of ideograms or icons (TileScript nod). Syntax errors don't really crop up any more, do they? Given a slightly nicer User Interface

Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?

2011-06-13 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 11:17 PM, Julian Leviston jul...@leviston.net wrote: I think Tiles prevent syntax errors is a red herring.  Sure, you can prevent stupid typos by offering only tiles with correctly spelled keywords, but that's not really a major problem in ordinary experience.  The more

Re: [fonc] why are true,false,nil pseudovariables

2011-06-12 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 1:43 AM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: Anyhow, I agree that there are plenty of optimizations available. But I don't believe we can replace a true/false/nil method invocation with a specialized bytecode in a typical open system. SELF did not have specialized

Re: [fonc] why are true,false,nil pseudovariables

2011-06-12 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 2:20 PM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 1:07 AM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote: SELF did not have specialized bytecodes for these.  See http://selflanguage.org/documentation/published/implementation.html  --scott Why

Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?

2011-06-11 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 1:40 AM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: The responsiveness of exploratory programming environments (such as the Smalltalk programming environment) allows the programmer to concentrate on the task at hand rather than being distracted by long pauses caused by compilation or

Re: [fonc] why are true,false,nil pseudovariables

2011-06-11 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 2:05 AM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: On Mon, Jun 6, 2011 at 11:48 AM, Ondrej Bilka nel...@seznam.cz wrote: My point is that you could just Object have methods true,false and nil Any reasonably optimalizing compiler would replace them with bytecode. As

Re: [fonc] why are true,false,nil pseudovariables

2011-06-11 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 11:19 PM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 6:33 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote: the majority of papers in academic compiler conferences (say, PLDI) suddenly shifted away from purely static compilation. True, if you use

Re: [fonc] why are true,false,nil pseudovariables

2011-06-11 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Sun, Jun 12, 2011 at 12:13 AM, David Barbour dmbarb...@gmail.com wrote: On Sat, Jun 11, 2011 at 8:34 PM, C. Scott Ananian csc...@laptop.org wrote: Even if you're doing pure static analysis, you should be doing open/closed class analysis and specializing/inlining any class which has

Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?

2011-06-10 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Jun 9, 2011, at 5:58 AM, Julian Leviston jul...@leviston.net wrote: On 09/06/2011, at 7:04 PM, BGB wrote: actually, possibly a relevant question here, would be why Java applets largely fell on their face, but Flash largely took off (in all its uses from YouTube to Punch The Monkey...).

Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?

2011-06-10 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Fri, Jun 10, 2011 at 2:45 PM, BGB cr88...@gmail.com wrote: just had an idle thought of a JVM starting up as a prebuilt image (say, methods are pre-JIT'ed and pre-linked, static fields are pre-initialized, ...). unless of course, they already started doing this (sadly, I am not much an

Re: Terseness, precedence, deprogramming (was Re: [fonc] languages)

2011-06-06 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Sun, Jun 5, 2011 at 8:13 PM, Casey Ransberger casey.obrie...@gmail.comwrote: Another approach I think is really cool is actually just using mathematical notation as one representation of what's otherwise basically an s-expr, in which case I think one is having some cake and eating it too.

Re: [fonc] Re: Electrical Actors?

2011-06-06 Thread C. Scott Ananian
I explored this idea a bit once upon a time in the context of Java: http://cscott.net/Publications/design.pdf The bibliography cites most of the related work I know about. --scott --       ( http://cscott.net ) ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org

Re: [fonc] Static typing and/vs. boot strap-able, small kernel, comprehensible, user modifiable systems

2011-06-04 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On Sat, Jun 4, 2011 at 2:12 PM, John Nilsson j...@milsson.nu wrote: Is static types really an intensic property of the language? In my mind any language can be statically typed. It is just more or less hard to do. Again, please read Gilad Bracha's position paper. He concisely enumerates the

Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?

2011-06-03 Thread C. Scott Ananian
On 31 May 2011 16:30, Alan Kay alan.n...@yahoo.com wrote: There are lots of egregiously wrong things in the web design. Perhaps one of the simplest is that the browser folks have lacked the perspective to see that the browser is not like an application, but like an OS. i.e. what it really

Re: [fonc] Alternative Web programming models?

2011-06-03 Thread C. Scott Ananian
2011/6/3 Benoît Fleury benoit.fle...@gmail.com: I tend to agree with you. The uniform interface of the web (reduced set of HTTP verbs, links...) is what make all these applications possible. We know what to do when we have the URL to the flickr image. But we could do so much more. I agree