Dispatches from the User Liberation Front
Chris Granger has a Kickstarter project to fund his IDE concept Light Table. He is looking for $200K and already has more than $100K in 13 days. It took him 6 days to build the demo.
There is much I want to say about this, but it all pales in comparison to the raw facts above. Let’s skip the sterile debate on whether there is anything intellectually new in the proposal. What is the bigger meaning of these events?
It’s time to put it down on paper: http://splashcon.org/2012/cfp/due-april-13-2012/380-onward-papers
My motivation for Visi is to change the landscape of computer languages the way that VisiCalc changed the language and computing landscape in 1979.
Yes yes yes! Continue reading “The Visi vision”
This post from the JavaScript team at Microsoft endorses JavaScript evolution as the basis of the future web, and criticizes the “clean break” of Dart. It also reveals Script#, Microsoft’s equivalent to GWT, used to write “hundreds of thousands” of lines of code in their Office Web Applications. This is hypocrisy. They endorse JavaScript while finding it unusable for their own mission critical work. Many of the touted benefits of Script# are based on static typing, and will not be possible in future JavaScript till they add type guards (currently slotted for ES7 == JS.next.next). The ES committee is doing a valiant job of evolving the language (and has some really good ideas worth stealing), but it is going to take time. That fact and the unfortunate history of political dysfunction over JavaScript means we need to seriously consider alternative approaches like Dart.
I saw an interesting demo at SPLASH of an end-user visual programming language: Cloud Extend. There were two main interesting points. First, it is used to build plugins for Salesforce. Major web applications like Salesforce, and especially Facebook, are becoming software platforms unto themselves. This is a great target domain for end-user programming tools.
The second interesting thing was how radical they are in conceptually simplifying the language. For example, they tried eliminating variable binding, essentially using only global variables. That turned out not to work, so they brought back a limited form of binding. I really like that they are going at conceptual simplicity rather than the focus on syntactic simplicity that most end-user work seems stuck in. For example, rather than use standard nested if-then-else blocks like everyone else, they have imposed a global decision-tree structure on the program. Whether or not that works, it is the kind of radical simplification we need to make progress. I also like that they are working with real end users, and adjusting based on what works. This language is a valuable data-point on how simple we can make an end-user programming language, and has some fresh thinking. Worth following.