Dispatches from the User Liberation Front
On Kickstarting research I asked for comments on the Light Table project. They were largely positive. Now, for the sake of argument, let’s assume this will be a complete disaster (a reasonable assumption based on history). What are the consequences?
Are people going to be pissed off and give similar efforts a bad rap? Or will they just see it as $50 donated to a good cause? Or, to paraphrase P.T.Barnum, is there a micro-investor born every minute?
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.