Google Wave is huge. I am not even going to try to assess it dispassionately. As I explained in my last post, the same epiphany hit me just a few weeks ago, so I have already drunk the Kool-Aid. Basically: email is the original killer app of the Internet. We live in email, but email sucks. Wave fixes a lot of the suckage. I think it could become a platform for a whole new “wave” of applications. See for yourself. But Wave raises some big questions: Continue reading “Wave reflections”
Curses, foiled again
For a long time I have been trying to come up with the “killer app” for my new programming paradigm. A few weeks ago I discovered it. As I thought it through, I started to panic, because I realized that it really was a killer app that didn’t need a new programming language. One could drop the fancy features and end-user programmability, and be left with something much simpler but with far greater impact: a replacement for email. Now that is a killer app. Should I shelve the research and do an open source project? Try to shoehorn my language in anyway? My head has been spinning. Well, Google just announced it today.
I am in shock. Going to take some time to digest this. Maybe it will turn out for the best: silence the siren call of commercialization, but still open up a niche for my language. Or maybe it is back to the drawing boards. Really only three weeks sunk at this point. What a trip.
The Summer of Code
The time has come to stop writing papers and start releasing code.
Continue reading “The Summer of Code”
Coherence — The Director’s Cut
The Coherence home page is up at http://coherence-lang.org. The submitted version of the paper is there, with a new intro and a surprise ending.
What if Smalltalk were invented today?
To: Alan Kay
From: The Program Committee
Subject: FAIL
Dear Dr. Kay,
The program committee thanks you for the submission of your paper “Object Orientation: A New Paradigm of Programming”. Unfortunately your paper has been rejected. We had many fine submissions this year, but as you know we must accept no more than 15% of submissions to be considered a premier conference. The reviewers’ comments are attached below. Continue reading “What if Smalltalk were invented today?”