Forgive me, for I have sinned. I have been seduced by Syntax — by its offer of quick implementation shortcuts, and by its promise of easy acceptance into the establishment. All lies, leading to perdition! I cast you out, Syntax! Continue reading “Repenting Syntax”
Semi-rejection
Onward has rejected my paper, but invites me to cut it in half and resubmit it. I feel like withdrawing the paper, but will probably swallow my pride. Continue reading “Semi-rejection”
Wave reflections
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.
Steps Toward the Reinvention of Programming
Time for some mental Spring cleaning. This is the first of several reviews I plan to do on interesting current research. First up is Alan Kay’s Viewpoints Research Institute. As the title states, he wants to reinvent programming. Again. The guiding goal of the project is to recreate the “personal computing experience” – from OS to apps – using dramatically fewer lines of code. They are looking for a “Moore’s Law” leap in software expressiveness of 3 or 4 orders of magnitude. Continue reading “Steps Toward the Reinvention of Programming”