Alarming Development

Long time no see. I have posted my latest OOPSLA submission.

At long last I feel like I am making progress again. I have been stuck on this problem for the last 9 months. The worst part is that people kept asking me “What are you working on?”, and I would say, “Well, I am trying to figure out how to do conditionals, and I am really stuck”. This produced funny looks. I mean, what kind of moron can’t figure out how to do conditionals? What could be hard about that? Well, I think I have finally figured out how to do conditionals.

The next paper will probably be about how to do loops. But first I need to do some honest coding…

The Subtext UI sucks. One of the biggest problems is linking: the welter of compasses and vectors is bewildering. We need something that is much easier to read. I have been thinking about an approach that borrows from Alice. Continue reading “Alice in Subtext-land”

My OOPSLA submission (to the Research Paper track) was rejected. Not a big surprise. The paper was ill-conceived, more of a brain-dump of my latest research than a focused story. Still, I thought it contained some real contributions, like a new approach to the problems of mutable state and concurrency. Continue reading “Abort, Retry, Fail?”

My recent proposal to work on modeling capabilities fell flat, but elicited some good discussion of future directions for Subtext. Peter Marks wrote:

… I would rather see a complete re-examination of what lies underneath the World Wide Web. And then take the Subtext approach of banishing syntax, treating program as data, history, etc. … This would mean initially abandoning the UI demo and focusing more on the development of a system/infrastructure that works with and within the Internet.

Macneil Shonle wrote:

I wonder what “Subtext on Rails” would look like?

Continue reading “Subtext on Rails”