Alan Kay's new project
Brian Rice
water at tunes.org
Sun Feb 11 10:32:07 PST 2007
On Feb 8, 2007, at 8:37 PM, Mark Haniford wrote:
> I'm wondering what people's thoughts are regarding Alan Kay's new
> project. http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/070214.html
I'm aware of it. I wouldn't call it Alan Kay's project. It's Ian
Piumarta's, and he's lucky enough to be one of the people that Alan
Kay will listen to.
> I just downloaded Pepsi, which is interesting in that it somewhat
> like Objective-C in that you can mix C with Smalltalk-like code.
> There's another language in the works called Coke (know less
> about), but seems to have a Lisp-like syntax. But I guess the real
> interesting thing about Pepsi, Coke, ALBERT is that it seems its
> goals are to have easy different object-model integration.
>
> It looks like Kay got 5 million from the NSF and another 5 million
> in private funding for a 5 year project. I wonder if Slate could
> be worked into this system.
Eh, perhaps. The whole thing looks very quirky and Ian-centric to me,
and he has a long history of not finishing what he starts. I'm still
in wait-and-see mode, personally. Also, don't forget that research
projects have absolutely no commitment to be useful or forthcoming to
other open-source hackers, so don't take it for granted that we can
just join in on the fun - after all, Squeak was "open-source" for 6
years before there was a community not directly attached to Alan that
had *any* say over its direction.
I'd prefer a situation where we can take the lessons from there and
morph Slate along those lines (and hopefully even re-use some code),
and as I've stated before, I don't care how much Slate has to change
if it means that the idea succeeds.
Coke/Pepsi also seem very single-dispatch-centric, for the record.
I invite comments/arguments/suggestions as usual.
--
-Brian
http://briantrice.com
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