
Steps Toward The Reinvention of Programming - jmorin007
http://www.scribd.com/vacuum?url=http://vpri.org/pdf/steps_TR-2007-008.pdf
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cmos
hey, friend, how about a warning that your linking to a PDF!

I didn't buy my laptop this year. Or the year before. Or the year before.

It works perfectly fine, until I click on a PDF link.

And because Adobe has to justify their existence, there are a seemingly
infinite number of api's that it tells me it's loading. About 1 every couple
seconds. It's all I have to look at while it takes over my machine and ticks
by.

My old computer will thank you. And all the other owners of small companies
with no budgets for zippy new computers will too.

~~~
technoguyrob
<https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/636>

<http://www.foxitsoftware.com/pdf/rd_intro.php>

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bdfh42
OK reading a single paper on a large project is likely to lead to one arriving
at false conclusions. So with that Caveat:

I think this team has like so many before them got the idea that solving
Brook's accidental complexity in selected domains leads towards solving the
problem of essential complexity.

Anyone who did not live through the era of "fourth level languages" will not
have been inoculated against this error. It seems to me that you can always
simplify the programming task in specific domains (often with a DSL) but I
have yet to have even got a hint of a solution to the problems of applying
such approaches to a wider business process.

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comatose_kid
This document has some interesting ideas! I especially liked the grammar which
defines the accessors for a TCP IP header by feeding in an ascii art image of
the header.

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anupamkapoor
what would it make it _much_ cooler would be some way to tie in protocol-
state-transitions with packet-structure to have machine generated protocol-
parsers.

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david927
I wish them luck. In my humble opinion, they're making many mistakes. Their
core principles aren't abstract enough. "Golden Box" is a technology not a
principle -- and it isn't necessary to get where they want to go. As long as
they focus on "small and self-describing", they won't go anywhere. Lisp is
beautiful in this way, but that's irrelevant. I heard they even pinned-up some
code that Ian wrote. Bad move -- no Golden Calves. You have to be able to
throw it all out every few months. There are some other things I could say but
won't. I respect Alan Kay more than anyone in this industry. So, again, good
luck.

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gruseom
Is there any idea more closely identified with Alan Kay than "small and self-
describing"?

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david927
I would more identify that with John McCarthy, but I know what you mean. The
problem is that it's making him bark up the wrong tree.

~~~
gruseom
Heh. A grammatical glitch. What I meant was, _Is there any idea Alan Kay is
more closely identified with than "small and self-describing"?_

More importantly, I'd like to hear why you think it's the wrong tree. The
point of a small and self-describing design is that it provides extensibility
and (logical) scalability that other approaches can't match (or even dream
of). Why would that have been a good idea in the Smalltalk days but a bad idea
now?

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david927
I know it makes perfect sense but it's just not going to get them where they
want to go. It's not fair to say that and not back it up, but it would take
too long to explain. Suffice it to say that 'small' is right, but not in terms
of code, and 'self-describing' doesn't even play a role.

