On Tue, Jan 1, 2013 at 7:53 AM, Alan Kay <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote:
> As humans, we are used to being sloppy about message creation and sending, > and rely on negotiation and good will after the fact to deal with errors. > You might be interested in my article on avoiding commitment in HCI, and its impact on programming languages<http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/05/20/abandoning-commitment-in-hci/>. I address some issues of negotiation and clarification after-the-fact. I'm interested in techniques that might make this property more systematic and compositional, such as modeling messages or signals as having probabilistic meanings in context. > you are much better off making -- with great care -- a few kinds of > relatively big modules as basic building blocks than to have zillions of > different modules being constructed by vanilla programmers > Large components are probably a good idea if humans are hand-managing the glue between them. But what if there was another way? Instead of modules being rigid components that we painstakingly wire together, they can be ingredients of a soup<http://awelonblue.wordpress.com/2012/09/12/stone-soup-programming/>- with the melding and combination process being largely automated. If the modules are composed automatically, they can become much smaller, more specialized and reusable. Large components require a lot of inefficient duplication of structure and computation (seen even in biology). > > Note that desires for runable specifications, etc., could be quite > harmonious with a viable module scheme that has great systems integrity. > Certainly. Before his untimely departure, Joseph Goguen was doing a lot of work on modular, runable specifications (the BOBJ - behavioral OBJ - language, like a fusion of OOP and term rewriting). Regards, Dave
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
