im also checking back from time to time. there is a lot to learn from PL. im a long time anti-complexity fan too. i was expressing this attitude of mine in SHell scripts and Rebol so far, but since Rebol has started rotting, im looking for alternatives. (by rotting, i mean the graphical version Rebol throws weird lowlevel message on the console since snow leopard and we are waiting for antialiased font support for it under mac for 3-4yrs now, while the windows and linux versions have it… and the core author's blog is silent for more than a year now…) http://red-lang.org is a nice alternative but it's just a baby toolkit/environment/language yet, which leave me with PicoLisp as the only choice, although im coding in NodeJS and AngularJS after Ruby for living…
im following the progress of http://web.syllable.org/pages/index.html and http://menuetos.net/ which are OS made in the same spirit. i want to understand all those things im using during programming and i think it's very possible actually throughout a lifetime, because there were examples of such complete systems exist before! think about lisp machines or even the "4th Forth by Febert Csaba" forth implementation i was using to learn programming on a zx spectrum… last year i heard a story from barry shein (founder of http://world.std.com) about why did the postscript based NeWS system died and the pie menus together with it. 1 small reason was improper sandboxing, but the major reason was politics and money and thats how sun unix-es won the universities over… with a different and a bit deceptive pricing model. also the boot time was great, however u had to reboot those unix machines regularly as opposed to those NeXT systems which ran NeWS. or something like that (sorry, barry if i remember inaccurately :) i see more an more convergence back to these simpler systems. html5 canvas can do things now what rebol could already do in 2000. angularjs is shrinking their library while alleviates the need for a lot of code u have to write in other framework (and think about shrinking by 1/2 to 2/3!) another less know example is the proprietary OS of the mediatek phone chips. it's a realtime multitasking OS with no networking libs, etc, so it's 300kB if compiled, but it allowed the mediatek guys to silently start to dominate the indian and chinese low price tag phone market which providing 8Mpixel camera, 3G internet, external keyboard, 320x340 display for ~120usd in the past ~3-4 years, iirc. i see the raising a secondary internet infrastructure too. not sure about the timeframe, but i think it will go common knowledge how to cover an area with robust wifi cheap from everyday materials (http://www.oreillynetcom/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448 and http://www.oreillynet.com/cs/weblog/view/wlg/448), low power consumption computers (http://www.raspberrypi.org/) and distributed communication and infrastructure applications (https://joindiaspora.com/ , http://status.net/ , http://freenetproject.org/ and http://unhosted.org/) to make them work reliably and make sure their maintenance is affordable to learn and development can maintain a pace, they have to be simpler than today... -- tom On Sunday, January 22, 2012 at 4:09 PM, Yiorgos Adamopoulos wrote: > No it is not dead to me. At least I do not want it dead. But in online > communities the1-9-90 rule applies: > > 1% is the major contributors > 9% are contributing from time to time > 90% are mostly silent (like me) > > With 70 people on the list the numbers seem appropriate. > > FWIW, I like PicoLisp the way it is, small and with "lack" of libraries. > > On Sunday, January 22, 2012, Alexander Burger <a...@software-lab.de > (mailto:a...@software-lab.de)> wrote: > > OK, I understand. > > > > The language is not useful or usable, and the "Community" (I count 70 > > members in this list) is silent. > > -- > > UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:picolisp@software-lab.de?subject=Unsubscribe > > > -- > http://gr.linkedin.com/in/yiorgos -- UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:picolisp@software-lab.de?subject=Unsubscribe
