Re: [fonc] goal clarifications (was: goals)
On Nov 25, 2007, at 14:49 , Waldemar Kornewald wrote: On Nov 25, 2007 7:14 AM, Yoshiki Ohshima [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: -- ... a practical working system that is also its own model; a whole system from the end-users to the metal that could be extremely compact (we think under 20,000 lines of code) yet practical enough to serve both as a highly useful end-user system and a system to learn about systems. I.e. the system could be compact, comprehensive, clear, high-level, and understandable enough to be an Exploratorium of itself. -- It is a working model of a personal computer which is self-supporting, and something that the user can do stuff/interact with. The way it's described you could interpret almost anything into it. What is self-supporting? What is this stuff you can do and interact with? What about the practical part? What use for the world will the system have apart from being self-descriptive in 20K lines of code (apart from being great in itself :)? What exactly do you mean with highly useful end-user system? Who is the end-user? Programmers, geeks/enthusiasts, businessmen, children/schools (for teaching science), or maybe everyone? What can we do with it? Is this project purposely sending out no concrete message to us? If we have no clue what it's about then our contributions won't always fit your goals and you are less likely to get contributions because we don't know what to expect from you. Is it possible for you all to define the goals in more concrete terms similar to this *example* (I have to admit, it might be exaggerated and biased by some of my personal goals ;): -- Our goals: Create a fully runtime-manipulable programming environment with a complete description of itself, all written in itself. Possibly also include a full description of the hardware running the system. Create a productive and easy to use graphical environment for desktop, business, and mobile users, providing an alternative to current general-purpose operating systems and applications. Design an environment to improve learning for children, students, and scientists. This environment should also form a base for researching new kinds of computing/programming systems and in turn bring an equivalent of Moore's Law to software. Develop the whole system in approximately 20K lines of code. -- These would be just the high-level goals. Each of them could need a better description of the target audience (e.g., with personas) and the lower-level goals (like easy to read code, easy to think in, whatever your goals are, explained in your own words). Did you actually read the NSF proposal and its secondary literature? - Bert - ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Fwd: [fonc] goal clarifications (was: goals)
Bitten again. :( -- Forwarded message -- From: Jason Johnson [EMAIL PROTECTED] Date: Nov 25, 2007 6:52 PM Subject: Re: [fonc] goal clarifications (was: goals) To: Waldemar Kornewald [EMAIL PROTECTED] On Nov 25, 2007 2:49 PM, Waldemar Kornewald [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: The way it's described you could interpret almost anything into it. What is self-supporting? What is this stuff you can do and interact with? What about the practical part? What use for the world will the system have apart from being self-descriptive in 20K lines of code (apart from being great in itself :)? Well the interaction doesn't have to be that hard. I don't know what the plans are, but unix already does something like this: you communicate to the system via system calls. If there were more system calls and perhaps new ones could dynamically appear perhaps that would fit the bill. What exactly do you mean with highly useful end-user system? Who is the end-user? Programmers, geeks/enthusiasts, businessmen, children/schools (for teaching science), or maybe everyone? What can we do with it? I would look at Alan Kay's talks about this. His oppinion seems to be that computers could be more useful but people who use them have not invested any time in learning them. So I would say this system is for Programmers, geeks/enthusiasts, businessmen children and schools but definitely not for everyone. I don't think the system is going to be for people who aren't interested in learning it. Or then again maybe those people are supported as well, they will just be reliant on people like us to make things for them to use. Is this project purposely sending out no concrete message to us? If we have no clue what it's about then our contributions won't always fit your goals and you are less likely to get contributions because we don't know what to expect from you. Is it possible for you all to define the goals in more concrete terms similar to this *example* (I have to admit, it might be exaggerated and biased by some of my personal goals ;): Well, one thing I think it isn't is a system that wants to appeal to the mainstream. I think the goal is to reinvent mainstream and try to do it right this time. ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] goal clarifications (was: goals)
On Nov 25, 2007 6:50 PM, Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Did you actually read the NSF proposal and its secondary literature? I read everything that didn't smell like implementation, but I think I didn't really understand it. I had the impression that, put very bluntly, it's about teaching children how to code in an innovative programming language and using that to teach them science and analytical thinking. The programming environment would at the same time be a general-purpose computing system (OS?), maybe similar to Croquet/Squeak, so you can do everything in it, but you have to be an expert which is no problem because you get taught everything at school. I definitely haven't yet understood it and of course this mail is full of irony. I'm trying hard to not picture an army of little programmers and scientists. :) Bye, Waldemar Kornewald ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] Compilation problem: undefined reference to `GC_malloc'
On Nov 22, 2007 11:28 PM, Antoine van Gelder [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
...
I've made a small modification to your patch which:
* escapes the opening '(' on the awk expression
Patch tested against a clean revision 362 tree.
Nice job, guys. All the libjolt-related parts of the patch look great.
Thanks for the help.
Dan
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Re: [fonc] tutorial
On Nov 23, 2007 2:39 AM, Stéphane Conversy [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: ... for example, there is a lot of canvas examples in the function directory, none in the object directory. Why is that ? can't I program OO graphical stuff with LOLA ? You can. The fact that the canvas stuff was done in jolt is not a sign of what you can or can't do with the various pieces of the system. The canvas stuff was created initially to support some jolt+javascript work that needed graphical capabilities. I wouldn't try to infer anything profound from its existence/implementation. Dan ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] goal clarifications
Waldemar Kornewald wrote: On Nov 25, 2007 6:50 PM, Bert Freudenberg [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Did you actually read the NSF proposal and its secondary literature? I read everything that didn't smell like implementation, but I think I didn't really understand it. I had the impression that, put very bluntly, it's about teaching children how to code in an innovative programming language and using that to teach them science and analytical thinking. The programming environment would at the same time be a general-purpose computing system (OS?), maybe similar to Croquet/Squeak, so you can do everything in it, but you have to be an expert which is no problem because you get taught everything at school. I definitely haven't yet understood it and of course this mail is full of irony. I'm trying hard to not picture an army of little programmers and scientists. :) I think the VPRI teaching goals are only indirectly related to the FONC project. The latter seems to be a reexamination of the programming process with the goal of developing a unified programming model that works for OS kernels, device drivers, web servers, distributed databases, office applications, econometrics models, air traffic control system, gene sequencing, etc. While fundamentally object oriented, I think the goal is to subsume imperative, functional, logic, and/or other programming paradigms. We have a Tower of Babel in present day computing, with the first floor built of various assemblers, C, and Forth; the second floor built of C, C++, C#, and Java, the third of these plus Eiffel, Fortran, Lisp, Perl, Python, Ruby, ... Ambitious, and it'll be interesting to see how successful the effort is. # Steve ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
Re: [fonc] goal clarifications
Hi, On Nov 26, 2007 3:13 AM, Steven H. Rogers [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: I think the VPRI teaching goals are only indirectly related to the FONC project. The latter seems to be a reexamination of the programming process with the goal of developing a unified programming model that works for OS kernels, device drivers, web servers, distributed databases, office applications, econometrics models, air traffic control system, gene sequencing, etc. [...]*snip* Yes, that's probably the obvious part of it because they explicitly mention a cool programming environment and Alan writes about teaching kids, but I think there is more. One of the other projects is powerful ideas content and how to represent it. That's very interesting, but this part hasn't been clarified, yet. It seems to target not only children, but also adults. How far will this go? Is it only about knowledge in the sense of Wikipedia or is it about any kind of information (e.g., project management data)? Could this be important for companies (knowledge management)? The goals aren't clearly stated, so I don't know where it stops. The front page makes the goals sound very open-ended. It starts with teaching children and later it mentions computer revolution (though, learning always seems to have the focus). Bye, Waldemar Kornewald ___ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
