---------- Forwarded message ---------- From: "John Carlson" <yottz...@gmail.com> Date: Sep 9, 2013 8:58 PM Subject: Re: [fonc] Programming by Demonstration (was Software Crisis (was Re: Final STEP progress report abandoned?)) To: "Alan Kay" <alan.n...@yahoo.com> Cc:
Thanks, Alan, for this reference. It looks like the difference between SmallStar and TWB/TE are mostly domain and how control structures were constructed. Our domain was formatting and mapping between EDI/X12 and proprietary files. SmallStar's domain was the desktop. TWB had a current add position (PC) for control structures...we used the lookup operation on a table containing rows of anded predicates and a procedure. These domain specific *visual* languages have lost out to domain specific modelling. More recently there has been model transformation by demonstration (MTBD) and learning by demonstration (I believe these have lost conditionals in favor of selectors) as well as Lively Kernel and Bret Victor's work. On Sep 9, 2013 7:55 PM, "Alan Kay" <alan.n...@yahoo.com> wrote: > > Check out "Smallstar" by Dan Halbert at Xerox PARC (written up in a PARC "bluebook") > > Cheers, > > Alan > > ________________________________ > From: John Carlson <yottz...@gmail.com> > > To: Fundamentals of New Computing <fonc@vpri.org> > Sent: Monday, September 9, 2013 3:47 PM > Subject: Re: [fonc] Software Crisis (was Re: Final STEP progress report abandoned?) > > One thing you can do is create a bunch of named widgets that work together with copy and paste. As long as you can do type safety, and can appropriately deal with variable explosion/collapsing. You'll probably want to create very small functions, which can also be stored in widgets (lambdas). Widgets will show up when their scope is entered, or you could have an inspect mode. > On Sep 9, 2013 5:11 PM, "David Barbour" <dmbarb...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I like Paul's idea here - form a "pit of success" even for people who tend to copy-paste. >> >> I'm very interested in unifying PL with HCI/UI such that actions like copy-paste actually have formal meaning. If you copy a time-varying field from a UI form, maybe you can paste it as a signal into a software agent. Similarly with buttons becoming capabilities. (Really, if we can use a form, it should be easy to program something to use it for us. And vice versa.) All UI actions can be 'acts of programming', if we find the right way to formalize it. I think the trick, then, is to turn the UI into a good PL. >> >> To make copy-and-paste code more robust, what can we do? >> >> Can we make our code more adaptive? Able to introspect its environment? >> >> Can we reduce the number of environmental dependencies? Control namespace entanglement? Could we make it easier to grab all the dependencies for code when we copy it? >> >> Can we make it more provable? >> >> And conversely, can we provide IDEs that can help the "kids" understand the code they take - visualize and graph its behavior, see how it integrates with its environment, etc? I think there's a lot we can do. Most of my thoughts center on language design and IDE design, but there may also be social avenues - perhaps wiki-based IDEs, or Gist-like repositories that also make it easy to interactively explore and understand code before using it. >> >> >> On Sun, Sep 8, 2013 at 10:33 AM, Paul Homer <paul_ho...@yahoo.ca> wrote: >>> >>> >>> These days, the "kids" do a quick google, then just copy&paste the results into the code base, mostly unaware of what the underlying 'magic' instructions actually do. So example code is possibly a bad thing? >>> >>> But even if that's true, we've let the genie out of the bottle and he is't going back in. To fix the quality of software, for example, we can't just ban all cut&paste-able web pages. >>> >>> The alternate route out of the problem is to exploit these types of human deficiencies. If some programmers just want to cut&paste, then perhaps all we can do is too just make sure that what they are using is high enough quality. If someday they want more depth, then it should be available in easily digestible forms, even if few will ever travel that route. >>> >>> If most people really don't want to think deeply about about their problems, then I think that the best we can do is ensure that their hasty decisions are based on as accurate knowledge as possible. It's far better than them just flipping a coin. In a sense it moves up our decision making to a higher level of abstraction. Some people lose the 'why' of the decision, but their underlying choice ultimately is superior, and the 'why' can still be found by doing digging into the data. In a way, isn't that what we've already done with micro-code, chips and assembler? Or machinery? Gradually we move up towards broader problems... >>>> >>>> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> fonc mailing list >> fonc@vpri.org >> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >> > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > > > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >
_______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
