I wish that emacs / vi, GBD, and the Unix shell had anything close to the
"n00b mode" provided by Squeak in terms of inline documentation, tool tips,
menus etc.. But, yeah, Squeak has serious problems, and you're absolutely
right that it's too hard to tinker with the core of it, just like every
oth
On 23/06/2011, at 12:35 PM, Max OrHai wrote:
> People who want a "small" language should be prepared to be somewhat
> idiosyncratic, if they want to express "big" or complex programs. I mean
> 'language' here not just in terms of a programming language definition but
> rather to mean all const
The emergence of ubiquitous internet media and the distribution architecture
we've built around it has shifted attention to the communication needs of
people. Many are employed in the Web industry and others unemployed...
market forces come into play. It's all possible because of established (and
a
On 23/06/2011, at 10:08 AM, Steve Wart wrote:
> So how can you make simple languages simple to use? Developers have
> been rejecting complex GUIs in favour of plain text. If Google and
> Apple are right, every program component isn't a file on a disk, but
> rather some network accessible resource
On 6/22/2011 5:08 PM, Steve Wart wrote:
Still, databases and file systems are both based on concepts that
predate electronic computers.
When Windows and Macs came along the document metaphor became
prevalent, but in practice this was always just a "user friendly" name
for a file. The layers and
Still, databases and file systems are both based on concepts that
predate electronic computers.
When Windows and Macs came along the document metaphor became
prevalent, but in practice this was always just a "user friendly" name
for a file. The layers and layers of slightly broken metaphors never
Yeah I've been using this DBMS on and off for years. I have a copy of it
installed on my machine. It's INCREDIBLY fast.
The interesting thing for me recently was that they've built an implementation
of Ruby on top of it, and called it MagLev, and it's now possible to have
persisted, fast, pure
On 6/21/2011 11:38 AM, Max OrHai wrote:
There are certainly practical differences between "conventional"
relational databases and hierarchical filesystems, without having to
get into implementation details. I'm sure at least a few people on
this list are familiar with the BeOS filesystem, whic
Also of interest might be GemStone/S, an ODBMS that is still heavily
used in at least two large Investment Banks (JP Morgan and UBS), as
well as several large shipping companies (OOCL, Coscon, and NYK).
Marketing blurb here
http://seaside.gemstone.com/docs/OOCL_SuccessStory.pdf
Basically it's an e
There are certainly practical differences between "conventional" relational
databases and hierarchical filesystems, without having to get into
implementation details. I'm sure at least a few people on this list are
familiar with the BeOS filesystem, which acted much more like a relational
DBMS tha
On 6/20/2011 9:19 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
Hi... (see below)...
On 21/06/2011, at 3:42 AM, BGB wrote:
On 6/20/2011 3:22 AM, Julian Leviston wrote:
On 20/06/2011, at 8:06 PM, BGB wrote:
hmm... S-Expression database?...
sort of like a hybrid between a database and a persistent store.
or s
Hi... (see below)...
On 21/06/2011, at 3:42 AM, BGB wrote:
> On 6/20/2011 3:22 AM, Julian Leviston wrote:
>> On 20/06/2011, at 8:06 PM, BGB wrote:
>>
>>> hmm... S-Expression database?...
>>> sort of like a hybrid between a database and a persistent store.
>>>
>>>
>>> or such...
>>
>> I'd like
On 6/20/2011 3:22 AM, Julian Leviston wrote:
On 20/06/2011, at 8:06 PM, BGB wrote:
hmm... S-Expression database?...
sort of like a hybrid between a database and a persistent store.
or such...
I'd like to know if you think there's a difference between a filesystem and a
database... conceptu
On 20/06/2011, at 8:06 PM, BGB wrote:
> hmm... S-Expression database?...
> sort of like a hybrid between a database and a persistent store.
>
>
> or such...
I'd like to know if you think there's a difference between a filesystem and a
database... conceptually...
or such...
_
On 6/20/2011 2:19 AM, Julian Leviston wrote:
On 20/06/2011, at 6:33 PM, BGB wrote:
I am not certain I follow how this would get rid of file-systems though...
I am not aware of any good alternative to the filesystem which is generally
better than the filesystem (can effectively manage huge numb
On 6/20/2011 1:00 AM, Steve Dekorte wrote:
On 2011-06-19 Sun, at 09:33 PM, BGB wrote:
.. which mappings are more natural and under which circumstances seems to be
the important question and one, AFAICS, that may not well answered by simply
replacing words with ideograms and expressions with bo
On 20/06/2011, at 6:33 PM, BGB wrote:
> I am not certain I follow how this would get rid of file-systems though...
> I am not aware of any good alternative to the filesystem which is generally
> better than the filesystem (can effectively manage huge numbers of files and
> multiple TB of disk s
On 6/19/2011 11:58 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
On 20/06/2011, at 4:33 PM, BGB wrote:
For example, when web programming on a specific web app, I use a web browser, a text editor, a database
management program, a command line, and a couple other tools. It'd be nice to be able to "fit these
tools
On 2011-06-19 Sun, at 09:33 PM, BGB wrote:
>> .. which mappings are more natural and under which circumstances seems to be
>> the important question and one, AFAICS, that may not well answered by simply
>> replacing words with ideograms and expressions with boxes and arrows.
>
> agreed... I rea
On 6/19/2011 11:54 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
On 20/06/2011, at 4:33 PM, BGB wrote:
interestingly, I don't believe in getting rid of the file-system, per-se, as
technically it works fairly well and is a proven piece of technology.
Interestingly, I disagree entirely. Finding things is a pain f
On 20/06/2011, at 4:33 PM, BGB wrote:
>> For example, when web programming on a specific web app, I use a web
>> browser, a text editor, a database management program, a command line, and a
>> couple other tools. It'd be nice to be able to "fit these tools together"
>> into a pseudo-app and th
On 20/06/2011, at 4:33 PM, BGB wrote:
> interestingly, I don't believe in getting rid of the file-system, per-se, as
> technically it works fairly well and is a proven piece of technology.
Interestingly, I disagree entirely. Finding things is a pain for most people
(including myself).
Julian.
On 6/19/2011 9:49 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
On 20/06/2011, at 2:33 PM, BGB wrote:
in a sense, the metaphor no longer works, and should likely itself be left to
fall into the recycle-bin of history. worse yet is having to read stuff written
by people who actually take this metaphor seriously.
On 20/06/2011, at 2:33 PM, BGB wrote:
> in a sense, the metaphor no longer works, and should likely itself be left to
> fall into the recycle-bin of history. worse yet is having to read stuff
> written by people who actually take this metaphor seriously.
Given the historical perspective, it wa
On 6/19/2011 7:20 PM, Steve Dekorte wrote:
On 2011-06-14 Tue, at 09:36 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
The thing that irritates me about this attitude of "don't consider kids as equal" is that
we DO consider them as equal in other frames... we expect so much of them in terms of linguistic
and cogni
On 20/06/2011, at 12:20 PM, Steve Dekorte wrote:
> From this perspective we could see the history of programming as one of
> finding ever more natural mappings between how our minds work and how we can
> get machines to do what we want - just as steering wheel and floor pedals map
> between ou
On 2011-06-14 Tue, at 09:36 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
> The thing that irritates me about this attitude of "don't consider kids as
> equal" is that we DO consider them as equal in other frames... we expect so
> much of them in terms of linguistic and cognitive development... and actually
> the
On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 8:16 PM, Dethe Elza wrote:
> Glad you like it. How old is your son? Maybe we should organize a Vancouver
> Geek Kids, or meet up at
> Maker Faire next week. Or there is this: http://www.tedxkidsbc.com/
TEDx kids looks wonderful - thanks for that link.
A Geek Kids meetup
On 2011-06-15, at 7:43 PM, Steve Wart wrote:
> I like it. My son is very keen on Scratch (although he prefers Lua
> these days), but we picked up an Arduino kit last month, and I'm
> looking forward to playing with that.
Glad you like it. How old is your son? Maybe we should organize a Vancouver
I like it. My son is very keen on Scratch (although he prefers Lua
these days), but we picked up an Arduino kit last month, and I'm
looking forward to playing with that.
His eyes kind of glazed over looking at the C code, as simple as it is
for Arduino. I got the impression he was just happy to ha
On 2011-06-15, at 3:42 PM, Dale Schumacher wrote:
> On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 8:30 AM, Dethe Elza wrote:
>> In fact, I'm interested enough in the block structure visualization that
>> I've been porting just the blocks, without the Scratch semantics and
>> runtime, to the web. You can use scratch-
On Wed, Jun 15, 2011 at 8:30 AM, Dethe Elza wrote:
> In fact, I'm interested enough in the block structure visualization that I've
> been porting just the blocks, without the Scratch semantics and runtime, to
> the web. You can use scratch-like blocks to write and output any language,
> provide
On 6/15/2011 6:30 AM, Dethe Elza wrote:
On 2011-06-15, at 3:22 AM, BGB wrote:
and, meanwhile, recent output has been net negative...
Nothing wrong with that, we learn to write better, tighter code and get rid of
the old cruft. Some of the best code I've seen has been written with the delete
On 2011-06-15, at 3:22 AM, BGB wrote:
> and, meanwhile, recent output has been net negative...
Nothing wrong with that, we learn to write better, tighter code and get rid of
the old cruft. Some of the best code I've seen has been written with the delete
key...
> a mystery though is how general
>
> but, yeah... being young, time seems to go by very slowly, and just sitting
> around fiddling with something, one accomplishes a lot of stuff in a
> relatively short period of time.
>
> as one gets older though, time goes by ever faster, and one can observe
> that less and less happens in a giv
On 6/14/2011 9:50 PM, Dethe Elza wrote:
On 2011-06-14, at 9:36 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
The thing that irritates me about this attitude of "don't consider kids as equal" is that
we DO consider them as equal in other frames... we expect so much of them in terms of linguistic
and cognitive de
On 2011-06-14, at 9:36 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
> The thing that irritates me about this attitude of "don't consider kids as
> equal" is that we DO consider them as equal in other frames... we expect so
> much of them in terms of linguistic and cognitive development... and actually
> the abst
On 15/06/2011, at 9:00 AM, Kevin Driedger wrote:
> I wonder if a thousand years ago the readers of the world thought that only
> certain people had an aptitude for reading.
> =
>
> As a professional coder and father of young children I find Dethe's anecdote
> of teaching his children to co
On 15/06/2011, at 5:33 AM, BGB wrote:
> personally, the textual nature of code was not such an issue, but I do
> remember at the time having a little confusion over the whole "order of
> operations" thing (I think I was left to wonder some why some operations
> would bind more tightly than oth
I wonder if a thousand years ago the readers of the world thought that only
certain people had an aptitude for reading.
=
As a professional coder and father of young children I find Dethe's anecdote
of teaching his children to code/program at an early age has me thinking I
need to take another
On 2011-06-14, at 12:33 PM, BGB wrote:
> much younger, and it is doubtful people can do much of anything useful.
> can you teach programming to a kindergartner?...
> maybe not such a good idea, so, it is an issue for what a good lower-limit is
> for where to try.
My kids learned to program arou
On 6/13/2011 8:09 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
On 14/06/2011, at 7:33 AM, Casey Ransberger wrote:
Kids may not have the linguistic development out of the way that one needs to do
"serious" programming. Adults who don't already code may find themselves short
on some of the core concepts that con
On 14/06/2011, at 7:33 AM, Casey Ransberger wrote:
> Kids may not have the linguistic development out of the way that one needs to
> do "serious" programming. Adults who don't already code may find themselves
> short on some of the core concepts that conventional programming languages
> expect
Below.
On Jun 13, 2011, at 2:16 PM, "C. Scott Ananian" wrote:
> On Mon, Jun 13, 2011 at 4:02 PM, BGB wrote:
>> Consider what it'd be like if we didn't represent code as text... and
>> represented it maybe as series of ideograms or icons (TileScript nod).
>> Syntax errors don't really crop up an
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