Lambda the Ultimate

One of the cool things about Second Life is that players can create new kinds of objects, by writing small programs in a special scripting language to describe how the objects should behave, and then launching objects into the world.

Things got really out of hand when the W-Hats created a doomsday device. It looked like a harmless little orb, but it was programmed to make copies of itself, repeatedly. The single object split into two. Then each of those split, and there were four. Then eight, and sixteen, and so on to infinity.

A highly amusing story this is.

I guess the correct term for this kind of thing is The law of unintended DSL consequences.

Please share similar stories, if you got them.

Chickenfoot is a tool that puts a programming environment in Firefox so you can write scripts to manipulate web pages and automate web browsing. In Chickenfoot, scripts are written in a superset of Javascript that includes special functions specific to web tasks.

Chickenfoot is similar to Greasemonkey, but tries to provide a higher level abstraction of web pages, more appropriate for end-user programming.

Take a look at the examples and decide for yourself.