Lambda the Ultimate

A question on usability regarding the site theme:

Am I the only one who's getting eyes wet while looking at the bold blue links?

Also, the blockquote tag is rendered in blue... Every day I find myself clicking on it and wondering why nothing happens.

Surely presentation is nothing, but maybe anyone has similiar problems with the site?

Several interesting papers have been published by researchers at the University of Colorado investigating ways of making end-user programming more accessible, especially to secondary-level (i.e., High School) students. In many ways, this work reminds me of the efforts of the PLT group and their excellent DrScheme software implementation, though its strong graphical leanings makes for wonderful eye candy.

I stumbled across this body of work while trying to generate some OpenGL models from Common Lisp. It turns out that most of the AgentSheets system is built on top of a DSL embedded in Common Lisp called AgenTalk. AgentTalk is implemented on top of MCL and Allegro Common Lisp. (Interestingly, an apparently independent AgentTalk appears to have been implemented on top of DrScheme.)

I found several items of note:

1. Discussion of AntiObjects as a way of designing large systems (as a foil to the Booch system.)
2. Descriptions of compelling 3-D authoring environments for non-technical users.
3. Some neat old-school Macintosh examples from the early days of AgentSheets.
4. A wonderful 3D Lisp Programming Library, the Open Agent Engine, which is used to power all of the above examples.