Lambda the Ultimate

As some of you may know the venerable RSS aggregator Bloglines is shutting down October 1st. I guess this is a good time to record some statistics, before it's too late.

The main RSS feed for LtU, which is populated by items appearing on the home page, currently has 1571 subscribers using Bloglines. Our other feeds have much smaller numbers: 25 for the comments feed and 4 for the RSS feed containing forum posts. The main feed used to have slightly higher numbers (~1585).

For comparison, the lambda the ultimate twitter account, through which the home page items also flow, currently has 506 followers.

Ask.com the owners of Bloglines mention Twitter and Facebook as the reasons for Bloglines demise.

So the iPad has been out for awhile now, and I can only imagine that slates and similar multi-touch devices (e.g., tables and walls) will become more and more popular. Although these devices supposedly focus on content consumption, they seem to have a lot of potential for creating things...like programs. Has anyone else thought about what a programming language and environment for a multi-touch device would look like?

I think free-form textual syntax would probably not work as it is too tedious to type much text in on a virtual keyboard. However, structured editing might be feasible given the direct screen access. Perhaps such a language would be visual based on patches and data-flow connections, maybe Conal's tangible functional programming, or block-based ala Scratch? As far as I know, there are no touch-optimized VPLs out there yet, they are all designed for mice and keyboards. Even at that, most VPLs are for end-users, whereas I'm wondering if we could do serious programming on something like an iPad.

I've edited my slides in the video of my talk on Thyrd at
the Emerging Languages Camp last July and put it
online at thyrd.org/thyrd/elvideo.php. Hopefully more
of the talks will be available soon, it was a fun conference.

Phil Mercurio