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STEPS Toward The Reinvention of Programming: First Year Progress Report

Viewpoints Research have published the first year's status report on their previously discussed project.

By Luke Gorrie at 2008-03-20 03:54 | General | other blogs | 10902 reads

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Executive summary?

The project sounds cool but the report is very badly organized as far as I can tell. A one paragraph summary would be appreciated...

By Ehud Lamm at Thu, 2008-03-20 07:06 | login or register to post comments

p9

Page 9 seems to fit the bill: they're building a new system that fits Alan Kayish ideas about what a programming environment should look like, that is targetted to three platforms: squeak, javascript & their new multiple architecture compiler.

By Charles Stewart at Thu, 2008-03-20 07:17 | login or register to post comments

:-)

I read it before posting my message... I was looking for a page to refer others to and decided that I didn't find a good place to recommend ;-)

Essentially what is needed is a (better) translation of "Alan Kayish ideas about what a programming environment should look like" into the regular terminology in the field.

By Ehud Lamm at Thu, 2008-03-20 07:20 | login or register to post comments

Alan Kayish ideas

I don't think the general thrust of Alan Kay's ideas have changed since Squeak. My very preliminary impression is that a major new focus is on keeping the parts of the new system separate, so that the system can be chopped and changed more; my impression is that Squeak can become a bit of a tangled mess.

I think the proposal is all over the place because the different investigators are doing lots of different things. My favourite slice was the diagram on page 29, where Chuck Thacker's project (at Microsoft) for making a tiny processor out of FPGAs as a target. But what making efficient parallel computational structures for some of the more adventurous solutions to the problems of this project might involve seems pretty wide open to interpretation.

By Charles Stewart at Thu, 2008-03-20 11:09 | login or register to post comments

I wouldn't call the report

I wouldn't call the report badly organized -- It's an activity report after all, not a whitepaper. The one-sentence summary I have would seem to be "programming with grammars" :) (edit: actually better would be "a complete modern operating environment in less than 20,000 LOC)

I'm not normally one to post mindless slashdot-esque "wow" replies, but I couldn't help but be absolutely gobsmacked by the work detailed in this paper -- not so much for pushing the theory (they're basically implementing old languages) but for the extreme expressiveness of the approach.

Shame I can't get Lively to run right in firefox :-/

By Chuck Adams at Mon, 2008-03-24 20:34 | login or register to post comments

There are a lot of achievements in the paper, but...

...many of them are not new achievements: take a look at what Kay & co did with Squeak. The natural question to ask is: why did the PIs think that they needed a new framework? Why couldn't they reuse what had been done with Squeak? What Achilleas & I wrote points to different aspects of a possible reason, though I don't know either Squeak or STEPS well enough to say with any confidence that we are on the right track.

By Charles Stewart at Tue, 2008-03-25 09:54 | login or register to post comments

Conclusion

Domain-specific languages are useful because they allow for more abstraction than generic-purpose languages.

I tried to run the lively kernel on my office PC(P4, 3GHz, 1 GB ram, NV 7100 GS) but it was unusable due to being extremely slow.

Until a major operating system comes along that is not programmed in C and proves as fast and as capable as a C-based O/S, there is really no hope from getting away from the C mindset in the large.

By Achilleas Margaritis at Fri, 2008-03-21 12:20 | login or register to post comments

Code?

I wonder if the code is available and if yes with which license: they don't talk about it in the report.

IMHO this kind of applied research should try to 'hook up' with the free software community..

By renox at Tue, 2008-03-25 09:06 | login or register to post comments

Click here.

Click here.

By Sean Childs at Tue, 2008-03-25 12:55 | login or register to post comments

Coke and pre-scheme

From how that page introduces the Coke programming guide: the 'pre-scheme'-like function language.

Is that the same as the Kelsey pre-scheme? No, probably not the same, since there's no talk of either tail-recursion or only evaluating lambda forms where they can be stack allocated, but it looks like a reference to what Kelsey was doing. I wonder why Piumarta didn't use Kelsey's dialect...

By Charles Stewart at Tue, 2008-03-25 13:22 | login or register to post comments

Thanks

Thanks.

By renox at Tue, 2008-03-25 15:43 | login or register to post comments

Ometa

Someone's already posted a link to COLA, so find OMeta here. Doesn't look like the COLA version of OMeta is available though, so you're going to need either JS or Squeak.

Anyone know about the availability of IS? It's not exactly the easiest term to google for.

By Chuck Adams at Tue, 2008-03-25 22:14 | login or register to post comments

Big

I find this project very provocative. Really high stakes, chance to really win big, lots of dangers.

Speaking of risks: reading about these tiny-winy line counts makes me wonder how much tinyness has been optimized at the expense of "habitability". For example, if I want to add multiple retransmission strategies to the TCP (a good feature of Linux) then will that be easy or might it bugger up the whole parser-based approach and make a big mess? They don't have to implement every feature under the sun but I hope the system will be amenable to extension.

I reckon the ultimate success criteria for a TCP is to be able to sit down with Alan Cox and say "mine's better than yours." :-)

So it's a very big and exciting project and I can't imagine anyone better qualified to undertake it than the people behind Squeak.
Let's see what they come up with this year :-)

By Luke Gorrie at Sun, 2008-03-30 13:03 | login or register to post comments

Link broken

But there is a new link for the status report.

By Charles Stewart at Fri, 2009-03-13 10:13 | login or register to post comments