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STEPS 2011 Progress Report (personal computing in 20kLOC)
The recent mention of the Nile programming language reminded me to post about the STEPS 2011 Progress Report.
The overall goal of STEPS is to make a working model of as much personal computing phenomena and user experience as possible in a very small number of lines of code (and using only our code). Our total lines of code‑count target for the entire system “from end‑user down to the metal†is 20,000, which—if we can do a lot within this limit—we think will be a very useful model and substantiate one part of our thesis: that systems which use millions to hundreds of millions of lines of code to do comparable things are much larger than they need to be.... Our general approach is to pick an area whose parts seem to be related—for example: 2.5D anti‑aliased alphaed computer graphics—try to find the mathematical relations that cover the desired phenomena, design a “problem oriented language†(POL) that is a “runnable math†version of the mathematics, implement that language, then use it to write the program code for the target area.... STEPS is now to the point where it is more fun to use and demonstrate than to talk and write about. Quite a bit of the original proposal is now working well enough to give all our presentations and write this entire report for the NSF and Viewpoints Research Institute websites. In the STEPS system, this document is live: the examples are actually runnable demos; the code shown is changeable and testable, etc.Previous discussion of this project on LtU includes:
By Greg Buchholz at 2012-01-24 22:45 | LtU Forum | previous forum topic | next forum topic | other blogs | 16601 reads
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