Lambda the Ultimate

[That's a book title]

Nice system. Did you write the design out once somewhere?

Funny you named it a democratic system, my analogy was anarchism - one of my brain-trains for the last week was: How to develop programming languages/programs/algorithms which work in ad-hoc globally scaled rulerless environments?

[Ad-hoc as in ad-hoc (mobile/sensor) networks]

There's a white paper which outlines the basic design and some more papers about.

Each agent (web page) is divided into a code and a state part. This code is Scheme at lowest level, state typically XML, but doesn't have to be. Each (byzantine) transaction can update the state and send messages to other agents (think of pi calculus or petri nets, that has been the idea behind). Often the state is XML and the code is an XSLT interpreter (a prototypical one is implemented), than the agent becomes reflexive and maintains it's own continuation. These xslt style sheets are typically divided into three sections: model, view and controller.

Anarchism is hardly a name for it: the most important part is a proof that permission system will not let you loose control (no take over). Anarchism in contrast is about no control ever. Askemos is fundamentally liberal and follows closely the ideas of the enlightment philosophy - because those are the foundation of our legal system.

Originally I just wantet to understand how "intellectual property" could work within our legal framework. So I created a formal model to play with.

Just when I understood that it brought the first tamper-proof processing and moreover in a simple environment, I went further.

Currently I'm sort of stuck: I might be able to model the new european patent law only in "insecure mode". If so, and if the model is correct, this would imply that real patent law is in conflict with "law of nature" (as of J.Locke). But discussion this here is beyond my english skills.

Anarchism is hardly a name for it: the most important part is a proof that permission system will not let you loose control (no take over). Anarchism in contrast is about no control ever. Askemos is fundamentally liberal and follows closely the ideas of the enlightment philosophy - because those are the foundation of our legal system.

I meant anarchism in the etymological sense, it stems from the greek word αναρχία (anarchia) which means, among others, "rulerless". You are right, it doesn't apply to your setting, it was something I was wondering about.

Originally I just wanted to understand how "intellectual property" could work within our legal framework. So I created a formal model to play with.

I totally misunderstood. I thought it was a kind of freenet/content management system... ;-)

Just when I understood that it brought the first tamper-proof processing and moreover in a simple environment, I went further.


Currently I'm sort of stuck: I might be able to model the new european patent law only in "insecure mode". If so, and if the model is correct, this would imply that real patent law is in conflict with "law of nature" (as of J.Locke).

[Don't really follow: you can't distribute patented content?, but...]

Ha! "A state of perfect freedom." Funny, this weekend I read an article in a local newspaper that the second law of thermodynamics was possibly always misunderstood as "maximizing chaos" whereas there are examples where systems by that law "maximize individual freedom" and result in ordered systems.

But discussion this here is beyond my english skills.

Hmpf?, the point of informal communication is that you lay down enough mud for others to see the road. I see more road than mud and otherwise I'll ask.

[Aber, wenn es dir besser gefaellt koenntest du natuerlich auch immer Deutsch reden. Aber nein, dafuer ist mein Deutsch eigentlich viel zu schlecht ;-)]

Ah well, let's not go kuro5hin.

Or was it the best fitting language for a specific infrastructure?

[Hmm, that was just to say - maybe it was just "well-designed" for web programming]

Sure, but design inheres in a lot of things. If a language is very forgiving syntactically, then new programmers who just want to programme straight away, without a lot of learning or even really understanding will prefer it to something very strict. An example of this is that (h:rest) is a valid pattern in Haskell, while h:rest is not. This seems pernickety, and would put off amateur programmers trying to hack something together (and perhaps professionals as well, justifiably).

...of being able to treat the web pages as independent entities, by having them become tightly coupled with the code/library. And you've made the generation of web pages become a java programming task. The programming end is made easier at the expense of making the manipulation of the data (html) harder. In some cases, the programming is the hardest chore, so that might make sense. In other cases, the manipulation of the data is the hardest part. And what's easy and hard will not vary just between projects, but also within any given project.

Three different types of framework come to mind. First, you can embed a little server side script in your pages, ala php, jsp, or asp - the presentation page is the master. Second, you can just generate the html from within the programming language of choice - such as you've done with Java (and how most of the original Perl CGI scripts were authored).

Or you can use a Template type scheme where there is a both a web page master and a bean master, trying to use each to it's best ability. This is the method used by the more recent vintage web frameworks (lot's of various Tomcat plugins, Mason, Zope).

I haven't studied Ruby on Rails or Ajax, so I'm not sure where they draw the lines in the divide and conquer strategy. But developing your own framework has some costs that have to be factored in. First, there is the cost of writing and maintaining your own libraries. (If an alternative is available, then you are just reinventing the wheel). Second, any new developers brought in have to be oriented towards the in-house framework, not being able to leverage off of their experience with other companies that use a more common framework. Finally, there is the problem of transitions, in that you can not leverage off of incremental improvements that are done by those who specialize in framework development. If a new feature gets added to Ruby on Rails that you want to use, you have to do some reverse engineering and program a parallel solution in your framework.

This is not to say that roll-your-own should be avoided. In some circumstances, it is the best thing to do (control your own destiny; optimized for you domain; knowledge and insight gained). But these things do have opportunity costs.

Finally, I am wondering why you chose Java? Just to up the ante one more level: If you can do these things via libraries within a programming language, then wouldn't it also make the most sense to use a language that optimizes our productivity? Perhaps Java does do that, but then the original reason for widespread adoption comes into question. Server side apps can be written in any language (Smalltalk, Scheme, Perl, ....). Why did we have to go through the motions of coming up with yet another half-baked programming language? The answer to this question might give you some insight into why people have been searching for new frameworks wherein the language use is a secondary or tertiary prerequisite.

After all this, my opinion is that the main problem with J2EE and all current web technologies is that programming languages are wrapped inside HTML, whereas it is the reverse that should take place.

I completely agree with you except for the "all current web technologies" bit. Continuation-based web servers like the PLT server, Seaside and UnCommonWeb have had the pattern of an overall program that displays web pages as part of its execution for several years now. Having used the PLT server quite a bit after moving from ColdFusion, PHP, and a few other more traditional web frameworks, I agree 100% that the notion of having a web page with code on it rather than a program that spits out web pages was a bad bad idea and really ought to go away.

[ The proof is there: everything in the world reduces to Cruyff ;-), another offtopic book title ]

OT thought: Dunno. Looking at something like TiddlyWiki, I can't help but wonder how it would be if you would `Ajaxify` it.