Re: Alan Kay's new project

On Feb 8, 2007, at 8:37 PM, Mark Haniford wrote:

> I'm wondering what people's thoughts are regarding Alan Kay's new  
> project.  http://www.stanford.edu/class/ee380/Abstracts/070214.html

I'm aware of it. I wouldn't call it Alan Kay's project. It's Ian  
Piumarta's, and he's lucky enough to be one of the people that Alan  
Kay will listen to.

> I just downloaded Pepsi, which is interesting in that it somewhat  
> like Objective-C in that you can mix C with Smalltalk-like code.   
> There's another language in the works called Coke (know less  
> about), but seems to have a Lisp-like syntax.  But I guess the real  
> interesting thing about Pepsi, Coke, ALBERT is that it seems its  
> goals are to have easy different object-model integration.
>
> It looks like Kay got 5 million from the NSF and another 5 million  
> in private funding for a 5 year project.  I wonder if Slate could  
> be worked into this system.

Eh, perhaps. The whole thing looks very quirky and Ian-centric to me,  
and he has a long history of not finishing what he starts. I'm still  
in wait-and-see mode, personally. Also, don't forget that research  
projects have absolutely no commitment to be useful or forthcoming to  
other open-source hackers, so don't take it for granted that we can  
just join in on the fun - after all, Squeak was "open-source" for 6  
years before there was a community not directly attached to Alan that  
had *any* say over its direction.

I'd prefer a situation where we can take the lessons from there and  
morph Slate along those lines (and hopefully even re-use some code),  
and as I've stated before, I don't care how much Slate has to change  
if it means that the idea succeeds.

Coke/Pepsi also seem very single-dispatch-centric, for the record.

I invite comments/arguments/suggestions as usual.

--
-Brian
http://briantrice.com