World: r3wp

hearing and seeing alan kay in the last few days has only solidified 
many of my ideas.  One capital sentence he repeats:


Adults have too many context and concepts, to be able to think simply 
and understand the most basic ideas.   kids have a "fresh" take on 
things... and they are much better at chosing simple things.

elixir, for example will seem like a bizare work environment for 
some, I guess, but its sooo simple, it needs no real learning... 
actually, the only thing people will have to learn is the panels 
which people will add to interface the internals... but at least 
we will be able to SEE the relationships and associations they have 
with the "innards"

so once you "understand" the concept of an self managing atom of 
information...

you understand EVERYTHING.

Maxim, yes, it's because we go to school. When I went to public school 
I liked electronics and wanted to work with it. I found it fun and 
could even put together little circuits that did fun stuff. When 
I became an engineer, the fun went away and everything became immensely 
complex, so what I had learned as a kid, I lost.

are you comming at the devcon henrik? I don't rememebr?

nope

The goal of elixir, is to get many people writing VERY small procedures 
and tasks.

darn... would really have liked to go over elixir with you in person.

 A service will give her a piece of paper as a view port.

 -- But what features does the service provide, and when does it become 
 an application? i.e. how do you save something, find something you 
 wrote before, add spell checking, print something, etc. These are 
 things that can be answered in different ways, and I think we'll 
 see a lot more big changes in software in the next 10 years.

the ubiquity is the key.

a pencil which actually stores data on a sheet.

a real sheat.

electronic paper already exists and is being sold by sony as a small 
book reader... no back lit.  0 consumption until you edit the page.

things like that and gestural workflow.

Gregg, you don't save anything. Like the piece of paper, the information 
is persistent the moment you write on it. How they want you to access 
documents, I'm not sure they are done working that out. I suppose 
that services that are tied together exist in contexts, so that putting 
text writing, printing and spell checking together makes sense, while 
bitmap painting and spell checking does not.

anyhow... I've got to go... but I am started to be exited for devcon... 
things are starting to "work"

I remember actually that Amiga Inc. were some of the first to start 
talking about persistent storage in desktop environments. Now everyone 
else but Amiga Inc. are doing it. :-)

I think fleecy moss called it orthogonal persistence.

Speaking of which: I'd love to see a way in Rebol to declare a piece 
of data persistent across sessions, so it would save automatically 
and you would not have to worry about it.

Yes, the whole "not saving" thing has been done before, but we haven't 
pushed far enough in that regard. Anyone remember Lotus Agenda? That 
was one smart app, and that's how you can auto-file things and find 
them again easily. 


The concept of a persistent image, ala Smalltalk, has also come up 
before. I think Maarten wanted to do something like that, but it's 
not a simple thing to do.

Like the piece of paper, the information is persistent the moment 
you write on it.

  This is the same in Qtask...we spend our time right now making it 
  faster, and much better (simpler) UI.

When you put something in the Scratch pad on Qtask's home page, no 
saving or loading.  It does it for you, and it is instantly availble 
on your Cell phone.

IT just works...

well, the close button here does not seem to work in the "Your unsupported 
browser is Safari" window :-)

As stated, Safari is not supported.  As proof, the close button does 
nothing!

Sometimes I wonder about you guys.

cool! I think. :-)

Don't people here see REBOL in line with this very thread.  I use 
REBOL for all kinds

of things, that could be an application, by why?  Use blocks.  Write 
a one-liner for the

task at hand.  That's why I was very interested that Carl may allow 
LOAD/RELAX

(although I would actually prefer a junk! or gibberish! datatype) 
in R3.  REBOL is my

non-application application.  I use this model when coding solutions 
to the

construction site bosses problems.  Use a block and write a script 
that suits the

problem.  Site managers need a button to "make it go" (the UI), but 
each

problem gets its own solution.  I'm not going to sit and try and 
write an accounting

package for a guy that just wants to invoice customers, and show 
his profit/loss.

If the user needs to export data to an actual "app", write a quick 
export etc.etc.etc. 

I don't call them Reblets per say, but it's the headspace I've been 
in for years now.

automatic persistent storage... i've done it, as the base of "your 
values!". wish i had the time to pursue that.

NeoOffice is all Java:  AFAIK it's a java/swing front-end on top 
of the C++ Open Office Code.

http://obligement.free.fr/articles_traduction/itwsassenrath_en.php
<--- Interview with Carl

very interesting stuff!

thanks. 


that's a very nice article to read ....as a lead-up to REBOL Devcon 
2007

thanks guys for your comments at Osnews ...

I'd hope to avoid the open/closed source debate. I don't plan to 
comment on it. I'd rather discuss the language features.

the problem is, with 3.0, we are discussing vapor yet. There are 
3 new OSNews posts re Amiga and ppl start to react negatively to 
it - because all those years anything amiga related was maybe announced, 
but never delivered ...

It would have been more appropriate to wait until after the devcon

posted my comment too, pointed to RebGUI :-)

There's a pretty strong reaction to my little video. I think we should 
focus a lot on video tutorials.

what video?

see last OSNews post

I watched the videa ... really cool! No other form of tutorial can 
express that ...

you can claim rebol is easy to use, you can provide your tutorial 
with code sample plus screenshot, but video shows it nicely ...

I would really like to do more videos, but it would need some scripting. 
I think we should have a video group.

even cooler one would be to start viewtop and run few demos, as particles, 
calculator, showing its short source code etc :-)

what tool was used to do the video?

I don't remember the name, but it was a Python based screen capture 
tool that generated a Flash video.

moving to Video Tutorials

Henrik - you are doing great service on amigaworld.net :-)

yes, but now I need a Scheme expert :-)