Archive for the ‘Extensible Programming’ Category
Friday, September 19th, 2008
I've grumbled before about the fact that mass-market tools like Firefox and Microsoft Word allow people to mix pictures and text, but programmers' editors (including IDEs) do not. My standard answer when people ask why I'd want that is, "So that I can put before and after pictures of data ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | 2 Comments »
Thursday, April 10th, 2008
I knew it would happen sooner rather than later: there is now an open source reimplementation of Microsoft PowerShell that will run on all the "other" platforms. If you haven't played with PowerShell, it's the coolest thing to happen to coding in a long time; there's also the Hotwire ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | No Comments »
Tuesday, February 12th, 2008
Via Jeff Balogh, a pointer to Hotwire Shell, a free object-oriented hypershell inspired by PowerShell that runs on Linux, and is being ported to Windows and Mac OS X. The principal author seems to be Colin Walters; I'll post more info as I get it.
Posted in Extensible Programming | No Comments »
Tuesday, January 15th, 2008
I keep trying to put extensible programming aside, but it just won't let me let go. (Yes, I know, the eighties want their lyrics back...) Most recently, Michael Feathers posted this piece about what he calls structural programming. As he says:
A structural program (or program snippet) is ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | 1 Comment »
Monday, December 31st, 2007
Back when I had time to think about extensible programming, I predicted that the most likely route to its realization was some vendor creating a new version of a wholly-owned toolchain. After all, if Microsoft had decided that VB.NET source code would be stored as XML, in a format that ...
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Wednesday, June 13th, 2007
I've been saying for a couple of years now that Javascript has a good chance of displacing Perl, Python, Ruby, and other scripting languages over the next two or three years: it has all their advantages, plus developers have to learn it to write modern applications. Apple's announcement that third-party ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | 2 Comments »
Wednesday, April 18th, 2007
A Dynamic Languages Symposium will be held in Montreal on October 22 (in conjunction with OOPSLA). I've put my interest in extensible programming on hold to pursue other projects, but I'd still like to attend. Anyone else planning on going?
Posted in Extensible Programming | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, March 14th, 2007
I've been saying for a while now that extensible programming systems are the Next Big Thing, but I wasn't expecting them to arrive this quickly. Check out Expressive Programs Through Presentation Extension, by Eisenberg and Kiczales (at UBC). They use Java plus annotations for storage, rather than XML, which allows ...
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Tuesday, January 9th, 2007
AntUnit 1.0 has been released; it allows programmers to define test cases inside an Ant build file, and proves that every build system (or anything else with a configuration file) turns into a programming language.
Posted in Extensible Programming | 3 Comments »
Thursday, November 9th, 2006
One of the projects I'm contributing to these days is writing a first-year Computer Science textbook using Python. We're using DrProject to manage it: after all, LaTeX files are really just another kind of source code, and what better way to keep track of who's supposed to be doing ...
Posted in DrProject, Extensible Programming, Research, Teaching | No Comments »