Archive for the ‘Extensible Programming’ Category
Saturday, March 13th, 2010
I just (finally) watched the demo video for Andrew Bragdon's CodeBubbles. You've probably already seen it, but if you haven't, check it out: it rocks. Like Kael Rowan's Code Canvas (a Microsoft research project), it imagines an IDE that is more than just a bunch of 1970s-era TTYs in a ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | 1 Comment »
Monday, February 1st, 2010
Lots of people were chatting last week about Sikuli, the "programming with screenshots" project from MIT. Even if I didn't agree with Adam Goucher's comments (with I do), I'd still criticize it as a half-measure: a real extensible programming system would allow one programmer to nest this capability in a ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | No Comments »
Friday, October 23rd, 2009
It's still a lot harder than it should be to add pictures to web pages. I know, you think it's easy, but let's do a comparison:
Modern desktop WYSIWYG editor
WordPress (and most other tools)
click on the drawing palette
draw
fire up a separate drawing application
create the image
upload it
add an <img> tag to link ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | 4 Comments »
Thursday, April 23rd, 2009
Interesting talk from Magnus Christerson and Shane Clifford about intentional programming (Charles Simonyi's "next big thing"). Starts a bit slowly, then accelerates; I particularly liked the off-hand characterization of all of today's widely-used languages as glorified punch cards. I think---I hope---that the demo starting around 14:00 is a glimpse of ...
Posted in Extensible Programming, Research | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, March 25th, 2009
Inference for R lets users nest the R statistical language in Word and Excel. It's a neat idea, and another example of the kind of bottom-up innovation that I predict will eventually lead to fully-fledged extensible programming systems. (If Bespin made it easier to do things like this, I might ...
Posted in Extensible Programming, Research, Software Carpentry | 1 Comment »
Friday, February 13th, 2009
Mozilla Labs just announced Bespin, "...an open extensible web-based framework for code editing that aims to increase developer productivity, enable compelling user experiences, and promote the use of open standards." It might actually be true --- check out their screencast.
Posted in Extensible Programming | No Comments »
Monday, December 29th, 2008
Several people have created family trees to trace the evolution of programming languages (see, for example, the Mother Tongues chart). Given the news that closures are being added to Objective-C, I'd like to see someone trace the ideas that make up programming languages, such as user-defined data types, generators, forall ...
Posted in Extensible Programming | 1 Comment »
Thursday, December 18th, 2008
InfoQ has an article on "Writing a Textual DSL (Domain Specific Language) Using Oslo", which is Microsoft's whiffy new sort-of-extensible programming system. It makes Scheme (and even Ruby) look pretty...
Posted in Extensible Programming | No Comments »
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 »