Peter Siebel famously once explained that the reason he had not looked
at Cells was that Kenny had never given him a reason to. The #Lisp IRC
yobbos will tell anyone who asks that there is no point to Cells,
Kenny
is the only one who thinks there is, and no one has ever used Cells in
an application (but there is a possibility Kenny is using them now for
his upcoming algebra software release). So.... why Cells? (Or Adobe
Adam
or COSI or, well, that is what brings me here...):
A correspondent recently turned me on to a mention of a paper on
functional reactive programming:
http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/2068
The paper sounded more like Cells than anything else I'd read:
http://kimbly.com/papers/bck-pepm-2007.pdf
Not by much, cuz everyone who gets anywhere near this paradigm is
really
talking about the same thing. I say dataflow, they say reactive,
others
say constraints, I forget what Adobe calls it -- but everyone uses the
spreadsheet metaphor, including these folks (down four lines), whom I
stumbled across
while reading up on FRP on the wiki:
WIKI: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Functional_reactive_programming
"These folks": http://www.flapjax-lang.org/tutorial/ To see the FJ
crew
flog the spreadsheet horse, look for "Intermezzo: The Spreadsheet Grew
Up" about halfway through that long page. The whole tutorial on that
page includes working JS examples offering a small taste of what
FRP/Cells programming is like.
The exciting thing is that FlapJax is just JavaScript. You can program
in FlapJax, a language built atop JavaScript, or you can write
JavaScript and call FlapJax as any other JS lib. I say 'exciting'
because so often when one gets A Whole New Language one is stuck with
it, especially the performance hit by the dread Hey! Let's Use It For
Everything gaffe. The paper cited above that started this whole line
of
web surfing in fact offers a workaround for this precise gaffe. And my
guess is that, because the FJ crew lets us use it as a library, it
will
be possible to use it more like Cells, by lifting only slot accessors
(which will make sense after learning what "lifting" is in FRP).
Summary: In 2007, with Kenny having converted about ten people to
Cells
after laughing in 1995 at Steele writing in 1983 his amazement that
Sutherland's 1963 constraints had gone nowhere while presenting his
(Steele's) constraints language, a research program that had withered
by
the time Kenny was laughing (in 1995), we look around and see
<whatever
it is> popping up more and more places all the time. Reminds me of
Lisp.
This time it is the paradigm that would not die.
And if you want to learn Cells, screw it, play with FlapJax. I'll be.
[Uh, mebbe not, damn code looks scary without macros.]
ken
--
Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and
I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.
-- Elwood P. Dowd
In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.
-- Elwood's Mom
<·········@gmail.com> wrote:
> Peter Siebel famously once explained that the reason he had not looked at
> Cells was that Kenny had never given him a reason to. The #Lisp IRC yobbos
> will tell anyone who asks that there is no point to Cells, Kenny is the
> only one who thinks there is, and no one has ever used Cells in an
> application (but there is a possibility Kenny is using them now for his
> upcoming algebra software release). So.... why Cells? (Or Adobe Adam or
> COSI or, well, that is what brings me here...):
>
I would have loved to use Cells a few years ago, although I would have
had to figure out how to use it inside a Photoshop plug-in*. But, alas,
that product is no more.
---
SiteGrinder uses Lisp inside Photoshop. Wish I knew how they did it
(or, better, wish I had the time to figure it out for myself).
For the same ideas especially used in GUI you might be intrested to
see these projects:
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Phooey
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/TV
http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/DeepArrow
This guy calls them Tangible Values :)
From: Ken Tilton
Subject: Re: MWUAHA: All your Web clients are belong to us (dataflow/reactive paradigms)
Date:
Message-ID: <v3OCh.70$bH3.25@newsfe12.lga>
Vagif Verdi wrote:
> For the same ideas especially used in GUI you might be intrested to
> see these projects:
> http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/Phooey
> http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/TV
> http://haskell.org/haskellwiki/DeepArrow
>
> This guy calls them Tangible Values :)
>
Actually, if we are just talking about GUIs, Tcl/Tk calls it (and the
company <g>) ActiveState.
We would hold annual international conferences but we do not know what
to call them. Lessee, C++ has Adam, Python has PyCells, Haskell has FRP,
Scheme has FrTime, JavaScript has FlapJack, Lisp has Cells and KR and
COSI and I am sure a dozen others -- looks like Cells (in spirit) will
catch on before Lisp! Eat that, #lisp!
:)
kenny
--
Well, I've wrestled with reality for 35 years, Doctor, and
I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.
-- Elwood P. Dowd
In this world, you must be oh so smart or oh so pleasant.
-- Elwood's Mom