> I've read this now - a really interesting paper with many lucid
> points. It sees live programming languages as separate from dynamic
> programming languages. In these terms something like PD is live, and
> something like Lisp or Smalltalk (and their descendants) are not.
Yeah, too bad he got that wrong, at least as far as Smalltalk is
concerned. Typically, the entire environment, including the code
editors, are implemented in Smalltalk; the system is reflective at every
stage of development. Changing the behavior of the system by changing
the implementation of a method is something that happens routinely
(independently of when that method is run). Whether the development
style is "declarative" or "imperative" is orthogonal.
He also seems to be under the impression that dynamic systems can't
do type inferencing without manual annotation. This is weird; the whole
point of type inferencing is avoiding such labor. Dynamic systems are
perfectly capable of providing useful "semantic feedback". It makes me
wonder how much attention he actually paid to the Self material he mentions.
> "Hot swapping in a dynamic language replaces code so that
> its re-execution occurs according to the new version of the
> code as opposed to the old version. ... By being based on a simple
> data-flow model, live programming in SuperGlue goes much more farther
> than this: code edits immediately change the program’s data-flow graph
> and the observable execution state of the program."
That just sounds like hot air to me. You can "change the program's
data-flow graph and the observable execution state" with mere code
replacement.
The system he presents is interesting, but I think he has failed to
understand what came before. And his system looks suspiciously like
something of the long-swaths-of-source-code-in-static-files variety,
which isn't encouraging to me as a performer.
-C
--
Craig Latta
improvisational musical informaticist
www.netjam.org
Smalltalkers do: [:it | All with: Class, (And love: it)]
Received on Sat Mar 24 2007 - 07:54:25 GMT