[self-interest] Korz (was: Bold outliner items)

[Jecel Assumpcao Jr.]

Russell,

> I never really played with Slate though I read its docs.  It was a
> bit CLOS-like?

To me it has a very Self-like flavor. The only thing I didn't like about
it was the inheritance model which I felt was too complex. One detail in
which it is the opposite of Self is that even the receiver has to be
named like any other argument (if it is going to be used - any argument
that is just a part of the dispatch can be anonymous). At one point I
considered basing my project on Slate but distributed computing is very
important to me and multi-dispatch doesn't seem to match that very well.

The best way to get a good idea of what Slate is really like is to
download the sources and look at the libraries (Brian Rice adapted them
from Squeak in just a few days) in any text editor.

> Korz in comparison seems to retain more of the feeling of late
> binding, though maybe that's a misremembering.
> Korz also still privileges the object/selector axis, with other aspects
> secondary ('context').

Indeed, though it makes the receiver "dimension" more like the others
than it was in Us.

When watching the presentation about Korz I kept remembering Ted
Nelson's "Zig Zag" multidimensional spreadsheet. Perhaps some of his GUI
ideas could be reused?

http://xanadu.com/zigzag/
http://www.nongnu.org/gzz/gi/gi.html

> Ian's earlier stuff with COLA seemed to be playing in the same space
> not by reifying context but by reifying the dispatch mechanism. Maybe
> that's a dynamism step too far though.

To "make things as simple as possible, but no simpler" (Albert Einstein)
you have to go a step too far and then come back a little. I see no
other way to do it. Chuck Moore eliminated source code entirely in his
Ok system and then took a step back in Color Forth. I worked on several
Self variations in the 1990s (it was a fad back then) which had a lot in
common with the early COLA stuff.

-- Jecel