protecting a space elevator is really simple to solve
, except for the cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per day for that aircraft carrier, not including support ships. I wouldn't just assume that the revenues would easily pay for it - we're talking about a huge up-front investment (during construction) to recover.
Re:From an author - Glad to see the interest now
on
Slate is Bootstrapped
·
· Score: 4, Informative
I realize you're joking, but that's actually what the original implementation did, up to a point (and it was decently non-abyssmal in performance). We had an inlining semi-compiler (to avoid the fact that Lisp implementations differ, you can't rely on specific ANSI-variable behaviors) with a few critical optimizations applied which we are now applying to the VM-based implementation (some are already present).
Let me just say that ANSI Common Lisp makes for a really poor virtual machine; that's really not what it excels at. It excels at optimizing Lisp programs, not other languages with a substantial impedance-mismatch. Slate super-heavily relies on polymorphism, and this just isn't something that Lisp compiler implementors focus on optimizing.
From an author - Glad to see the interest now
on
Slate is Bootstrapped
·
· Score: 5, Informative
So it looks like the original story here wasn't such a fluke after all. I was really kind of shocked that anyone would even look at it or want to use it given that it was written in Common Lisp for experimentation.
The language we write the system code in is currently not quite Slate, but it's designed to make the C code more consistent and relatively safe. We spent some months debugging the new implementation, so this release is focussed on being debugged. Future releases will have more features, and so forth.
And, no, I still don't care about the online magazine of the same name. Just think of it as "Clean Slate" Smalltalk or Slate Smalltalk. Too many other things are named Slate or some variation thereof, anyway (see the USPTO's registry).
My partner on the project plans on full compilation without a C back-end, but also that it will take time, so I can't promise you guys a darned thing yet - don't hold your breath! (He's a talented guy, and great to work with, but things like this take time to develop.)
This took me by surprise, and I'm not a usual poster here, so I don't have the energy to reply to each person in turn. So I'll summarize some points I've seen:
This post is entirely misleading; we are not researchers, and we do intend to do business based on this language. However, what the language itself is is entirely mis-represented. Note: the original submitter is not affiliated with our project in any way, and in fact does not actually know or use the language.
First, we are not in a project mode of self-promotion or public representation at all. Nothing on that site claims to be a real tutorial, and the current efforts have mostly been about experimentation. We are still preparing the really usable implementation, and have a huge set of ideas and environment enhancements in backlog waiting for this. What's mentioned on the front page is actually a mere fraction of what we're working on.
The project name, "Slate", is short for "Clean Slate Smalltalk". If you don't know Smalltalk, very little of it will make sense; what's at issue is that we mean what Alan Kay would say in that Smalltalk currently means Smalltalk-80, just a certain quirky snapshot of a whole range of ideas that he and others were working on. We're interested in that whole range.
Slate is only about prototypes insofar as this was an initial language stage that was simple to play with and powerful enough to explore without too many limitations. Further revisions of the language will feature higher-level facilities for more type-safe programming and more declarative consistency (declarative in the sense of (re-)defining a class and having its instances track that consistently).
Slate's environment is about 0.001% of completion of what we intend, and we have a huge body of experience and code and ideas to draw upon which are already largely mapped-out. What you see on the site is not representative of what we want in those terms.
The syntax is definitely odd. At issue is the fact that we kept a minimal Smalltalk syntax core and optimized it for "phrase value" and added various annotation mechanisms, which wind up being very hard to understand until you crack open the 40-page programmers' manual which explains this all. Although it is no tutorial, everything is explained there, and improved with feedback from early users.
Slate is eventually going to be a full environment, and be very flexible at a large scale, so that questions of prejudice about design choices will not matter, because we actively take part in designing the system so that users can make the choices: whether image-style live interaction or C-embeddable, highly-optimized, low-overhead, no-IDE deployment. And make it so you can make these choices independently; current Smalltalks, Lisps, Dylan, and hundreds of other languages (especially the more common ones) don't have this.
There are a number of issues brought up here which are addressed but not advertised on the front page; for example, Slate will handle security at the language level, using capability analysis and the subjective programming feature mentioned. Our project has no marketting team (see Smallscript), and has actively avoided public claims until we have the demonstration at-hand. I am giving a presentation and demonstration of the next major release, featuring a self-hosting (C-friendly) setup in Seattle at Smalltalk Solutions 2004 in May.
Slashdot Mirror
I realize you're joking, but that's actually what the original implementation did, up to a point (and it was decently non-abyssmal in performance). We had an inlining semi-compiler (to avoid the fact that Lisp implementations differ, you can't rely on specific ANSI-variable behaviors) with a few critical optimizations applied which we are now applying to the VM-based implementation (some are already present).
Let me just say that ANSI Common Lisp makes for a really poor virtual machine; that's really not what it excels at. It excels at optimizing Lisp programs, not other languages with a substantial impedance-mismatch. Slate super-heavily relies on polymorphism, and this just isn't something that Lisp compiler implementors focus on optimizing.
So it looks like the original story here wasn't such a fluke after all. I was really kind of shocked that anyone would even look at it or want to use it given that it was written in Common Lisp for experimentation.
The language we write the system code in is currently not quite Slate, but it's designed to make the C code more consistent and relatively safe. We spent some months debugging the new implementation, so this release is focussed on being debugged. Future releases will have more features, and so forth.
And, no, I still don't care about the online magazine of the same name. Just think of it as "Clean Slate" Smalltalk or Slate Smalltalk. Too many other things are named Slate or some variation thereof, anyway (see the USPTO's registry).
My partner on the project plans on full compilation without a C back-end, but also that it will take time, so I can't promise you guys a darned thing yet - don't hold your breath! (He's a talented guy, and great to work with, but things like this take time to develop.)
This took me by surprise, and I'm not a usual poster here, so I don't have the energy to reply to each person in turn. So I'll summarize some points I've seen:
This post is entirely misleading; we are not researchers, and we do intend to do business based on this language. However, what the language itself is is entirely mis-represented. Note: the original submitter is not affiliated with our project in any way, and in fact does not actually know or use the language.
First, we are not in a project mode of self-promotion or public representation at all. Nothing on that site claims to be a real tutorial, and the current efforts have mostly been about experimentation. We are still preparing the really usable implementation, and have a huge set of ideas and environment enhancements in backlog waiting for this. What's mentioned on the front page is actually a mere fraction of what we're working on.
The project name, "Slate", is short for "Clean Slate Smalltalk". If you don't know Smalltalk, very little of it will make sense; what's at issue is that we mean what Alan Kay would say in that Smalltalk currently means Smalltalk-80, just a certain quirky snapshot of a whole range of ideas that he and others were working on. We're interested in that whole range.
Slate is only about prototypes insofar as this was an initial language stage that was simple to play with and powerful enough to explore without too many limitations. Further revisions of the language will feature higher-level facilities for more type-safe programming and more declarative consistency (declarative in the sense of (re-)defining a class and having its instances track that consistently).
Slate's environment is about 0.001% of completion of what we intend, and we have a huge body of experience and code and ideas to draw upon which are already largely mapped-out. What you see on the site is not representative of what we want in those terms.
The syntax is definitely odd. At issue is the fact that we kept a minimal Smalltalk syntax core and optimized it for "phrase value" and added various annotation mechanisms, which wind up being very hard to understand until you crack open the 40-page programmers' manual which explains this all. Although it is no tutorial, everything is explained there, and improved with feedback from early users.
Slate is eventually going to be a full environment, and be very flexible at a large scale, so that questions of prejudice about design choices will not matter, because we actively take part in designing the system so that users can make the choices: whether image-style live interaction or C-embeddable, highly-optimized, low-overhead, no-IDE deployment. And make it so you can make these choices independently; current Smalltalks, Lisps, Dylan, and hundreds of other languages (especially the more common ones) don't have this.
There are a number of issues brought up here which are addressed but not advertised on the front page; for example, Slate will handle security at the language level, using capability analysis and the subjective programming feature mentioned. Our project has no marketting team (see Smallscript), and has actively avoided public claims until we have the demonstration at-hand. I am giving a presentation and demonstration of the next major release, featuring a self-hosting (C-friendly) setup in Seattle at Smalltalk Solutions 2004 in May.
Yeah, I haven't been threatened with losing my job for that. Nope, no heresy, there.