Levi's Lisp Log

Interactive Fiction as Programming

Here's something novel: Craig Latta has created an interactive programming environment on top of a Smalltalk system based on the paradigm of interactive fiction. It's called Quoth, and he's created a screen-capture video demo of it featuring a simple musical application. He intends to use it for live musical demos; the interactive prose should make the programming possible to follow by a non-technical audience.

This isn't exactly an environment I'd like to use for programming anything substantial, but at the very least it's a very clever hack, and it's fun to see programs so fully anthropomorphised. I can see it being useful for making some rather entertaining presentations.

Iterators a Sign of Weakness

I'm currently taking a Java class in school. It's a pretty basic class, but I have a new perspective on it now that I'm familiar with a larger range of languages. When we discussed anonymous inner classes, I immediately recognized them as closures. I was anxious to find just what you could accomplish with them, so I did a bit of research online. First, I found a wiki page describing an implementation of Smalltalk-like code blocks in Java. These are cool, but syntactically awkward in Java. Via that page, I found a very interesting essay regarding Iterator objects, and how they are a sign of a weakness in a language. Finally, I came across a Koan regarding the similarity of objects and closures.