[gambit-list] Arto Bendiken | Rediscovering the Lively Road Not Taken

Jeff Read bitwize at gmail.com
Wed May 28 17:33:48 EDT 2008


On Wed, May 28, 2008 at 7:04 AM, Bradley Lucier <lucier at math.purdue.edu> wrote:

> The Lively Kernel by Dan Ingalls had already caught my eye, but
> sometimes one needs an interpreter to really tell you what some
> technology is about, and Arto does a great job here.  Somehow, with
> Marc's Scheme->Javascript compiler, I see a "Scheme machine" lurking
> in the background here, or at least a true OS-independent graphical
> world that Gambit could live in and drive.

Argh. The Lively Kernel is one of those things which, while hella cool
on paper (it inspired my "Spritely Framework", a JavaScript game
engine for the CANVAS element), still sucks in reality. Aside from
being unusable in anything but Safari, graphical updates are too slow
to be an attractive platform to use or develop for.

As for your Scheme Machine, it's basically what I had in mind for the
OLPC Gambit Activity. I was going to use a GdkCanvas or perhaps an SDL
surface instead of scriptable SVG objects, but oh well...

--Jeff



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