www.nickhodge.com

In 1988 Mitchell Waite sent me a small paper­back to read: Ver­nor Vinge’s True Names. I was a mere, lowly Hyper­talk pro­gram­mer from Adelaide, South Aus­tralia. He was an import­ant person.

This book has stuck in the neur­ons, and now the vir­tual is becom­ing real. It really goes to show how hard sci­ence fic­tion depicts a future that cur­rent liv­ing humans will not see. Based on some work I was doing to Tricks of the Hyper­talk Mas­ters, cre­at­ing what would be now known as a “skin” over Com­puServe; the book was just sci­ence fiction.

True Names pub­lished in 1981, describes a world called “Other Plane” were people inter­act online. The premise of sep­ar­at­ing your online from your phys­ical inden­tity; and the concept of a future Sin­gu­lar­ity per­vade my per­sonal world-view today.

Thanks Mitch.

Now, what does this have to do with today?

Second Life. It’s more than the tech­no­logy; it is also about the plat­forms involved. It is also how it impacts real people: such as Dave Wal­lace. Second Life is what I visu­al­ised as “Other Plane”

Watch the first half of this video: Jim-Cory-SecondLife.wmv, Lang.NET Sym­posium.

The first half of the video is light on tech­no­logy; but heavy on the eco­nom­ics, and wider-world impacts of the vir­tual world. The user cre­ation rate (Write­ness in the Read/Write equa­tion) is over 60%; com­pared to the web which is less than 10%.

A key reason seems to be the eco­nomic value attached to vir­tual objects scrip­ted in Second Life. As items in the Second­Life vir­tual world are intel­lec­tual prop­erty; an item can be cre­ated, sold and purchased.

Ensur­ing that intel­lec­tual prop­erty is val­ued is going to be one of the toughest chal­lenges for upcom­ing generations.

Is the script­ing in Second Life the new HyperCard?

Today, at least in the US, it is Programmer’s Day.

Maybe it should be called “Inter­na­tional Pro­gram­ming Lan­guage Peace Day”. The level of advocacy for vari­ous pro­gram­ming lan­guages reaches rhet­or­ical heights last seen dur­ing the one of the not-so-successful 18^th cen­tury revolutions.

When not speak­ing to humans, other pro­gram­mers to read­ing the latest advocacy on their lan­guage of choice: pro­gram­mers stitch together the wild thoughts of oth­ers to munge data into inform­a­tion.

Pro­gram­mers are the people who use com­puter lan­guages, in their vari­ous forms, to get com­puters to do cool things. From bliken­lights to cool online maps: there are a pyr­amid of pro­gram­mers respons­ible for your com­puter exper­i­ence. A pro­gram­mer is behind the “ding” in the lift you used this morn­ing; and the soft­ware that val­id­ated your ticket on the bus ride to work.

The beauty of com­puter lan­guages is that they never seem to stag­nate: like mod­ern, spoken lan­guages: they evolve as the world changes. Except those that are aban­don­ware.

Microsoft has recently released my cur­rent favour­ite pro­gram­ming lan­guage, Python, as a CLR/.net lan­guage: Iron­Py­thon. This imple­ments Python as a dynamic lan­guage on the CLR engine.

C# is the lan­guage of imple­ment­a­tion for CLR, as is Sun’s Java is for the JVM. A# (Ada), B#, D# F# (OCaml), G# (Gen­er­at­ive lan­guage), J# (Jsharp), P# (Pro­log), L#. More sharps than Beeth­oven.

The lan­guage wars has returned to an old field: dynamic lan­guages. The grand-daddy of dynamic lan­guages, LISP, has received some recent pos­it­ive PR. One per­son, Paul Gra­ham, is the poster mil­lion­aire for LISP. Laz­arus of LISP.

This week, Sun Microsys­tems par­ried Microsoft’s Iron­Py­thon by hir­ing the team behind JRuby. The aim here is to imple­ment the Ruby dynamic lan­guage on the Java Vir­tual Machine (JVM). Some months ago, this team was able to get a Ruby on Rails work­ing on the JVM.

Whilst the big lan­guage guys battle it out, is Erlang the next Ruby, or is it just a vik­ing proto-language with the best non-pun name? The Erlang com­munity is start­ing to come out of their tele­phone exchanges.

No lan­guage has deemed to have arrived in the 21^st Cen­tury until there is a web frame­work writ­ten around it. C# is ASP.NET, Python has Dyango, Ruby has Rails, Erlang has Jaws, Scheme has Magic… and so it goes on.

This broken thing called Javas­cript that has been reborn with AJAX, and is receiv­ing daily blood trans­fu­sions of new features.

All of these lan­guages just remind me of my per­sonal all­time favour­ite lan­guage love of my life: Hypercard’s Hyper­Talk. As Hyper­card is no longer sold, and “Clas­sic MacOS” is a battle to get going on my Mac­Book Pro — sadly it is a lan­guage as use­ful as Cornish.

So, for a short period of time it is back to one of HyperTalk’s chil­dren: Applescript. Bas­ketweav­ing for the mind.

A good art­icle on Apples Hyper­Card. Memor­ies! Even though it wasnt a pion­eer, it was before its time. There are many things on the Inter­net that should be modeled on Hyper­Card. Stand­ard, English-language script­ing; simple object-based meta­phor and security.