STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems,
2010 Progress Report Submitted to the National
Science Foundation (NSF) October 2010
Alan Kay et al
"If computing is important—for daily life, learning, business,
national defense, jobs, and more — then qualitatively advancing
computing is extremely important. For example, many software
systems today are made from millions to hundreds of millions of
lines of program code that is too large, complex and fragile to be
improved, fixed, or integrated. (One hundred million lines of code at 50
lines per page is 5000 books of 400 pages each! This is beyond human
scale.) What if this could be made literally 1000 times smaller — or more?
And made more powerful, clear, simple, and robust? This would bring one
of the most important technologies of our time from a state that is
almost out of human reach—and dangerously close to being out of
control—back into human scale.
(...)
Previous STEPS Results
The first three years were devoted to making much smaller, simpler, and
more readable versions of many of the prime parts of personal computing,
including: graphics and sound, viewing/windowing, UIs, text,
composition, cells, TCP/IP, etc. These have turned out well (they are
chronicled in previous NSF reports and in our papers and memos). For
example, essentially all of standard personal computing graphics can be
created from scratch in the Nile language in a little more than 300
lines of code. Nile itself can be made in a little over 100 lines of
code in the OMeta metalanguage, and optimized to run acceptably in
real‐time (also in OMeta) in another 700 lines. OMeta can be made in
itself and optimized in about 100 lines of code."
"This year we are able to write this entire report in the Frank part of STEPS, including producing the PDF
version for NSF’s web site. We can give comprehensive high‐quality, high‐resolution presentations using
STEPS which include live code and in situ demos, and which show working versions of a number of the
document types derived from the STEPS “universal document”."
So yes, they have something that is working. Unfortunately, as far as I can figure out - the "Frank part of STEPS" isn't really available as such.
svn co http://piumarta.com/svn2/idst/trunk idst
head -2 idst/function/examples/tcp/00_README
This example demonstrates an alternate 'shell' for
Jolt and how to build a tiny TCP/IP stack using it.
http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2010004_steps10.pdf
STEPS Toward Expressive Programming Systems, 2010 Progress Report Submitted to the National Science Foundation (NSF) October 2010 Alan Kay et al
"If computing is important—for daily life, learning, business, national defense, jobs, and more — then qualitatively advancing computing is extremely important. For example, many software systems today are made from millions to hundreds of millions of lines of program code that is too large, complex and fragile to be improved, fixed, or integrated. (One hundred million lines of code at 50 lines per page is 5000 books of 400 pages each! This is beyond human scale.) What if this could be made literally 1000 times smaller — or more? And made more powerful, clear, simple, and robust? This would bring one of the most important technologies of our time from a state that is almost out of human reach—and dangerously close to being out of control—back into human scale.
(...)
Previous STEPS Results
The first three years were devoted to making much smaller, simpler, and more readable versions of many of the prime parts of personal computing, including: graphics and sound, viewing/windowing, UIs, text, composition, cells, TCP/IP, etc. These have turned out well (they are chronicled in previous NSF reports and in our papers and memos). For example, essentially all of standard personal computing graphics can be created from scratch in the Nile language in a little more than 300 lines of code. Nile itself can be made in a little over 100 lines of code in the OMeta metalanguage, and optimized to run acceptably in real‐time (also in OMeta) in another 700 lines. OMeta can be made in itself and optimized in about 100 lines of code."
More:
http://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php