March 2004 - cells-devel - mailman3.common-lisp.net

[cells-devel] Re: [cello-devel] All GZ all the time?
by Thomas F. Burdick 25 Mar '04

25 Mar '04

=?iso-8859-1?Q?Bj=F8rn_Nordb=F8?= writes: > Yeah, I almost felt useful for a minute or so.. I'm still trying to > get the test suite for cells to pass or fail consistently on SBCL. :) Uh-oh, that doesn't sound so good. Care to elaborate? For me, there was one test that failed, and it did so consistently. It involved some part of Cells I haven't really touched, and I seem to remember Kenny convincing me that it wasn't a problem. I can go dig up something better than hazy recollections, if I need to :-). This was with sbcl-0.8.4. I've been doing some development with this combination, and it seems to work fine. What sbcl version are you using, and what's going wrong? (Hopefully it's trivial, since I'm in the middle of writing a web app for a client, using Cells. BTW, Cells + Araneida + SQLisp is a great combo, for anyone wondering.)

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[cells-devel] Re: [admin] new admin for cells/cello
by Kenny Tilton 11 Mar '04

11 Mar '04

Mario Mommer wrote: >I would like to recklessly seize the oportunity, and kindly urge you >to write something in the webpages of these two projects. > OK, will do. I use the Yahoo PageBuilder applet to develop my tilton-technology site, so I'll have to go to school on doing this manually. I can look at what kind of HTML Framemaker generates, or one of the many other HTML-generating apps I have. I also have an old Adobe GoLive relase on a Mac OS 9 box, maybe that will help. Or maybe someone interested in Cells/Cello ican do this in their sleep and will pitch in if I just produce the copy and, what?, GIFs? JPEGs? and say how to splice them. cheers, kenneth -- http://tilton-technology.com Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application

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Re: [cells-devel] asdf-install update (sort of)
by Kenny Tilton 09 Mar '04

09 Mar '04

Thomas F. Burdick wrote: >Kenny Tilton writes: > > > > Thomas F. Burdick wrote: > > > > >For those curious, I'll be using Cells to drive the application > > >(Kenny, you ever come up with a term for this? ). > > > > "Cells Inside"? If that is what you mean. Not sure. You mean a shorthand > > for "Cells-driven app", right? That's a tough one. > >Right. "Cells Inside" could mean all sorts of things, which wouldn't >necessarily involve driving the main application logic. If it weren't >a great road towards confusion with research-style constraints >systems, I'd say, "I'm using Cells as the constraints system," just >like I'd say, "I'm using Araneida as the web server." > I think the problem is that there is a pretty dramatic paradigm shift. Use a familiar word (constraints) and people cannot escape the gravitational pull of their knowledge of that domain; they understand, but the wrong thing. Make up a new word (animus-oriented programming) and people simply have no idea what you are going on about. Use a familiar term as an analog (spreadsheet for instances) and they have one of those two problems, either "No, I have to do a RoboCup team, not Visicalc" or "Hunh?". "Dataflow model" is tempting, but I think has the problem of "constraints". "cell-driven" is a lot easier to say than "cells-driven", but no one will understand you. How about "datapush"? "Causal programming"? It's a tough one. Probably the best thing to do is say cell-driven to avoid false sense of comprehension, then deal with the hunh? Builds the brand, too. :) I mean, basically, this is the time to pick the buzzword we'll have to live with. But should those things be picked, or should they just be the phrase we all settle on as shorthand without thinking about it? I like "animation" because it is novel as a programming metaphor and captures the essence of what cells do. "Animus" forces a "hunh?" to head off "no, I am not doing a cartoon...". The other highbrow way of looking at Cells is that they endow data with causal power over other data and, via echo, processes. The causal thing facilitates the animation thing. Causal is a deeper way of looking at it, animation is sexier. Something like that. kt -- http://tilton-technology.com Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application

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[cells-devel] asdf-install update (sort of)
by Thomas F. Burdick 09 Mar '04

09 Mar '04

For the contract I'm starting, I want all the open source software it's built on to be asdf-installable, so to that end I put an asdf-installable tarball of the 2003-11-08 distribution in http://www.common-lisp.net/project/cells/asdf-install/. CLiki wouldn't let me edit the cells page to update the link (I mailed Dan B about it), so you can't get it with (asdf-install:install :cells) quite yet, but almost. For those curious, I'll be using Cells to drive the application (Kenny, you ever come up with a term for this? ). And maybe for KR -- if it works out, it'll be simpler that way, if not, I can always fall back on my old tools (Garnet's KR).

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[cells-devel] corman second thoughts
by Kenny Tilton 06 Mar '04

06 Mar '04

It just occurred to me what the problem may have been that made me abandon the Corman and CLisp ports. The key Cells mechanism called "echoing" works via the generic function c-echo-slot-name. Two problems: the method combination is progn, and the dispatch requires EQL specialization. The first question is whether those limitations still apply to either implementation. Perhaps newer versions have fixed these. If not.. The method combo can be dispensed with. It did make a rare edge case easier to manage and then struck me as more appropriate to the necessary semantics, but normal method combo could have been made to work without too much work. Indeed, you'll see the defgeneric for c-echo-slot-name is featured-out for clisp and corman. As for the eql dispatch, that would require modifying def-c-echo to stash anonymous functions with gensym'ed names into a hash table...well, it would be ugly, and I think this is where I ran out of patience with corman and clisp. hopefully they have mended their CLOS ways. if not, I think someone really determined to make the port should not have that much trouble. these are nicely localized little problems, and I would certainly help and accept the changes into Cells/Cello. kenneth -- http://tilton-technology.com Why Lisp? http://alu.cliki.net/RtL%20Highlight%20Film Your Project Here! http://alu.cliki.net/Industry%20Application

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