On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 12:16:46PM -0500, Kenny Tilton wrote:
More fun? Graphical output which would be much more recognizable. Handling mouse and keydown input.
Fair enough. Never having written a GUI app in my life I'm always left a bit cold by GUI examples, but basically they're fine.
Have you looked at the text-based examples?
Yes, comments below.
Hmmm, that would be a challenge. A text-only, real-world example on which to base a tutorial.
Almost any simulation would seem plausible.
Do me a favor, let me know everyone what you think of the text-based tutorials on Bill's blog and in my own 01-cell-basics.lisp (and there is
Looking at 01-cell-basics.lisp.
The terminology is somewhat confusing. For example:
"C? associates a rule with a cellular slot (or "cell", for short)."
Which really doesn't make sense to me: it doesn't seems to associate anything with anything, but rather (as far as I can tell so far) *creates* a rule that can then be associated with a cell.
Nowhere do I see a short explanation of the basic consepts: What are rules and cells? How do they relate to each other? It's easy enough to pick up the basics of "howto", but really hard to understand the "why".
Example: I look at an example on defmodel, and see how SELF seems to be bound by it for :default-initargs. Except that this bit of anaphora seems to be done by C?...
A non-documentation-related nitpick: I find myself mentally skipping over C?, CV, &co constantly, since the names look like internal iteration or pattern matching variable names...
I'd personally prefer
(cell-lambda (foo) ...)
or equivalent over C? with implicit lexical bindings, and DEFINE-CELL-ECHO over DEF-C-ECHO, etc...
But I'm just funny that way. ,)=
One answer might be to clean up something like the boiler example (fairly realistic, that) which already covers all the basics. Then do up a similar level of reference material for those who just want to dive in and have some place to see all the options.
Sounds sensible. Except that I'd prioritize that reference. Very often when reading a given tutorial I like to refer to an actual reference every once and a while to check if I'm understanding things correctly.
Even if one is /not/ doing a GUI, the complexity of this will be enough to see how Cells scale to big problems, and given the LW ubiquity, it would not really be an obstacle to anyone that I am using a proprietary tool (in freebie form).
True. Though I'm surprised if you really need to sell the scalability very hard. Especially since I think that if there are doubts about scalability they would/should be focused on huge nets and simulations, not interface.complexity... ;)
Cheers,
-- Nikodemus