The Third Bit

There’s a new demo of Jonathan Edwards’ Subtext system online. This is the best example I’ve seen yet of an extensible programming system. It’s pretty cool—once you stop insisting that programs have to be directly presentable as ASCII strings, many new thoughts become possible.

Quote: “It’s good to remember that with practice, you can even learn to read Perl. Humans are not good at abstract thinking, but they’re great at pattern recognition. I think it’s a win to trade one for the other.”

(And to follow up on the “many new thoughts become possible” meme, I once saw a talk by Richard Dawkins on “The Evolution of Evolvability”. Dawkins’ thesis was that some evolutionary changes give evolution new things to act on—segmented bodies, for example, allow for specialization of segments and limbs. Code-in-database systems almost certainly have this property.)

Greg Wilson Extensible Programming