Tim Bray on Ruby and Python vs Lisp

Tim Bray: "If Lisp’s audience had been harried sysadmins rather than AI researchers, it’d rule the world by now."

The Ruby Conspiracy

The Ruby Conspiracy: "Who are those who are benefiting from Ruby on Rails? Answer: O'Reilly Publishing, the authors Bruce Tate and Dave Thomas and a handful of consultants....We have two production applications running on Ruby. And how is it. Well, despite being perhaps no more than 5% of the functionality of our applications, Ruby on Rails is the number one consumer of Oracle CPU and logical gets....After all, the productivity benefits of Ruby are so much greater than Java you will save all of the money in development. Or do you. Our experience was that Ruby on Rails took longer than Java would have. And what about maintenance. Well we just refactor as things change. Or do we? There are no Ruby tools that support refactoring. And nor are they are expected due to the difficulties of implementing refactoring tools for Dynamic Languages, or so I am advised."

Interpreted... tons of magic^H^H^H^H^H abstraction. Right.

Voidstar - Desktop clients

Julian Bond references Martin Geddes on desktop clients -- the browser, the messenger, the "manager":

All the portals are focussed on collecting everything you might read in one place. The "My Page". Nobody focusses on the reverse, collecting everything I create in one place *for other people* to read about me.

Analyzing along this line is getting closer to what I had in mind.

YouOS

My first reaction to YouOS: Cool. A webtop that looks the same from wherever I log in.

Second reaction: Hey, we had this in the 80's! Log in to any Sun on the LAN and your NFS shares are all in the same structure, your desktop just as you left it.

Third reaction: Did we invent the web only to repro the 1984 Mac desktop yet again?

Fourth reaction: There isn't hyperlink number one on this desktop. Shouldn't I be able to get the hyperlink of an object and send it to someone so they can see it or get it?

I'm not sure what I'm looking for, but it needs to be more webby. It needs to enable something I can't do now with a desktop. There's some new metaphor we're groping for. I'll know it when I see it.