Introducing Seed, an interactive software environment built on ASDF

[Faré]

On Thu, Nov 2, 2017 at 2:56 AM, Andrew Sengul <ml at imagegardenphoto.com> wrote:
>> What is the granularity of your seeds?
> I'm not sure what you mean, by granularity are you referring to the size
> of the minimum viable Seed system? It could be just a folder containing
> an .asd file and a .seed file. You'd probably want a .lisp source file
> in there to do much of anything interesting. Less orthodox arrangements
> could work too.
>
I'm a bit confused. Is it a Lisp DSL, a graphical programming system,
the two next to each other, or the two at the same time, etc.?
When you program graphically, how do you specify the division in files
and/or systems?

> When I first joined this list in July 2016 I asked a question about the
> possibility of using ASDF to build systems with source code that didn't
> come in files but from lists stored in variables in the running Lisp
> instance. Implementing a feature like that would make Seed more flexible.
>
I remember that question. ASDF as it is isn't geared for small
expressions. It's "up-to-date" check uses a simple timestamp, in
practice with a precision of one second only. Not a great way
foundation for a dataflow system. Actually, I'd like to see a
successor of ASDF use a dataflow system as a better foundation. Not
going to happen by me, though. And backward compatibility is a bitch
(see bugs recently announced on this list, despite months of testing
before release). See my blog post about my ideal build system:
http://ngnghm.github.io/blog/2016/04/26/chapter-9-build-systems/

> The main thing to understand is that it's a dataflow language. Each
> successive form like (set-time) and (codec) is passed the input data,
> does something to it and passes it to the next form in the list. So the
> till macro transforms something like "(set-time) (do-something) (codec)"
> to "(codec (do-something (set-time original-data)))." With this
> language, I can implement things like clipboards and undo history in
> unique ways for different systems.
>
Reminds me of my uiop:nest macro. https://fare.livejournal.com/189741.html
More seriously, congrats, it really looks neat at first glance.

>> BTW, are you around NYC or are you passing by in 2018? You could give
>> a talk at Lisp NYC.
> I'm located on the West Coast but I could be over there sometime; that
> would be great. Thanks for your feedback,
Tell me if/when you go East.

—♯ƒ • François-René ÐVB Rideau •Reflection&Cybernethics• http://fare.tunes.org
A tautology is a thing which is tautological.