Older blog entries for cananian (starting at number 94)

"Hello, World" from XOrduino/XO Stick

Here's a quick look at the next versions of the XOrduino and XO Stick boards. These were assembled from a small quantity of "pre-B1" boards I had made at BatchPCB.

XO Bot joins the XOrduino and XO Stick

Free things first: I've got parts for 20 copies of the "Mk I" XOrduino and XO Stick. I'm mailing them out for free (!) in exchange for your development help. Send me an email at xorduino@gmail.com describing what you'd like to do with the XOrduino/XO Stick, and your full mailing address. Best 20 or so get kits.

Here are some of the projects which you might be able to help with:

• Assemble an XOrduino / XO stick with an 8-12 year old and document the process. What parts were tricky to solder? Where did polarity matter? How much of the function of the different devices did you find worth explaining? Photos or video of children assembling the device would be great for future publicity, with their permission. (We're not crazy: kids can repair XOs and solder.)
• Test different configurations of the boards. What are the fewest components necessary for a functional XO Stick? What capacitors are really needed? What's the smallest number of components needed to get the arduino IDE to talk to the XOrduino? Then add the components for the Scratch Sensor Board functionality, and test that with this Arduino sketch (some minor porting required). Try out whatever Arduino shields/old Arduino code you have lying around, and see if there are any gotchas there. Document it all, take photos and video, let me know about bugs and pitfalls.
• Write some killer education apps! These boards are meant specifically for teaching kids—take the Turtle Art with Sensors ideas as examples, and write up some lessons to teach science. Or take inspiration from the old school "fun with electronics" kits from Radio Shack and recreate some of the popular standbys: a burglar alarm for kids' tree fort, a light-sensitive alarm they can hide in their sibling's drawer, etc. Or a document how to program a robot (more on the robot below) with simple emergent behaviors—avoiding walls, turning toward light, fleeing loud sounds, etc. The Cubelets examples may give you ideas. Take photos and video.
• Arduino support for the XO Stick. There are a number of projects which add support for the ATtiny85 and friends to the Arduino IDE (for example, this one). Ideally we'd like to make the XO Stick as Arduino-compatible as possible, so we can reuse the excellent Arduino IDE, etc. This involves (a) porting an arduino-compatible bootloader (like usbAspLoader-tiny), as well as (b) porting the Arduino libraries to match the pinout/peripherals of the ATtiny85 and ATtiny861 (this page is a good start).
• Program an XO Stick from an XOrduino and vice versa. Ideally we'd like to bootstrap the initial chip programming, so that one programmed XOrduino (or XO Stick) can be used to put the initial bootloaders on the others. For technical reasons the XO Stick is probably best as a "clone tool": without interacting with the USB bus it would just copy its internal memory to another XO Stick. The XOrduino is a little easier, just a matter of adapting the existing Arduino sketches and documentation.
• Debrick an XO from the XO Stick. The XO Stick can talk to the EC programming bus to recover a bricked XO; it can probably also reprogram OpenFirmware. We need to write a bit of code to make it pain-free and document the process. This would make the XO Stick a useful repair accessory for XO deployments.
• Scratch/Turtle Blocks support for the XOrduino and/or XO turtle bot (see below).

Here's the exciting part two: I'm already working on the XOrduino and XO Stick "Mk II". The latest schematics/boards are in github (xostick, xorduino). The kits I'll be sending out this week correspond to the "A1" tag in those repositories; the "Mk II" revision is on the master branch.

The XO Stick gets a minor change with big implications: instead of using a 20-pin header matching the ATtiny861 pinout, I've widened the board to give the XO Stick a standard Arduino shield connector (and some prototyping area). This opens the way for a port of the Arduino IDE (mentioned above), but it also means that the XO Stick can be mounted on top of an XOrduino. In a cost-conscious classroom environment, this allows a teacher to buy/make one copy of the XOrduino with all of its fancy peripherals (scratch sensors, robot support) and then give each student a copy of the cheaper XO Stick. The students share the XOrduino and swap out their XO Stick "brains" on top to control it or use its peripherals. Mating the two boards also makes it straightforward to program an XO Stick from an XOrduino, or to use the XO Stick's prototyping area to hack together a shield for the XOrduino.

The XOrduino gets a more exciting feature (hinted at above) -- enough peripherals to become the XO Turtle Bot! This is a very low-cost turtle robot based on a Tamiya motor assembly. All of the extra robot components are optional—you can populate just the parts you want—but a classroom can now make their XOrduinos (or XO Stick + XOrduino base) into standalone turtle robots, controlled by Scratch, Turtle Art, or Arduino code. The XO Turtle Bot revision adds a motor driver, two bump switches, a simple 3-cell power supply, and rotation sensors for the motors to the XOrduino. (Arnan Sipitakiat and Nussarin Nusen in their Robo-Blocks presentation for IDC 2012 explained that children find "turn for two seconds" hard to understand; we include motor sensors so that we can "turn 90 degrees" instead.) And of course because the robot is based on XOrduino, you can add whatever other sensors you like and write arduino/Scratch/Turtle Blocks code for it.

I'm excited about the potential of low-cost robotics and the Arduino platform for education. If you are, too, let me send you a kit so you can help out!

Syndicated 2012-08-02 06:39:39 (Updated 2012-08-02 07:14:11) from Dr. C. Scott Ananian

Nell's Tinkrbook in Omo

This week I will be at the 2012 Interaction Design and Children conference in Bremen, Germany. I will be presenting the Growing Up With Nell paper as well as discussing the OLPC Foundation's literacy pilots in Ethiopia.

The Literacy Project is a collaboration between four different groups (as alluded to by the title of this post): the One Laptop per Child Foundation (“Nell”), the MIT Media Lab (“Tinkrbook”), the School of Education, Communication and Language Sciences at Newcastle University, and the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University (“Omo”). The goal is to reach children even further from educational infrastructure than OLPC has ventured to date. In particular, the Ethiopia pilots are complete child-led bootstraps, attempting to teach kids to read English (an official language of Ethiopia) who neither speak English nor read in any language yet. There are no teachers in the village, and no literate adults either.

Adapting Nell to this environment has some challenges: how do we guide students through pedagogic material with stories if they don't yet understand the language of the stories we want to tell? But the essential challenge is the same: we have hundreds of apps and videos on the tablets and need to provide scaffolding and guidance to the bits most appropriate for each child at any given time, just as Nell seeks to guide children through the many activities included in Sugar. In the literacy project there is also a need for automated assessment tools: how can we tell that the project is working? How can we determine what parts of our content are effective in their role?

I'll write more about the Literacy Project in the coming weeks. As we've started to get data back, some of the lessons learned are familiar: kids do the strangest things! They learn how to do things we never knew they could do (or meant for them to) and often are motivated by pleasures which surprise us. For example, one app we deployed had a sphere which deflated with a sort of farting noise when the child picked the wrong answer. It turns out that the kids liked making the farting noise much more than they liked the response to the correct answer! Obvious in retrospect, but the lesson reminds us why we are pursuing an incremental development and data collection approach. Happily, the hardware itself has been a success: low hardware failure rates, solar powered charging is successful (although they prefer to charge the devices during the middle of the day; we'd expected them to do so overnight from storage batteries charged during the day), and they've mastered the touch interface very quickly on their own. The pilots have been running since February, and the kids are still very engaged with the content. So far, so good!

Syndicated 2012-06-12 06:39:52 from Dr. C. Scott Ananian

Introducting the XOrduino! (and XO Stick)

I banged out two open hardware designs this week, designed for use with the OLPC XO laptops.

The first is the XOrduino, a stripped down low-cost Arduino-compatible board that plugs right into the XO's USB ports. But wait, there's more: it's also compatible with the Scratch Sensor Board, so you can use this device to control Scratch (and Turtle Art, once Firmata is ported). It should be compatible with the Arduino IDE and all Arduino Leonardo-compatible shields.

The board uses mostly through-hole parts, with one exception, and there are only 20 required components for the basic Arduino functionality, costing about $5 (from digikey, quantity 100). It is reasonable for local labor or even older kids to assemble by hand.

It's open hardware: Eagle design files are on github (schematic PDF, pcb PDF). I expect to have a small number of boards in a few weeks; let me know if you'd like one in exchange for help with hardware and software bring-up. Schematic and layout review also appreciated (I did the PCB routing late at night under time pressure leaning heavily on autoroute, it's certainly not the prettiest). And feedback from Arduino and Arduino shield hackers would also be welcome.

If $5 per student is too much money, there's also the XO Stick, my second board. It's based on the AVR Stick using the ATtiny85 processor and costs only $1/student. It's not quite as user-friendly as the Arduino-compatible board, but it can also be used to teach simple lessons in embedded electronics. For $0.12 more you can populate an ATtiny261A (though a '461 or '861 would be better) and get 13 I/O ports; this variant should be powerful enough to program other XO Sticks and perform XO maintenance tasks (accessing the serial console, debricking a laptop via SPI flash). The XO Stick is even easier for a kid to assemble themself: only 8 required components, all through-hole. (Sadly, my desire to shave every penny off the cost of this design meant that I couldn't use some of the symmetry tricks I invented for a 2012 Mystery Hunt puzzle to make the circuit impossible to assemble incorrectly.)

Same deal as the XOrduino: design files on github (schematic PDF, pcb PDF); I expect to have a few boards available to people who want to help make some software for them. Schematic and layout review is also appreciated!

Syndicated 2012-06-09 16:06:32 (Updated 2012-08-02 18:33:58) from Dr. C. Scott Ananian

Growing Up With Nell

Chris, Michael, and I just submitted a short paper describing our work on the XO-3 Nell project to this year's Interaction Design and Children conference. Give the preprint a read: Growing Up With Nell: A Narrative Interface for Literacy [pdf].

We're hard at work implementing Nell. We could use help in a number of areas: art, animation, story, user interface, javascript hacking, and probably others. For example, at the moment Chris and I are: drawing the characters, drawing user interface concepts, writing silly alphabet stories, animating the silly alphabet stories, doing the CSS/HTML layout to mock up designs, making some of the mock ups into functional demos, implementing HMM-based handwriting recognition in JavaScript, porting pyaiml to JavaScript, implementing an Apple Guide-style contextual help system on top of HTML widgets, and writing a integrated story editor (and stories about the story editor). I'd welcome volunteers for any of these tasks!

Syndicated 2012-03-12 20:55:35 (Updated 2012-03-14 00:28:51) from Dr. C. Scott Ananian

2012 Mystery Hunt

This year I was a member of Codex, the writing team for the 2012 Mystery Hunt. I'm going to describe some of the puzzles I wrote for "The Producers" hunt, in release order. BEWARE SPOILERS!

1. One of the early theme proposals for our hunt was "Alice in Wonderland." Casting about for novel meta ideas, I hit upon the idea of a round with purely numeric answers, 1 through 29,394, which would resolve to words via "looking glass numbers"—that is, numbering all the words in "Through the Looking Glass". It occurred to me that you could make your numbering system self-descriptive if you used certain words; for example, if you wanted to make clear that hyphenated words should be counted as one (instead of two), you could include "great" and "half" on either side of "arm-chair". The numbering of "great" (164) and "half" (166) would make it clear that "arm-chair" should be treated as a single number (165).

   This didn't survive as a meta, but it eventually became a puzzle, called 1207 1370 (which translates to "Looking-Glass Words" using its enumeration system). It also served to ensure that teams had a good wordlist by the time they got to the Charles Dodgson meta...

2. Blinkenlights. A recursive-structured puzzle inspired by (but not reaching the greatness of) Derek Kisman's Maze from Setec's '05 Hunt. If anyone is mourning the lack of Jonathan Coulton-related puzzles from this year's hunt, blame me: I stole the answer PROTECTORS which Andrew Lin had earmarked for a JoCo puzzle. ("Did I say overlords?")

3. Caterpillars. I like giving physical objects to teams. This was another failed meta—you would have assembled the pieces out of words, then would have to assemble the jigsaw from the word-pieces. The location of the caterpillars' heads in the final assembly would spell out the final meta answer using an overlay. But the puzzle is more fun with tangible pieces, I think.

4. B.J. Blazkowicz in ‘Wintertime for Hitler’. I was writing the meta for this round and trying to find non-dictionary words. I needed "CAR..." as a prefix to make the chess game work, which suggested CARMACK as an answer, and the puzzle just wrote itself from there. Scott Handelman contributed the title. This puzzle was going to be distributed on 3.5" disks (remember how I said I like giving teams physical objects?), but the last 3.5" floppy disk puzzle was Blue Steel in '06. (Redundant Obsolescence doesn't count, since the 5 1/4" disk was redundant.) The past six years have not been kind to the 3.5" floppy; ultimately we decided we didn't want to deny teams the pleasure of playing the game because they couldn't locate a floppy drive. It's more important that puzzles be fun than hard!

5. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson meta. I began writing this puzzle immediately after the 2011 hunt, dissatisfied with the mechanism and final clue phrase of that year's Racking Your Brains. I thought I could write a better puzzle using Scrabble Solitaire as a mechanism.

   Slightly later it became part of the "Alice in Wonderland" theme proposal, with Jabberwocky words. Then I spent a couple of months away from the hunt, getting married.

   Upon returning we badly needed critic metas so I dusted off the puzzle, adding an Alice chess frontend yielding the tile string in order to make it a shell meta. The puzzle can still be solved as pure Scrabble Solitaire (ie, without the given "scores after each play") but it's easier for humans to solve with the frequent checkpoints given. For what it's worth, I constructed the chess game with a reasonably-deep alpha-beta search, so all the moves "make sense" as much as is possible given the constraints of the puzzle. And it ends in a clean checkmate, obviously... I have no idea how BENOISY snuck in there.

6. Ben Bitdiddle meta. The idea of making an electronic circuit which was impossible to assemble incorrectly had been in my "Mystery Hunt ideas" folder for years. A coworker at OLPC mentioned the odd power-pin configuration of the PIC chips one day, which gave me the "flip" mechanism. Brainstorming with Andrew Lin brought it the rest of the way.

   I promise never to abuse an optoisolator in this way again.

   (Of course it turned out when constructing this puzzle that Ben Bitdiddle really needed to use the show answers CARPAL and THESOUTH because of their length in morse code, so I ended up having to rewrite parts of Dodgson to make Bitdiddle work. In the rewrite CARPAL became CARMACK... and B.J. Blazkowitcz was born.)

7. JFK SHAGS A SAD SLIM LASS. One of my earliest puzzle submissions was, "A puzzle contained only in its title." Again, the fabulous Codex editor team turned this into a real puzzle.

Some puzzles I enjoyed editing:

1. Revisiting History — I commissioned a Doctor Who-themed puzzle for the answer TORCHWOOD (see the final clue phrase for the reason why) and contributed the "location of the word 'who'" mechanism.

2. Gibberish and More Gibberish. I liked the idea for this puzzle enough that I shoehorned a suitable answer into the Charles Dodgson meta... and then had to do some heavy lifting to get the puzzle finished and into the hunt.

3. Sounds Good to Me. It was immediately obvious this was a brilliant idea from Seth Schoen. But the twin barriers of toki pona and hiragana threatened to make it unsolvable. I'd like to think I played a role in making this an accessible and solvable puzzle.

4. Itinerant People of America. Same deal. Squiggles had bequeathed the world the facial expression described as, "That's my brain leaving out the back door while my face distracts you." My contribution here was solely instilling the fear of God into the authors. Scott Handleman describes how he and Emily Morgan took that advice and constructed a kick-ass puzzle.

And that's it for my puzzles! I also did a heck of a lot of other stuff for the hunt; I hope y'all enjoyed it. (My own favorite part was the wrap-up, since all my responsibilities had been discharged by then. I could just watch Patrick rock my hat and accordion, play along on ukulele, and sing tenor with Francis at the end.)

Syndicated 2012-01-18 23:09:41 (Updated 2012-01-18 23:11:16) from Dr. C. Scott Ananian

A collection of Nell demos

Here are some banged-together demos of various pieces of One Laptop per Child's Project Nell. The ultimate goal is a Nell demo for CES in January 2012, but these bits should be considered as tech demos, benchmarks, and proofs of concept, not actual pieces of that demo (yet).

Most of these demos require WebGL support. Visit get.webgl.org for information about enabling WebGL in your browser; there is WebGL support in Chrome, Firefox, Safari, and Opera—although it often requires enabling experimental features in the browser preferences.

• Tiles. Performance benchmark for a tile-based home screen. "Apps" are "locations" on your world map, which you can customize as you like. (Here's an interesting blog entry discussing world-creation for kids.) Day/night would ultimately reflect current time, although they've been greatly sped up in this demo. Lots of rough edges and missing UI, but all the textured triangles are present, so it should be an accurate benchmark.
  (Drag with left mouse button to rotate, middle mouse button to zoom, right mouse button to pan.)
• Nell at home. Basic idea (including transition) for activities which include dialog with Nell or story-telling.
  Standalone model viewers: Castle (from blendswap), "Nell" (Sintel, from blendswap), Alternate (lightweight) Nell model, Alternate (heavyweight) house model (from blendswap).
  In model viewers: drag with left mouse button to rotate, middle mouse button to zoom, right mouse button to pan.
• Music maker. Uses WebGL and the Web Audio APIs to let you draw and perform music.
  Inspired by André Michelle's ToneMatrix and Karplus-Strong Guitar (see also wiki and this 2008 Linux Audio Conference paper), as well as DinahMoe's ToneCraft and the Tenori-on.
• Quake on XO-1.75 (video). Of course we need to actually run WebGL with good performance on XO hardware. Jon Nettleton has been working hard on our GL drivers, enabling the GPU on the XO-1.75 hardware for the first time. This Quake demo shows his progress—don't worry, Quake is not actually part of the Nell demo! (We have a GPU in the XO-1.5 as well, which hasn't yet been utilized.)
• Codify—not one of our demos (it's a commercial iPad app) but it demonstrates the direction we'd like to push Pippy.

Coming soon: TurtleArt and Implode for the web. We've started converting them to GTK3 in preparation for hoisting them bodily onto the interwebs. Here's the source code repository for the TurtleArt port if you'd like to watch or participate in this hackage. (See repl.it for one of the more unusual ways to get Python running in the web context.) The rest of the demo source code is on github (or just "View Source" in your browser).

Syndicated 2011-11-01 22:28:14 from Dr. C. Scott Ananian

Introducing Nell

Between now and January CES, Chris Ball and I will be building Nell for the OLPC XO-3 tablet. Nell is a name, not an acronym, but if you want to pronounce it as "Narrative Environment for Learning Learning," I won't stop you.

Nell's development will be demo-oriented—we're going to try to write the most interesting bits first and learn as we go—so don't be upset if you don't see support right away for legacy Sugar activities ("Sweet Nell"), robust sharing support, mesh networking, or whatever your favorite existing feature is. They'll come, but the new crazy stuff is what we need to evaluate first.

Here are four of the big ideas behind Nell, along with pointers to some of our sources of inspiration.

Narrative. I probably don't need to restate that Neil Stephenson's "The Diamond Age" has been hugely influential, and we also owe a large debt to interactive fiction and the Boston IF group in particular. (Check out the talks from our "Narrative Interfaces day" at OLPC.) Wide Ruled (conference paper) and Mark Riedl at Georgia Tech have demonstrated interesting approaches to story representation. I'm also looking forward to the results of the Experimental Game Play group's September Story Game competition.

Emotion. The Radiolab podcast "Talking To Machines" crystallized my thinking about emotionally-attractive environments. The discussion with Caleb Chung, the creator of Furby, is particularly apropos. Caleb's goal is to make things which kids want to "play with for a long time," and he contributes his three rules for creating things which "feel alive": it must (1) feel and show emotions, (2) be aware of itself and its environment, and (3) have behaviors which change over time. Furby's pursuit of these goals include expressive eyes and ears, crying when held upside down, reacting to loud noises, and gradually switching from Furbish to English for its utterances. A living thing emits a constant stream of little surprises. Expect to see Nell put the XO-3's microphone and accelerometer to good use.

Talking and Listening. The "Talking To Machines" podcast also discusses ELIZA and Cleverbot, which dovetails with my interest in the popular Speak activity for Sugar and related toys like Talking Tomcat for mobile phones. The key insight here is that a little bit of "cheap trick" AI can go a long way toward making a personable and engaging system. We want Nell to feel like a friend. Recent work by the Common Sense Computing Initiative at MIT's Media Lab shows how we can reset this on a sounder basis and use mostly-unstructured input to allow the system to grow and learn (creating "behaviors changing over time"). In particular, I'll cite ConceptNet for its database and practical NLP tools, and inspiration from "Empathy Buddy," "StoryFighter," and the other projects described in their Beating Common Sense paper. It's also worth noting that open source speech tools are good and getting better (the VoxForge site points to most of them); also interesting is this technique for matching a synthesized voice to that of the user.

Collecting, nurturing, and rewarding. Collector games such as Pocket Frogs and Flower Garden are sticky activities which encourage kids to come back to the device and continue working toward a goal over a long period of time. Memrise is educational software illustrating this technique: its users tend a garden of flowers by mastering a set of flash cards. Nell will incorporate the sticky aspects of such games, possibly also integrating the Mozilla Open Badges infrastructure into an achievement/reward system.

I hope this has given you a general sense of the direction of our Nell project. In future blog posts I'll drill down into implementation details, demonstration storyboards, and other more concrete facets of Nell.

Syndicated 2011-10-01 05:18:05 (Updated 2011-10-01 05:45:36) from Dr. C. Scott Ananian

Narrative Interfaces

One Laptop per Child creates student-centric learning experiences. Our current software stack, however, is somewhat "shallow". When you turn on the XO, all the content is immediately available but there is no path or guidance provided. Nothing suggests what you should try first, or indicates an order to progress through the activities provided. Everything is available, but there's no built-in journey. No plot. How can we improve this?

This Friday (June 17) at 2pm Eastern we're inviting some folks over to OLPC's new offices at the American Twine building to discuss Narrative Interfaces, as part of the proposed XO-3 software stack. Nick Montfort will give a short talk on Curveship, his model-based interactive fiction system, and Chris Ball will present some related recent hacking. Angela Chang will present her Tinkerbooks early-literacy platform, which allows kids to interactively change the written story on the page. And I'll discuss Neal Stephenson's novel The Diamond Age (a recap of a short talk I gave at EduJAM in Uruguay), and give concrete suggestions for how Diamond Age's Primer might influence the software architecture for the XO-3. (I might even reveal how to make software testing semantically indistinguishable from writing a game!) Chris Ball and I have also been collecting best-of-breed "comic books that teach you something" as examples of educational narrative; we'll pass those around and post a reading list after the event.

The real point of this meeting isn't the talks, per se, but the discussions to follow. We're trying to gather folks who know a lot more about this stuff than we do, in order to learn from them and be inspired. We don't have a lot of space, unfortunately, so I'm going to have to ask for RSVPs from those who wish to attend. If you're in the Boston area and feel like you have something to contribute (and especially if you have created/could create Creative Commons-licensed content for education), drop me a line at cscott at laptop dot org. Describing what you can contribute to the discussion will help break ties if space is inadequate.

We will also live-stream the meeting at ustream.tv/channel/cscottnet. Afterwards we'll post higher-quality video and a list of cited works. Thanks in advance to everyone who will participate, online and off!

UPDATE: video now up; see this writeup on Chris Ball's blog.

Syndicated 2011-06-15 21:27:50 (Updated 2011-06-18 05:12:14) from Dr. C. Scott Ananian

Small systems... and distributed ones

Today I stumbled across some very interesting projects by Nickolay Platonov which I'd like to discuss in an OLPC context.

I've been hacking away at TurtleScript fueled partly by a drive for minimalism: a small system is a learnable system. To that end, the language is based on Douglas Crockford's "Simplified JavaScript" (as recognized by this top-down operator precedence parser) which tries hard to include only JavaScript's "Good Parts". For example, the initial code for the TurtleScript system uses prototype inheritance (via Object.create) rather than classical class-style inheritance. In fact, the new operator isn't even included in the Simplified JavaScript/TurtleScript language.

In a discussion of TurtleScript Alan Kay mentioned, "It is very tricky to retain/maintain readability (so the first Smalltalk was also an extensible language not just semantically but syntactically)." And today I stumbled across the Joose library, which gives a very readable syntax for traditional class-based inheritance. It backs this up with a robust meta-object protocol, introspection, and lots of nice features borrowed from Perl 6, CLOS, and Smalltalk. The syntax ought to work fine with the limited tile set of TurtleScript, although I might have to add a tile for the new operator.

However, adding Joose raises some questions. Is the increase in readability worth the addition of such a large library to the system? What impact will this have on understanding problems and debugging? Is a return to class-based inheritance a positive change? (There have been arguments that the make-a-clone-and-change-it practice of prototype inheritance is easier to understand for new learners.) Can a larger overall system actually be easier to understand?

And once we're looking at libraries... Nickolay Platonov is now working on Syncler, based on the Bayou system. Unobstructive replication mechanisms would certainly make it easier to construct the sorts of collaborative applications we've wanted for Sugar. I have two concerns with Syncler's current state. First, the use of explicit continuation-passing style greatly impairs readability. The JavaScript yield keyword helps a lot when writing asynchronous code. (It's not supported by all JavaScript engines, but yield wouldn't be hard to add to TurtleScript.) Second, Syncler's event model uses explicit callbacks. I've been greatly impressed with the Flapjax event model (and its strongly-typed functional cousin). Both of these changes ought to make asynchronous code much more readable—and isn't that an important part of grokking a system?

Syndicated 2011-05-24 16:22:51 (Updated 2011-05-29 22:48:04) from Dr. C. Scott Ananian