We went to the Farmers Market in Benicia, as we do most Thursdays. This was the first week of corn season, so we got some. It was amazingly good. I like farmers markets; they're a good way to make a connection to the people who actually grow your food.
Fitz
Antony Courtney called me up today, and we had a nice chat. He is interested in working on Fitz, largely so he can use it for his thesis work on functional reactive user interfaces.
His work is done in Haskell, so Haskell bindings for Fitz would be part of the deal. I think these two things could work well together. Fitz has a somewhat functional design. The rendering of a tree is a function of the tree. Caching is strongly related to memoization in functional languages, and minimal updating is a form of incremental computation.
Language bindings are to be an integral part of Fitz. We'll use the Python bindings extensively for testing. It's also, I think, the best language for experimenting. But I don't mean to exclude Perl or Ruby programmers, either. I just wish it was easier to write high quality cross-language wrappers.
What I'd really like is something like Pyrex, only with the ability to generate code for many different runtimes. Pyrex itself seems to be coming along quite nicely. As of 0.3, you can define classes in C, which seems quite useful. At some point, I might be motivated to try an experiment of making Pyrex generate, say, a Ruby extension.
Picoservers
David McCusker writes briefly of picoservers. These sound like fun. Basically, the problem boils down to: how do you best express asynchronous behavior in a programming language? Threads are one way, but they have lots of pitfalls, including performance and scaling issues. Event-based programming is more lightweight, but has a reputation for being very tedious and low-level. Also, event-based programming by itself can't take advantage of multiple processors.
I haven't looked at SEDA carefully yet (it's the thesis work of Matt Welsh), but it looks interesting.
People have been thinking about asynchrony for a long time. One of the more elegant approaches is Hoare's Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). I'm a bit surprised that CSP hasn't gone further. It seems like a nice higher level abstraction compared with event-driven programming, but without all the nasty problems with race conditions and lock contention that threads bring you.
There is actually a CSP implementation in C. It seems like more typing than languages that have CSP baked-in. Occam is the most famous of these languages, but I think Limbo might be a more useful incarnation. Occam tends to be fairly static, but Limbo lets you create "threads" and channels very dynamically.
Python's generators are already sorta like coroutines. David Mertz talks about using them to implement what he calls weightless threads.