On Friday 13 October 2006 02:35, Simon Elliott wrote:
If anyone remembers anything else talked about or would like to continue any of these particular discussions on the mailing list, feel free!
Thanks, I will.
Martijn and I talked quite a bit about content management systems. We came to the conclusion that Cocoon[1] (a consequently a similar, related project that I know of) is not a content management. But the most interesting thing was the failure of the "software as a service" paradigm. Currently, most Web-based applications take one of two approaches: either you use them to edit content stored locally, in which case the only benefit is not having to install and manage the software yourself; or you use them to edit content which is stored remotely but centrally, which depends on you being willing to trust the service provider who is storing your content.
What doesn't yet exist is truly distributed content editing. In this situation you would be able to synchronise (without any effort or even understanding of the process) your content between several remote but trusted machines (e.g. your PC, your work computer, your parents' computer, etc.) and edit it at any terminal (e.g. your laptop, at work, your PDA, etc.). The service providers would provide the seemless synchronisation mechanism and possibly on-line software as well, but the content would be distributed - not local or central.
As we were being kicked out, there was also talk of obfuscating programming languages such as Brainfuck[2], Whitepsace[3] (which has the distinct advantage of making your comments /really/ clear!) and ML[4] which isn't really an obfuscation language at all. I've just had a scan through this introduction[5] and it seems that the author believes that functional languages are quite the opposite of deliberately obfuscating: they are based on reason and only allow you to write correct programs in which testing is meaningless. Pretty cool.
Cheers, Richard
[1] http://cocoon.apache.org/ [2] http://www.muppetlabs.com/~breadbox/bf/ [3] http://compsoc.dur.ac.uk/whitespace/ [4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ML_programming_language [5] http://www.dcs.napier.ac.uk/course-notes/sml/introfp.htm