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Comment by lfowles | Hacker News Reader

I'm looking for more details as well, the idea fascinates me. Each program looks to be a code printout, so I'm not quite grasping how changing code works with just an "editor token".

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The "editor token" is also a program that Realtalk recognizes. It's just a small program that says "I am an editor named X" - you then point the token at the code you want to edit and then use a text editor to make those changes. I've seen people use laptops, iPads, and other Realtalk programs to make the edits.

The important thing to keep in mind is that everything in Dynamicland is, well, dynamic. Right now, editor tokens are just normal Realktalk programs printed on paper, but in the future the might be a different physical object. Right now you edit the coded using a text editor, but in the future you might use a pen to write code directly on paper, or perhaps you'd re-arrange physical objects that represented blocks of code, etc ...

The printed code is sort of just a documentation -- the system isn't, for example, scanning it visually to decide what to execute. Rather, each card encodes a unique ID, and the running code lives on the network at that ID, so you can point your editor at the card, read the ID, and see and edit the code at that ID. The printout is just the code that was at the ID at the time of printing.

Would be cool if they projected the code onto the card rather than printing it—that way it doesn't get stale, and more re-use.

Ah OK, I had to scan the page a few times to realize it wasn't a visually interpreted form of Scratch.

I think the color dots are some hash/key to a program. Whenever the camera sees the code in its FOV, the system executes the program. Also, the color code seems to serve as location tracking as well, so the program is projected on the physical paper.

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