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smosher_

> Image-based bootstrapping was useful, but too monolithic.

I feel that. I have no problem with images in theory, but history has made me flinch at them.

> As it is, I'm disillusioned with the open source and software research fields

That's a shame. Open source is very diverse... I hope you have better experiences in the future.

> You may as well AMA.

Awesome. What do you think of Io? — http://iolanguage.org/

I'm asking because I rarely ever hear PL people talk about Io.

I'm also curious, was there a coherent design goal or philosophy behind Slate? Alan Kay is very clear about his values, I have a handle on what Io is about, and so on. All I'm getting from Slate is "better than Smalltalk" but is there something more specific to it?

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I know Steve Dekorte and remember him bringing me along to visit David Ungar over beer and pizza more than a decade ago. :) Io doesn't quite address the goals I wanted, and it was dynamic in ways that prevented some optimizations. But it is rather charming.

Slate had some design goals, but a lot of the goal was general, like "how much can we fit into Smalltalk and still have that core idea be recognizable and coherent?" Multimethods, prototypes, macros, optionals, etc. were all just a part of that.

We did spend a lot of the project's focus on how heavily we could leverage multimethods to clarify and collapse code. Slate probably uses multimethods better than any language I know of, although I admire what Julia does with it within the Matlab/R compatibility constraints.

Mainly, we wanted to take operating systems and meld them with computer languages. The TUNES project says a lot of what I think about that (with a good deal of ideological distortion and handwaving, but that's group editing for you).

Honestly, I checked Alan Kay's philosophical reading list, and its depth in phenomenology and developmental psychology was stuff I covered in college. While he belongs to another generation, I'm keenly following the ideas of the FoNC project and hope to deliver something that takes that to an everyday context broadly.

Images are like filesystems or sandboxes, by the way. They just need better tool support.

No argument here.

The problem I have in practice is images are so often lacking, or they start you off with an alien universe full of preconceptions rather than just a collection of tools. This isn't an inherent problem, but it seems to show up half the time or more.

I want to like images, but I think what I really want is a system that has a fully functional base state with a good image that can be (and usually is) loaded at startup. I guess that might get in your way if you're worried about optimal performance.

Well, I'd like to explore a link-phase to build images. I think that'd be really quite interesting and might break up the monolith and mix Smalltalk ideas in with Unix as they ought to have.

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