[cells-devel] A shocking proposal

[Nikodemus Siivola]

On Mon, Nov 10, 2003 at 12:16:46PM -0500, Kenny Tilton wrote:

> More fun? Graphical output which would be much more recognizable. 
> Handling mouse and keydown input. 

Fair enough. Never having written a GUI app in my life I'm always left
a bit cold by GUI examples, but basically they're fine.

> Have you looked at the text-based examples?

Yes, comments below.

> Hmmm, that would be a challenge. A text-only, real-world example 
> on which to base a tutorial.

Almost any simulation would seem plausible.

> Do me a favor, let me know everyone what you think of the text-based 
> tutorials on Bill's blog and in my own 01-cell-basics.lisp (and there is 

Looking at 01-cell-basics.lisp.

The terminology is somewhat confusing. For example:

 "C? associates a rule with a cellular slot (or "cell", for short)."

Which really doesn't make sense to me: it doesn't seems to associate
anything with anything, but rather (as far as I can tell so far)
*creates* a rule that can then be associated with a cell.

Nowhere do I see a short explanation of the basic consepts: What are
rules and cells? How do they relate to each other? It's easy enough to
pick up the basics of "howto", but really hard to understand the
"why".

Example: I look at an example on defmodel, and see how SELF seems to
be bound by it for :default-initargs. Except that this bit of anaphora
seems to be done by C?...

A non-documentation-related nitpick: I find myself mentally skipping
over C?, CV, &co constantly, since the names look like internal
iteration or pattern matching variable names... 

I'd personally prefer 

 (cell-lambda (foo) ...) 

or equivalent over C? with implicit lexical bindings, and
DEFINE-CELL-ECHO over DEF-C-ECHO, etc... 

But I'm just funny that way. ,)=

> One answer might be to clean up something like the boiler example 
> (fairly realistic, that) which already covers all the basics. Then do up 
> a similar level of reference material for those who just want to dive in 
> and have some place to see all the options. 

Sounds sensible. Except that I'd prioritize that reference. Very often
when reading a given tutorial I like to refer to an actual reference
every once and a while to check if I'm understanding things correctly.

> Even if one is /not/ doing a GUI, the complexity of this will be enough 
> to see how Cells scale to big problems, and given the LW ubiquity, it 
> would not really be an obstacle to anyone that I am using a proprietary 
> tool (in freebie form).

True. Though I'm surprised if you really need to sell the scalability
very hard. Especially since I think that if there are doubts about
scalability they would/should be focused on huge nets and simulations,
not interface.complexity... ;)

Cheers,

 -- Nikodemus
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