So, here I am in Tallinn, attending the Scheme Workshop and ICFP. There is an WiFi access at each corner of the city, however, there is no WiFi access in the hotel room (actually, it’s supposed to work there…).
Last week, I was in Dublin attending the IFL workshop. A few of the talks were quiet interesting. I found the talks given by the guys from the Clean gang especially interesting. I didn’t know that they gave up to sell Clean and that it’s available for free on the web. It seems that they have lots of good stuff to offer. I think Clean can become my second favourite functional programming language. Well, I was a bit disappointed by Dublin, it doesn’t have much to offer. It’s much smaller than I thought, only few historical buildings, however, lots of Pubs. I enjoyed the excursion to Glendalough a lot.
So, I’m sitting here in the conference room where the Scheme workshop takes places trying to recover from my talk on Commander S. A lot of people asked questions about Commander S, which I consider to be a good sign. My talk itself wasn’t as good, clear, and understandable as I hoped it to be…
There were some interesting talks. I especially liked Jacob Matthew’s talk on the operational semantics of Scheme, Manuel Serrano’s talk on his IMAP synchronisation tool, and Jonathan Sobel’s talk on the explicit monadic reflection in Scheme.
During the last week Martin and I added tons of features to Commander S and we rewrote some parts of the code. I’ll hope to committ these changes to the CVS soon. I also need to upload the final version of the paper to my home page…
Technorati Tags: Scheme, IFL, ICFP
So, I’m back from a ten day vacation. However, just for one week. On friday, I’m leaving for Dublin to attend the IFL workshop. After this, the journey continues to Tallinn, where the ICFP takes place. I’ll be giving a talk on “Commander S” at the Scheme Workshop which is co-located with the ICFP. “Commander S” is a full-featured graphical (that is, ncurses-based) shell built on-top of scsh. It adds features like a command history, line-editing, programmable completion and job control to scsh. In short, features users are accustomed to by traditional shells like tcsh or bash.
However, there is more. The screen is split into a command buffer (for entering commands) and a result buffer. The result buffer acts as a “browser”. The browser allows viewing and manipulating arbitrary system objects and command output such as file lists, processes, user information graphically. So, if you evaluate (directory-files “/etc”) or ls, for example, a browser for file lists will pop up in the result buffer. Using this browser you can manipulate files, enter a sub-directory, or mark some files and paste the marked files back into the REPL as a Scheme list.
Works the same way for processes, you enter ps and end up with a pretty view of the processes in the browser window which enables you to select, kill, and paste some processes. These browsers are implemented in object-oriented faishon (in Scheme). The interface is pretty simple, thus, it’s very easy to add custom browser for the command output or system object of your choice.
We also have a complete and nice implementation of a tradionatiol shell’s job control features. Such as running a process in foreground or background, and additionally connect a job to a separate (pseudo) TTY. The implementation of job control makes rather heavy use the Concurrent ML API, which yields an elegant implementation (at least I think so).
The paper describing the motivation, the most dazzling features, and the interesting parts of the implementation. I’m not sure if it’s legitimate to upload that (final) version of the paper to my homepage yet (will do so, when I found out). However, don’t expect faustian insights from this paper: it’s a description of an application not a research paper. Although the CFP explicitly invites papers on applications, I entertain suspicion that nobody will take this stuff seriously or pay much attention. Well, never mind. I hope that I manage to give a good talk anyways.
Apropos. This will be my first talk with slides made with PLT slideshow. I believe that the Scheme workshop is a good place to try this out: In case anything goes wrong, there are tons of experts around, in fact, Tallinn will probably have the highest density of slideshow users on the planet. If slideshows turns out to be nice, I think I’ll use it to make the tons of slides I need for my web application programming course.
Technorati Tags: Scheme, scsh, IFL, ICFP