Sounds great to me!

We really need a community -- like we had in the 60s -- of people who are
interested in designing and building better languages. Keep us posted....

Cheers,

Alan

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At 1:14 AM -0800 1/12/00, Brian T. Rice wrote:
>Hello all,
>	I'd like to announce a new programming language project called Slate
>(http://www.tunes.org/~water/slate-home.html) that attempts to take the
>best of the Self and BETA programming languages, and provide a coherent
>framework for these ideas. Although the language will primarily be dynamic
>in the style of Self, it will also extensively use the benefits of
>pattern-programming and the various abstractions that BETA has shown to be
>so useful. The language will also incorporate the abstract syntax tree
>(similar to Lisp's SEXP notation) structure and a functional character for
>its object semantics. This will allow for some cleaner semantics and better
>meta-programming facilities within the language itself than are available
>for other object-oriented languages.
>	Finally, the language will follow the practice of Squeak by hosting its
>own interpreter system, compiler, and user-interface. In fact, we plan to
>implement a user interface consisting of direct manipulation of language
>patterns according to semantics adjustible through reflective programming.
>This will in fact form a language and environment that is programmable by
>visual gestures and representations alone.
>	Well, I brought this to your attention as a modest request for
>feedback on
>the idea as well as to help identify interested parties. If you are
>interested, please contact me via e-mail, and I will be happy to send you
>more information and answer any questions you may have. We also invite
>people to assist in the development of the language and its environment.
>Currently, there is a partially complete prototype of the language system
>under Common Lisp, and plans include adapting the Squeak project's
>smalltalk virtual machine sources generated from smalltalk code to support
>Slate language primitives and the graphics system.
>	As soon as we produce a language implementation that completely
>fulfills
>the language technical requirements, we plan on releasing the source code
>and environment under the GPL to open up development possibilities.
>
>Sincerely,
>	Brian T. Rice
>	email: water at tunes.org