Monday  2002-11-25   Development

More intertwingularity

At the end of his essay on intertwingularity or phenomenon of deeply entangled inter-depedent messages and information, Jamie Zawinski writes

This sort of model [of utilizing intertwingularity] is not applicable merely to the domain of [email] messages; it applies equally well to any corpus which has structured, potentially-ambiguous references (or rather, representations of references.)

For example, source code.

Programmers have been making many tools to deal with volumes of source code. One simple way is to format the code in certain convention and use tools like grep or text editor's search commands. Another method is to use simple databases like TAGS or source code browsing tools like cscope to augment text editors. More tools like lxr (Linux Cross Reference) and global that generate web pages came during last several years. These tools however know only of source code text, not its semantics as parsing is done by compilers after editing code is finished.

While people on conventional operating systems deal with files, Smalltalk programmers store their source code as objects in real databases. Because these databases or images are written in Smalltalk and interact with users in Smalltalk (ie images know the semantics and inter-relationships expressed in the source code), users need not bother to disambiguate manually what a piece of text in question may be as they browse the code. Smalltalk browser has been evolving to many interesting directions like Whisker, Refactoring Browser and Star Browser.

Old Lisp Machines (like the ones Zawinski used) had similar features that make an old timer like Kent Pitman nostalgic and it is easy to see why.

Mainstream Java programmers are discovering productivity gains from using an environment that does more than text search but rather understands their code like IntelliJ IDEA. As more attention is focused on making sense of far too many artifacts of software builing, more tools like Hipikat that can find relevent information from "source code, documentation, bug reports and fixes, e-mail, and version information", will receive warm welcome.
 
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Sunday  2002-11-24   Software

Intertwingle

"Everything is deeply intertwingled."
-- Ted Nelson
"Everything is related to everything else."
-- Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

More than four years after Jamie Zawinski wrote about dealing with large volume of messages by aggressively exploiting their relationship to one another (expressed in their "metadata" and data), several new promising programs in the category of PIM or personal information manager are appearing. ZOË is hailed as Google for email for surfacing out all kinds of relevant information about a given email. Spaces tries to connect email, calendar, tasks and notes by providing multiple views on them. Mitch Kapor, famous for Lotus 1-2-3, is also designing Chandler as an inter-personal information manager - sharing information with other users is its primary design goal. Kapor is also known for Agenda, a pioneering PIM from 1980s.