Kenny Tilton presenting at lispden in February 2004
Monday, November 24, 2003
Just a bit of advance notice - Kenny Tilton is coming out to Colorado in February (2004) and will be giving a couple of presentations on Cells to the Denver Area Lisp Users Group. I commented on Kenny's Cells project in a weblog posting earlier this year and showed off some example code. Since that time, Kenny has been working on RoboCells (a RoboCup client that is based on Cells) and Cello (a GUI construction toolkit based on Cells).
For those of you who are new to Cells, basically, it lets you define CLOS slots as if they were cells in a spreadsheet with dynamic updates from dependent cells. Sorta like a combination of constraint-based programming with listeners. The concepts behind Cells actually go back a long way and related approaches can be found in:
- Spreadsheet applications
- Bottleneck functions
- Notification schemes
- TCL Provider Classes
- GoF Observer Pattern
- Smalltalk
- Constraint Programming
- Sketchpad, 1962
- Steele, 1980
- Garnet/Amulet
- COSI
- Frames, slots, daemons
- Quintus Prolog
- Lab 3
- PORK
The second session will be on Monday evening, February 9, and will be a presentation - "Cells, A Silver Bullet". This will put Cells into a historical context going back to 1962, as well as provide a detailed look at how Cells can defeat Fred Brooks's solid case against the possibility of significant leaps in programmer productivity :-).
It will be neat to see the new projects that Kenny has been working on and to get some first-hand commentary on them. More details will be posted (on newsgroups as well as the user group's page on the ALU site) in January.
