[om-list] languages and 4C-Informatica

[Tom and other Packers]

Mark

    I met a guy in Centerville who is putting together a little group to
design and write a new, better programming language.  He says C/C++ and
other languages are just not extendable enough, or something.  He feels
constrained by the class paradigm somehow, and other units of programming in
other languages.

    I mention this for two reasons:

    (1) I thought you might be interested in this since you are also
interested in making a better programming language, so maybe you'd like to
talk to him and find out if your ideas are compatible:

    sssjjjnnn at Yahoo.com

    His name is Justin Nicolaides.

    (2) I initially talked to him to see if his ideas were compatible with
my MTL plans.  It seems like he wants a very general purpose programming
language able to do everything from low-level hardware stuff to perl-type
web-page text stuff.  That's about all I know.  So if you find out more,
maybe you could better confirm my impression, and that is this: I don't
think it's a good fit for me.  I think that, to make it worth my while,
designing and implementing a new language for MTShell would have to be more
specialised than his language will be.  Do you think you'd agree?

    I mentioned to him the pipe-connecting emphasis needed for my MTL, but
that didn't seem to bother him.  He said it could handle that.  But I get
the impression that he's not really interested in telling me whether or not
his language would be the best choice, simply that his language could do
anything.

    On a related note:

    I'm thinking of not bothering Dan about my MTShell plans at all, even
after we pass the mile-stone he said was necessary in order for him to
consider funding my ideas.  I don't want to loose ownership of this idea.  I
want to continue developing it into my fully general information processing
goal, eventually.

    I'm thinking of calling both the final product and the initial product
(the one consisting of just a few utilities and a shell): "4C-Informatica".

    Both the company name (4C) and the program name (Informatica) have been
used already by other companies, but I don't think any of the 4C's have
anything to do with computers, and I don't think any of the Informaticas are
the names of programs or products.  So, I don't see a problem in using this
name combination.  Do you?

    I will probably initially limit my use of 4C-Informatica to two areas:
(1) those studies or fields related to TF, i.e. those which could be
considered competitive, which I will just do for the benefit of TF, (2)
anything else that is not related to TF, and therefore is not competitive.
I.e., I will limit my use of Informatica to things that do not compete
against TF.

    In those things which are related to TF, I will hopefully be able to use
TF as my first customer: I will offer a cervices to TF using Informatica.
TF can pay me for my time -- not the software for now, which will be mostly
open-sourced.  Informatica as a packaged-whole will not be open source, but
the bulk of its components, including the first shell (MTShell) and most of
its utilities will be open, under the MPL, or something similar.

    Any thoughts?

ciao,
tomp