Re: What app would show off Prothon?

On Thu, 15 Jul 2004 14:47:51 -0700 Mark Hahn <[email protected]> wrote:

> The IBM DeveloperWorks magazine column _Charming Python_ author David Mertz
> wants to write about Prothon but his IBM contact wants him to make it about
> some application that shows what Prothon is good for instead of just talking
> about Prothon and prototypes.
> 
> David is looking for suggestions for an application that shows off Prothon.
> Any ideas?
> 
> Mark Hahn wrote:
> > David Mertz, Ph.D. wrote:
> >> Hi Mark & Ben,
> >>
> >> I got around to proposing an installment on Prothon, which I'd really
> >> like to do now that your "stable alpha" is out.  Unfortunately,
> >> here's what I got back:
> >>
> >>> Hi David,
> >>>
> >>> Tom said that prothon.org seems to do a pretty good job of
> >>> introducing Prothon, so he's
> >>> not really interested in publishing something new at that level.  He
> >>> said
> >>> that he does realize it's still in alpha, but still if you are
> >>> actually doing something useful with
> >>> Prothon (and, ideally, something Prothon is uniquely suited for) and
> >>> you
> >>> want to write about that, then he'd reconsider.
> >>>
> >>> Let me know what you think.
> >>>
> >>> thanks,
> >>> Aaron
> >>
> >> Aaron (Bitterman) is my "content broker", and Tom (Young) is the IBM
> >> dW guy who needs to OK Linux Zone articles.  I kinda think Tom misses
> >> the point--I don't really think I'd have anything fundamental that
> >> y'all haven't written about on your site.  But I'd bring a discussion
> >> of prototypes to my broad readership, which is really about the same
> >> thing I do with many of my writeups on libraries/tools.
> >>
> >> Still, any good ideas on concrete stuff I might piggyback on to get a
> >> refined proposal? I might just try again after a little time (a
> >> couple months), which sometimes works.  Sometimes Tom's mood or
> >> current focus is different.
> >
> > That last release wasn't the stable alpha.  It was the penultimate
> > "almost alpha".   We are still arguing over some last minute details
> > of the language.  My July target has slipped to mean late July
> > instead of the beginning of July :-)
> >
> > I'm buried getting my first talk together for the workshop in
> > Vancouver and getting the real first Alpha release out, so I'm not
> > going to be much good for ideas until after July is over.
> >
> > Let me give this some thought over the next few weeks and I'll bounce
> > it off of some people at the workshop.
> 
Well, prototypes and attributes have a lot in common with Lisp atoms and properties,
but with inheritance added. So Prothon should be good with A.I. applications like
knowledge bases and expert systems. I implemented a graph search in Prothon using
object statements to define the nodes. Each node defined its own unique methods to
determine which node to go to next. A simular approach could be taken in Python but
the code would not be as clean.

But this has been a concern of mine. Prothon's benefits are tied to its interpreter
implementation: stackless, fast compilation, not reference counting, true threads.
The language itself has not been targetted at any particular problem set. So it is
anybodies guess what applications Prothon is best suited for. But with integrated
internationalization and thread support maybe Prothon will be a natural for implementing
client-server programs on multiprocessor systems.

Lenard Lindstrom
<[email protected]>