Article:		Scripting Cocoa with F-Script
Subject:		fixation then illumination
Date:		2001-12-14 22:40:32
From:		psheldon
When I finished your article, I was late for a party and rushing myself to say something encouraging. That didn't work for me and I got fixated at the odd way you specified a point, whined and complained about just learning that there was a cocoa call MakePoint and now there was just another version. I decided I was feeling crabby because I still had to navigate to the Chistmas Caroling and had to give trying to think positive a rest. Just now it hit me, after the party and a bit of discussion griping about grippy people, you built a framework. Woooh. That's far out. I think that ranks you as a pedestrian advisor. I have this holy grail of commenting omnigroup's game frameworks to sort of motivate myself with fun to learn how to navigate knowledge of programming building tools built by mobs of people without having to relive their lives. Finding out how people can be useful to each other in work groups, crucial to postgraduate publication in academia for tenure. And you built a framework. I've learned to "think in the mathematical language Maple". One of its features that a person can exploit to "amplify his thinking" is to assign complex expressions rather than their evaluations to variables. And you made a framework with a block you could assign to a variable that recorded the organization and modularity worked on by a programmer. Woooh. I saw some portents of stuff going on in parallel in that curly bracket construction of your framework or parser. Steve Weyer made a framework for the newton message pad in the original apple newton compiler. That meant that he really understood Apple's compiler and what programs it could write. He also made an equivalent of netscape called newtscape. You could embed newtonscript and html in books and run other programs through them. He had books that ran his compiler and made tutorials. He coauthored with his young daughter. He touched the clouds and advised pedestrians. So, cool. Glad your on board. Maybe AppleScript Studio at the end of this month will be a hard shadow to stand in to make a stand on being the only game in town on scripting, but I think you had to understand stuff better than those nearsighted guys who might see you in some sort of shadow and you have a lot of knowledge for us to mine. I shall look forward to your column as I do Mike's.

Showing messages 1 through 3 of 3.

• Re: fixation then illumination
  2001-12-16 13:53:46  pmougin [View]
  
  
  Thanks for your kind comments. Indeed, F-Script is a framework that one can embed and use from its own components and also a framework into which one can plug and use its own components. This leads to some interesting synergies, for instance the fact that blocks are represented by regular Objective-C objects, and thus can be used from F-Script and from Objective-C in the same way. We'll probably explore this further in a forthcoming column.
  
  
  
  Best,
  
  
  
  Philippe
• I shall enjoy learning to make building blocks
  2001-12-16 22:39:44  psheldon [View]
  
  
  Building blocks sort of boot strap my mind or amplify it.
  I tried to make subclass of Bezier that behaved like a colored pen, but I don't think I really understood what assignment meant in either C or objective C. Just telling myself you pass the address starting the object didn't help me debug. What I tried to do just didn't work. Mike will get to it when he isn't swamped with finals and maybe see what flawed thinking I entertained. He did an article on memory managment which helped me only start to grasp cocoa scope rules, something with the metaphor of passing on and declaring ownership of a scope by objects. But my own exercise was enough to get me in trouble and maybe next time around I'll get a better feel.
  Maybe my confusion indicartes others were confusable as well. My confusion might mean that these concepts must be more clearly illustrated with example for others as well. Maybe you all might decide that hammering away at another guy's old bugs that will leave by themselves with the guy's own increased wisdom is not as cool as going on in a column. At my first aerospace job, my boss reassured me that I might well paperclip questions and move on with the reading and then go back to the paperclip questions to see if they answered themselves or are no longer important. I've told myself I can't understand everything in the universe and I might like to move on to more interesting questions. But there is glory after staring at a brick wall finally getting that insight or 20x20 hindsight. Sometimes I think that's the only real learning that goes on.
  Maybe you and Mike will figure from my bug in the colored pen subclass use some theme you both would like to strengthen.
  You thanked my kindness. I work on this. I find that, myself having a lot of education and investment in building mental tools, some people tend to debate with me and use me as a judge of their own worthiness and not listen to my story, rarely displaying a sense of my worthiness. This behavior is not all that inspirational to me building a story or mental tools. I try to practice what I wish they would do. Do unto others as I would... With some people it's hard.
  I think great ideas happen when people can learn to trust each other. That takes time. Maybe it should take time and that's OK.

• wish I would remember about tabs not showing on publication
  2001-12-14 22:45:53  psheldon [View]
  
  
  Or could the form entry code Oreilly uses recognize tabs as formatting publication. Right now you have to recognize my paragraphs by indents at the end of the paragraph, not the beginning.
  Could the form entry into these thread responses to columns be made more wysiwyg. Eventually, I'll learn to detab in bbedit.