[General] A few thoughts on LK's future

[Axel Rauschmayer]

Lively Kernel (LK) is a really exciting project! I think the  
Javascript language is already very interesting and will be even more  
so in the future, so it is a good place to be.

Here are a few thoughts on LK's potential. Have any of these points  
been considered, yet?

- Ecmascript 4: This version feels like a "good-enough" mix of Lisp,  
Dylan, Smalltalk, Self, while it is bound to have the same amount of  
broad tool support that Java currently enjoys. It will also  
inevitably run on the JVM. Two consequences arise for LK: (1) If its  
language extensions mimick ES4, a transition will be easier later.  
(2) Soon LK will have the option of being a desktop environment (when  
hosted on the JVM).

- Client/server programming: My guess is that LK could be the ideal  
distributed environment. You would implement your application in LK  
and then decide which parts stay on the server (JVM-hosted?) and  
which parts stay on the client.

- Look and feel: What still puts me slightly off Morphic is that it  
is non-standard. This does not mean that I particularly like how the  
Mac OS or Windows do their thing, but it is still standardized enough  
that you can easily switch between them (or even between them and  
Gnome or KDE for that matter). I think it would be both a practical  
and a marketing advantage to emulate these operating systems as much  
as is reasonable.

Thanks for your time,

Axel Rauschmayer

--
http://hypergraphs.de/