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Kayia had intrigued me before but I seem to have lost my notes about it, so I watched the video again. I confess I still don't feel like I have a solid underst
by mattmccutchen 10y ago
Kayia had intrigued me before but I seem to have lost my notes about it, so I watched the video again. I confess I still don't feel like I have a solid understanding of the semantics. It looks like Kayia (like many general-purpose programming languages) has more than enough flexibility to set things up so that applications can be built with similarly clean code as in Object Spreadsheets, but also enough flexibility for novice users to mess things up in unobvious ways once they start creating nontrivial nested structures. I believe we're better off enforcing a schema and showing the entire hierarchical data set on one screen so novice users can recognize more quickly when something isn't the way they want. (For large data sets, we may need folding, or drill-down in separate windows as in Kayia may even be preferable, but showing everything at once is a great place to start to build user understanding of the tool on small data sets.)
- david927 10y agoI need first to say that you should be commended on working on Object Spreadsheets. Alan Kay has always warmly received anything effort in that space -- it's simply neglected and for no clear reason. For Kayia, you can set constraints which enforce schema, if you want, but it's not recommended. I would rather have too much flexibility for novice users than not enough, because that's the side we err on. We often (I'm speaking generally) remove complexity by removing or limiting function, and I disagree with that, philosophically. I would rather steer than stop.