eXene

[Jay Nelson]

eXene is the user interface writting in Concurrent ML that
Vlad & Vlad referred to.  I am about half way through the
article and see a lot of similarity in what I have been thinking
about, but one big dissimilarity.  They are using the X server
model and still view an 'application' as a desirable thing.

I am thinking a little more radically in trying to eliminate
objects, and thus am trying to eliminate applications.  I
really don't want anything that is statically pre-architected.
I detest static type checking, I found erlang because Java
objects forced me to structure my code in ways that did
not mirror the medium it was running on and web services
are less applications than collections of tasks.  I don't want
to reimplement the same UI in a different language, I would
rather think about a wholly new approach to UI.

I have been thinking mainly about processes, streams and
how they fit together.  User input arrives from the Universal
Serial Bus nowadays, so it is expected to be a stream of
actions.  Monitors are also a serial device, but they use
2 dimensions to allow random access of data more easily.
Why not view the UI as a pool of data that is streamed out?

My biggest problem with OO and applications is that they
rigidly impose _one_ interpretation and force the user to
deal with that model.  As a user I would rather restructure
my display based on the tasks I need to accomplish, not
based on the applications that I have installed.  If the computer
is a general-purpose machine why are the programs not
general-purpose?

jay