[erlang-questions] Erlang as a tool for human communication -- was GUI development

[lloyd@REDACTED]

Hi David,

ARC is an excellent example of the kind of human-facing application I've been striving toward.

Content creators provide input; output is disseminated in many formats and through many media channels.

But I'm imagining a Tinker Toy-like suite of Erlang libraries and applications that can be mixed and matched to build any number of purpose-built human-facing applications.

And, I believe we have much in Erlang to work with toward that goal.

I've been factoring, revising, and extending erlguten, for instance, into four components:

1. Copy input and management
2. Type specification 
3. Page design and layout
4. Paste-up 

Each of these areas could have print and digital analogs. With careful thought to interfaces, they could abstracted into templates in the spirit of OTP.

All the best,

Lloyd





-----Original Message-----
From: "David Talmage" <talmage@REDACTED>
Sent: Thursday, December 28, 2017 10:48am
To: erlang-questions@REDACTED
Cc: "Joe Armstrong" <erlang@REDACTED>, "Lloyd R. Prentice" <lloyd@REDACTED>
Subject: Re: [erlang-questions] Erlang as a tool for human communication -- was GUI development

On Friday, December 22, 2017 7:33:30 AM EST Joe Armstrong wrote:
> ...
> The model of documentation I would like to see is:
> 
>    - One author many eyes
> ...
>    - Beautiful output
> ...
>   - Easy to organise the input
> ...
>   - Low barrier for entry to comments
> ...
>   - Parseable document tree
> ...
>  - Extensible
> ...
> The stages involved were
> 
>     - authoring
>     - editing (this was chapter by chapter with an editor providing
> feedback) - beta release (publish a PDF - this is the many eyes bit)
>     - final chapters and more editing
>     - proof reading
>     - final edit
>     - indexing
>     - layout
> ...
> I'd actually love to know how a newspaper solves this - a decent newspaper
> turns out tens of thousands of words per day - news articles are
> written, proof read and edited in hours - commissioned articles are
> integrated with the news and there must be hundreds to thousands of
> contributing sources.
> ...

The Washington Post uses ARC (https://www.arcpublishing.com/), a home-grown, 
web-based publishing system.  It has an article editor (Ellipsis); CMSes for 
photos (Anglerfish) and video (Goldfish); a page layout editor (PageBuilder); 
and tools for analytics, personalization, user experience testing, and a lot 
more. They all work together seamlessly.

Virtually everything in ARC has a web front end in HTML, Javascript, and CSS.  
The back ends are written in Java or another language that runs on the JVM.

WaPo uses ARC and it sells ARC as a service to other newspapers.  As I recall, 
The Globe and Mail in Toronto and Willamette Week are customers.  Some other 
customers are named in an article on businessinsider.com: http://
www.businessinsider.com/the-washington-post-is-growing-its-arc-publishing-
business-2016-6