=== Top of the Swiki === Attachments ===
Lex Spoon
Email: mailto:lex@cc.gatech.edu
WWW: http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~lex
I'm a PhD student at Georgia Tech. I am quite interested in making software development easier, faster, and more robust, and so Smalltalk attracts me like a moth to flame.
In general, I've got two big interests. First, I'm interested in wide area collaborative spaces. After getting a modem and Prodigy account, and playing on the thing until 6am (my first computer allnighter!), I realized computers aren't just useful for computing, but make possible some fantastic communication mechanisms. I'm interested right now in both page-oriented systems like Swiki, and in real-time shared spaces.
Second, I'm interested in end-user interfaces and programming languages. Computer mega-geeks currently get shortchanged by standard OS interfaces, because they don't provide the best facility a computer has: arbitrary computation! Furthermore, less geeky users often spend huge amounts of time in front of these machines; wouldn't it be worthwhile for them to spend a few of those hours, if it means they become much more powerful? For both of these reasons, I think general OS interfaces should offer more programmatic power than they do currently, though in a way that leaves the non-geeks still able to do basic things. Squeak seems to have gone a long way in this direction already.
Well, that's grand and all. Currently I'm working on using type inference to help in reading dynamically-typed code. Current information is at http://www.cc.gatech.edu/~lex/ti/ti.html.
Finally, I also exist outside of Squeaking :) . See my more general web page, at the top of this page.