Kind-OT: cs books, lisp, threads and stuff (was Re: [OT] - REALBasic Claims 100K Users)

[Andre Garzia]

Dan,

yes, that much is true, anyone can simulate nested arrays. I've seen  
solutions for that poping on the list every now and then.

As for threads. Yes we need them, and hard if we want to build  
networked servers and fastcgi like daemons. I decided to use some of  
my time every week to learn more about computer sciences, as many on  
this list know, I have no formal education on this area except for  
two years of engineering which gave me only 60 hours of computer  
studies. Most of my coding is done in Rev, but I tend to think and  
design things in terms of scheme which is a "dialect" of lisp. I  
think in terms of lists and recursion and I really love scheme as  
much as I love Rev.

I picked a couple books to read that teach me more about programming,  
my first book which I am reading is Structure and Interpretation of  
Computer Programs (everybody seems to call it SICP) which is a  
wonderful book and then I'll move to some other scheme books. Why I  
am doing that when I code almost full time in Rev and almost zero  
time in Scheme? Because scheme is a very nice language to learn  
concepts that I can apply later using some other language, and  
because many of the book authors I like write books about CS using  
lisp/scheme as the language for the examples.

What I am missing in Rev is continuations, I've tried to build them  
but I can't. I know Dar Scott experiemented with some lambda-like  
constructs but I could not even reach that point. If I had  
continuations, I could save the state of a stack and its environment  
and be able to re-use that state case I need. One might ask where  
that is useful, and the answer is dead simple: Web Sessions. If we  
could save a stack state, like a debugger snapshot, then we could re- 
use it later, so we could save states for each web user and that  
would provide a very easy way to manage the sessions, because it  
would virtually need no management, just save the state when  
answering the request and restore it when receiving it. With  
something like that, we might even be able to do more useful web apps  
before we get thread support. Heck, we can even fake threads using  
such feature, save state, run one "thread", restore state, run "other  
thread". Using this snapshots we can implement co-routines which are  
always useful!!!

One way we could create a snapshot of the environment is by reading  
"the variableNames" and saving everybody. Just by that we would get a  
very easy session support. If we go further and examinate the  
pendingMessages, the stacksInUse, the OpenStacks, the backscripts and  
the frontscripts. Well, then we can have a wonderful session support.  
The problem is that there's no way to probe the variableNames by  
building a library, the thing must be hard-coded inside the handler  
it is used. We can't access the variables in memory at a given time.  
What I wanted to build is something that would make a code like this  
possible...

on someHandler
	...
	put sessionStore() into gUniqueID
	...
end someHandler

on otherHandler
	...
	sessionRestore gUniqueID
	...
	## do stuff...
end otherhandler

And sessionStore would be able to get the variables running from  
someHandler. This is impossible, I don't know how the debugger does  
it but I can't code it, I've tried it. I have my own session library  
but it does not work like this in a way that would enable me to  
implement the things I want.

Right now, I keep building my own solutions to problems all web  
developers face. We can't take Ruby on Rails right now because we  
don't have threads. We can't take seaside because we don't have  
continuations (or futures or related technologies). We can build  
plain CGIs which is cool and very powerful, but if we want to move  
further we simply need some new things in the core revolution bag of  
tricks. I still dream of a Rev version where I can use the construct  
- send thisHandler to me in a new thread - but right now, we can't.  
My dream is to create something like Userland Frontier, but without  
threads or some other way to code around them, I simply can't

we also need more books... I learn code from books... I like them...  
specially Dans! :-D

Cheers
andre
PS: ... and now, I am coding scheduling functions on fastcgi so that  
I don't run into DDoS...


On Oct 4, 2006, at 6:39 PM, Dan Shafer wrote:

> Andre.....
>
> Threads we need. Nested arrays we can simulate.
>
> :-)
>
> Dan
>
>
> On 10/4/06, Andre Garzia <soapdog at mac.com> wrote:
>>
>> Now my only wish for Rev is NESTED ARRAYS AND THREADS!!!!! Sorry for
>> the all caps, I get emotional over this topics... :-)
>>
>> Andre
>>
>>
>>
> -- 
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Dan Shafer, Information Product Consultant and Author
> http://www.shafermedia.com
> Get my book, "Revolution: Software at the Speed of Thought"
>> From http://www.shafermediastore.com/tech_main.html
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