I wanted to course correct a little on the preparation for the workshop.

The readings I posted are intended to get you into a frame of mind to
think freely and not be afraid to express thoughts or ideas that
otherwise might not go over well in "regular" company. We will use
deconstruction about to the extent presented in the note by Brian
Marick on the web page. "Against Method" presents a philosophical
justification for the methodology of abandoning assumptions of the
past - and deconstruction will help us uncover what they are.

I don't want to spend much time talking about meta-level stuff. I am
personally interested in exploring 3 things:

* to what degree does the idea make sense of trying to do *some* sort
of reset in computing?

* what areas and specific ideas seem to have some hope of improving
things for building software and involving end-users in design

* what ways are there to actually push these approaches forward

For example, I believe that we have spent the last 10 years in a
spiral in which interfaces and our approach to designing with them
have become more and more rigid while the requirements for
distributed computing are pushing in the opposite direction. The
evidence of a pushback is the rise of XML as a distributed computing
*language* or protocol instead of APIs. I'd like to talk about how to
make APIs more flexible, for example.

If you look at my weird paper on parallel programming language
design, you'll see that there are a number of programming language
ideas that could make some kinds of distributed computing easier and
perhaps more correctly done. I'm certain I've not dug very deeply
into what could be possible here.

I'd like us to consider whether how we conceive of programming helps
or hurts us at the moment with how we plan software and build it.

User-involved design seems more like a pipe dream than reality. Open
source seems to exalt coders and freeze out non-coding users. Can we
figure out how to really involve users, perhaps by using scripting or
at least a customization "protocol" that would enable people to trade
their customizations.

And how should we do this for real? My approach so far has been to be
outrageous about the ideas to get attention. In fact, the paper on
parallel programming language design was intended to be just that.
But that's ok for PR, not for how we could really proceed.

To these ends, it might be useful for folks in the workshop to post
(perhaps revised, perhaps expanded, perhaps different) position
statements so everyone can get an idea what interests people have.

I will be off e-mail the rest of today, so I hope you all can get started.

-rpg-