Hello, all! I’m Edward Platt. I just finished a PhD studying large-scale participatory decision-making in online communities, with a little work on attack tolerance in webs of trust. Prior to that, I co-founded and variously served as treasurer and board member at the i3 Detroit hackerspace, where I also helped develop Seltzer CRM, a tool for helping membership organizations self-organize (still in use, but has been maintenance-only for a while). Before returning to grad school, I worked as a staff developer at the MIT Center for Civic Media for a few years, where I helped students and researchers develop software for civic technology projects.
Spritely appeals to me both as a PL geek and as an organizer of decentralized communities. I was introduced to Christine through @eximious who I met when she was a Guest of Honor at Penguicon, and I’ve been excitedly following the development of Spritely on Christine’s mastodon. My love of scheme goes back to my undergrad at MIT taking 6.001/SICP and even more so SICM. And of course, I’ve spent many hours playing MUDs, and a decentralized MUD would be a dream come true.
Looking at the intros above, the amount of expertise and experience here is amazing!
I’ve been working with lisps for a while; I created the Leiningen project automation tool that’s used by most Clojure developers and am the lead developer for the Fennel programming language.
I’ve been an active user and proponent of the Fediverse since early 2017. (In most crowds I can say “almost since the beginning” but in this crowd that feels more like the middle.) Spritely caught my eye since it merges both these interests (lisps and user-empowering systems). (of course there’s nothing about it that couldn’t work outside lisps, but that’s where we are now).
I’m currently trying to resist the temptation to start a port of Goblins to Fennel. We’ll see how long that lasts.
Welcome to both @elplatt and @technomancy! BTW, I asked both to join because they were giving me very useful feedback on the core paper, so I figured it would be better to get some of that thinking here and give them an opportunity to join the review calls if they should like.
It’s gonna be… a busy few weeks, too busy for me to go into details, but this would indeed be cool. For those that don’t know, Fennel and Lua code are 100% cross-compatible to each other. This would be neat because it would mean getting, effectively, a port to Lua in the process. I’d love to see Goblins on Lua/Fennel, I’d probably use it myself even, and I know a few gamedevs who have been asking for this too. Plus it would be another path for Goblins in the browser.
But yes, time is tricky right now. Most importantly, in the meanwhile, welcome
Hello everyone! I’m Mikayla, I’m currently working my first proper tech job @ Zed.dev building a code editor in Rust. I was introduced to Christine by @danny and have been blown away by how much user empowerment OCap allows. I’ve been trying to find a project / approach capable of shattering the centralization currently throttling the web, and Spritely seems to be it. Excited to meet, work with, and learn from all of y’all
Hi all, I’m Tom, a standard-issue Python/Javascript web developer who does a little Lisp in his off time. I grew up with the web and have a lot of affection for it, but it seems to have reached its red giant phase. Spritely is a box of ideas that’s fun to rummage through, so I thought I’d ask join you here. I hope I can be of some use.
I’m Ian Denhardt. I maintain the Go & Haskell implementations of Cap’n Proto (another CapTP-based protocol) and am one of the more active contributors to Sandstorm. I’ve been watching spritely with interest for a while now.
Hey everyone! I’m Jacob Weisz, I’m a regular contributor to the Sandstorm.io project (a capability-based web app self-hosting platform, for those not aware). I’m not well-versed in Spritely yet, but as I’m very excited about capability-based security and federated social networks, I want to learn more.
Hello, I’m Kris Kowal. I was rewriting a MUD from scratch in C++ and got distracted by template meta-programming, then started over in Python and got distracted by generator trampolines, then started over in JavaScript and got distracted because there wasn’t a module system. When I was pitching CommonJS to the JavaScript community, Mark Miller distracted me with promises, so I took Tyler Close’s Q promises (with pipelining!) library, pivoted its API off of Doug Crockford’s AdSafe and back into objects with prototypes, in anticipation of Object.freeze getting into JavaScript, and pitched it at the nascent npm ecosystem in a time when nobody wanted it. Domenic Denicola and Mark Miller closed the loop and now JavaScript has promises (but doesn’t have pipelining, yet!).
When I wasn’t indulging my hobby of getting distracted, I built a number of generations of RPC infrastructure at Uber, including a gambit to transform Apache/Facebook Thrift services to classes, to make the system more like Cap’n’Proto or Orleans.
Now I’m on the team at Agoric and tech lead on Endo. Endo includes the latest incarnation of AdSafe or Caja which we call Hardened JavaScript or SES, supports JavaScript modules, and a CapTP variant (with pipelining!), out of which we intend to build a user agent for peer to peer OCaps.
No, and when I try again, I’ll definitely get distracted by OCaps. What I’ve learned is that “shipping” occurs after ambition descends, ability ascends, and the two meet somewhere. So far for me: single player interactive fiction, online fantasy maps, and single page web standards.
OCap MUD is something of a convergent touchstone. I know @danfinlay and @kumavis (I’ll extend an invitation to Aaron) have both been beating the OCap MUD drum.
Oh, wait @ocdtrekkie was talking about @kris’s mention of an OCap MUD! Okay, yes there’s a Certain Kind Of Person who shows up for these things huh?
As an aside, you can see the old MUD I did on the 8sync page, (the actor model system I built preceding my work on Spritely), scroll down to the video! The video is a talk about 8sync where the MUD was the presentation and the rooms were the slides and the audience was walking around. People liked that I could extend it in response to their comments, but the big question was, “how do we extend it?” and at the time I didn’t know how to make that safe. That question partly led me on the journey to discover ocaps and thus Goblins’ current design.
Hi, I’m Andrew Whatson. I work as a software developer in banking and payment processing/switching infrastructure, writing modern software to embrace and extinguish legacy systems. This has involved low-level implementation of a variety of weird and wonderful ATM/POS/HSM/H2H messaging protols, and an unhealthy amount of async and concurrent network programming (and debugging) in C++.
Outside of work, I enjoy hacking with and on Scheme. Recently I’ve been working on guile-prescheme, a port of the PreScheme compiler from Scheme 48 to Guile. Previously I wrote guile-gemini, an implementation of the Gemini protocol using Guile Fibers. Both of these projects have involved side-quests into the guts of Guile to fix bugs and scratch itches.
I’m new to the concept of ocaps, and am enjoying learning how they can be used to tackle the challenges of programming distributed systems. Spritely’s vision of an open and user-centric future seems extremely important, I’m excited to see where things go!
