OpenACS is a collaboration tool that offers some good email integration while preserving the benefits of a collaboration toolset. For example, the discussion forums can be email enabled to send out new posts by email and to accept replies to those emails. This way, someone can refer later to a post by URL and all the email is archived in one place, and indexed for full text search. Other collaboration tools in the OpenACS platform can be enabled in the same way. Almost every applicaiton supports notification of new items and changes by email.

Another tool that is becoming more common is RSS syndication. In this way the user chooses to be notified in a news reader instead of by email. To reply from there they can just click on a link and go to the collaboration web site within their browser.

A collaboration toolset like OpenACS gives users the option to work with email, rss, or any combination. Of course, new communication mediums such as SMS can also be integrated with the right code.

A mix of tools that fit each users work style while preseving a searchable centralized history and current status of the collaboration is a good solution taking advantage of the technology we have now.

I wish this had been more clearly explained, I would have gotten it right away!

Recursive Procedure that results in a recursive process

(define (factorial n)

    (if (= n 1)

        1

        (* n (factorial (-n 1)))))

Recursive Procedure that results in an iterative process

(define (factorial n)

    (define inter product counter)

        (if (> counter n)

            product

            (iter (* counter product)

                  (+ counter 1))))

    (iter 1 1))

The second example has the recursive procedure defined inside the factorial procedure.

Scheme Implementation in Javascript by Chris Double and Little Scheme by Douglas Crockford who also wrote The Little JavaScripter a version of The Little Schemer focused on the same concepts implemented in Javascript.

I am quite surpised I have never seen a link to this article. I must have missed it. It really explains the power and the simplicity of the math behind Lisp. Basically the entire language of Lisp is written in itself using a few primitives and a few more functions.

I found this article poking around Paul Graham's site looking for the online version of On Lisp, which I thought I would read to expand my learning. I think this short paper gave me enough to think about for a while.

This ties into the maze of twisty abstractions idea. It is definitely the case that some of the historical design issues of ACS 4 (the predecessor to OpenACS 4 and 5) were due to a dangerous amount of a little knowledge. Powerful tools can be used effectively or ineffectively, just like any tools. I guess the more power, the more effective or ineffectively they can be used.

TODO: Find some real-world code to talk about?