Date: Mon, 03 Oct 2011 07:34:05 -0000
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From: "maggethun" <phimvt@...>
Subject: Tribute to Slava Pestov

Dear Friends,

my health has been going down rapidly for a while,
I could no longer travel to my Uni, barely coped
with looking after myself, until I decided to go
into a home where I am treated exceptionally well.
I got myself a computer, internet, email again
with username phimvt, but provided by google (gmail).
So, this is my first email to the group.

La Trobe has re-organised all its web pages according
to some templates imposed from above. That meant that
a lot, not just mine, became disconnected and resulted
in many dead links all over the web. After some quite
exhausting negotiations my own pages were reconnected
with a small change: the "philosophy" part of my
pages is no longer operative. My homepage is now
      www.latrobe.edu.au/phimvt/
and the Joy pages just have "joy/" appended.

I want to use this my first email to the group to do
what I should have done years ago. Slava Pestov has
designed and implemented his Factor language over
quite some time now. The result is a most impressive
piece of work. The design goes well beyond what I
ever dreamed of for Joy, and the implementation is
professional and clearly far superior than that of Joy.
There is already a huge library for all sorts of things.
And, very importantly, there are many users who are
contributing in one way or another.

So, Slava, this is my tribute to your work. I also
want to congratulate you on your Master's. I tried
to read some early bits of your thesis, but had to
look up "direct sum of vector spaces", and shortly
after that I just gave up. Anyhow, well done.

And what should happen to Joy? With a far superior
alternative around, it would be pointless for me
to patch up the existing Joy either as the language 
or in the implementation. Besides, I am too frail
now and don't have the energy for any major project.
Should somebody else design a kind of Joy2? Maybe,
but probably not. It would have to be significantly
different from Factor to make it worthwhile. But I
don't know Factor well enough to say what could be
different enough for that. However, I do think that
in the Joy libraries there are a few techniques
(especially continuations to implement backtracking)
that are useful. Maybe these should be translated
into Factor.

I hope all you members of the group are thriving.
I'll be around again!

- Manfred