STEPS Toward The Reinvention Of Programming

2 This system is an “omni-application ” for general media authoring called “Dynabook Junior”. It takes its roots from early DTP architectures at PARC, Hypercard at Apple, and the Squeak Etoys system. It is a layout organizer for views of objects that are derived in turn from an “omni-object ” and a rough analogy to the “omnicells ” of most biological organisms, which have the same DNA but diversify into hundreds of distinct cell types. In sympathy with our philosophy of generality and self-similarity, and in contrast to typical DTP systems, the document is an object that can be inserted into a document like any other object, even recursively. The first page of the document contains the document itself, scaled by 50%. We use a “T ” metaphor in reference to two of our inspirations: Maxwell’s Equations on a T-shirt (“…and then there was light”) and the Ford “Model-T”, a real automobile made from very few components which could be taken apart and reassembled by most 12-year-olds almost a century ago. Several of the principles that made our report application possible are included in our “T-shirt ” findings from this year: 1. The Nile rendering and compositing language. 2. The transformation of syntax and semantics (such as Nile) into an executable form. 3. The transformation of intermediate forms into machine code, bypassing C or other compilers