[pttrsmrt]

At first glance, it seemed like yet another silicon-valley-neoliberlist-style lots of words and ideologies, but no code and practicalities. But it seems like OPs thesis has a more hands-on approach:

http://zells.org/res/Zells_DiplomaThesis.pdf

[airesQ]

From the 10mins I spend looking at it:

- It seems some kind of language/computation-model. Loosely based on a "everything is an actor" model.

- It did look goodish. I tried following the Fibonacci example, which sort of made sense (I got the impression that recursion is handled by creating new nodes/zells). The discussion chapter also seemed interesting.

- It has that abstruse academic feel, where sometimes it is hard to assess whether the problem is my ignorance, or just vagueness of the publication.

- Motivation sections usually have an exaggerated tone to them (i.e. this will totally change everything), but this one, and the article above, are a bit over the top.

- There are also some over-the-top statements sprinkled throughout the thesis (e.g. "a model of virtual objects which exist independent of any hardware").

[rtens]

- that's exactly what it is. And the way I see it, actors are an implementation of OOP (in it's original meaning) so I would stick with "everything in an object"

- thanks =)

- I had that same feeling while writing it, constantly balancing my own ignorance with an acceptable level of vagueness

- call me the over-the-top guy. But the way I see, your vision has to be grand, if not megalomaniac if you want the essence to survive the collision with reality

- seamlessly migrating networked objects are one of the lesser over-the-top ideas though

[inimino]

If the thesis is relevant at all to what you're doing now, might I suggest linking to it directly from the manifesto? Otherwise it sounds mostly like you are very excited about something, but I got almost no idea what that something is.

[rtens]

That's probably the biggest weakpoint of the manifesto but also kinda on purpose. While the thesis was all about "let's build something" the manifesto is a fresh start trying to answer the question "what is the problem?". The thesis is still relevant but a bit outdated and I'll probably rewrite it in multiple blog articles.

What I'm planning to use as information starting point is zells.org but it's all still in an early stage. At the moment I'm working on creating a document that visualizes the "end product" that I have in mind.

[inimino]

After looking at the thesis and the manifesto, I think your best bet is to create one worked example, in pseudo-code or whatever, and then see if you can get anyone on board with that.

[dkersten]

This looks interesting to me as a programmer, but it looks much too complex and niche-knowledge-dependent to be, in my opinion, a real contender as a tool to allow non-programmers to program.

I only glanced at it, though, so maybe its easier than it seems, but to me, the samples looked complex enough that I don't see it.

It does look great as an experiment into different programming models though and that's something I always enjoy (and is needed if we're to get better future tools).