[some-mthfka]

STEPS is a very interesting project, indeed. I don't think it was quite a failure, after all, they did Nile and Gezira, which was pretty cool (powerful vector graphics rendering in a few hundred lines of code). Someone might reuse those in the future, I don't see why not.

But from the limited things that I saw, I got the feeling there was no overarching system. And there was no thinking about flexibility in general (which I consider to be essential to computing). I could be wrong about that, though, I didn't study it very thoroughly, only watched a presentation or two and skimmed the paper. Not that it wasn't ambitious enough already.

> I wish you more success!

Thank you!

[alexisread]

Actually there was a lot of thought given to flexibility, I think a lot of the concepts were not exposed well due to the large project scope. Maru (which is the underlying STEPS runtime) for instance was designed to be completely replaceable (See COLA papers) using a composition mechanism similar to fexprs. Maru is also very easily bootstrapped as the VM/runtime and compiler come in at under 2KLOC with all the facilities.

[some-mthfka]

Huh, interesting. I should try to learn more about STEPS in general some time...