Taming the Monolith: Refactoring for an open source HyperCard

LiveCode had an earlier blog piece on how they want to implement “Open Language” so that the HyperTalk syntax could be extended.  This piece (linked below) goes into more detail and is an interesting history of how LiveCode evolved from HyperCard, and how they plan to refactor it so that it’s extensible by an open source community.

LiveCode is a large, mature software product which has been around in some form for over 20 years. In this highly technical article, Mark Waddingham, RunRev CTO, takes us under the hood to look at our plan to modularize the code, making it easy for a community to contribute to the project. The project described in this post will make the platform an order of magnitude more flexible, extensible and faster to develop by both our team and the community.

Like many such projects which are developed by a small team (a single person to begin with – Dr Scott Raney – who had a vision for a HyperCard environment running on UNIX systems and thus started MetaCard from which LiveCode derives), LiveCode has grown organically over two decades as it adapts to ever expanding needs.

With the focus on maintenance, porting to new platforms and adding features after all this time evolving we now have what you’d describe as a monolithic system – where all aspects are interwoven to some degree rather than being architecturally separate components.

via Taming the Monolith.

Survey of Non-Doctoral Computing Departments: Please Participate!

The Computing Research Association conducts an annual survey of US doctorate-granting departments in Computing, called the Taulbee Survey.  It’s an important resource for understanding the state of computing education in the United States, but only gives the research-focused side of the picture.  The ACM has launched an effort to do a similar survey of the-rest-of-us (hence it’s original name, “TauRUs,” Taulbee for the Rest of Us).  Please do help to get the word out so that we can get a clearer picture of US post-secondary computing education.

As of last week, the NDC Survey of Non-Doctoral Granting Departments in Computing (all U.S., not-for-profit bachelor’s and master’s programs in CE, CS, IS, IT, SE), previously known as TauRUs, is live. We have gone out to our list of qualifying schools, but we can use YOUR help in getting the word out so we can get to those who may have been left off the mailing, and those who might “forget” to participate! Among other benefits, there is a drawing for five $2,500 grants for the respondents’ departments!

Here is an informational flyer you can share with your colleagues in the non-doctoral computing program community: http://www.acm.org/education/acm-ndc_flyer.pdf.

There will also be an announcement in SIGCSE welcome bags and its listserv.