Hackety.org

Unfortunately you can only create a view from the
original data, there is no way to create views whose
input is other views. This means that you cannot do
anything really interesting with values from multiple
documents. You can aggregate data from several documents
using the reduce functionality into buckets, but you
can't process that data further.

I've come to this idea also - when we do get it the world changes. New era for hackers. We will be able to operate against a couchdb cloud from a console-in-a-browser with the power of (and as a full alternative to) a unix system, and to think in terms of that cloud rather than in terms of services. The barrier between code and data will be much more blurred in practical terms because the cloud will host the services.

Another idea that couchdb already does that is a necessary pre-requisite to this outcome (from http://jchrisa.net/drl/_design/sofa/_show/post/standalone_applications_with_co):

Over the last few days I've polished up my
notion that CouchDB can be a perfectly viable
application host, all on its own, without any
3rd tier between database and client. That
is, CouchDB is capable of serving standalone
applications. These standalone CouchDB
applications can be deployed to any working
CouchDB node and used from any browser.

I wish couch was based on IO rather than javascript, because with IO you can reverse algorithms out of running code. Hence processes could act…

Whatever language you choose: write a lot of (small?) shell scripts. This is very unix-y and also easy. The composing of those scripts using unix-pipes also will give him a little bit experience with things like modularity.

Also, I'd choose a language I like and that I'm familiar with. I think OCaml would definitely be a good start. Strongly typed and strict, lots of possibilities for abstraction, it's all pretty cool. Or teach him (and yourself) Haskell using RWH or something.

If you go for an imperative language then Ruby or Python would probably be a good idea. Those languages are really a lot like English and have a lot of momentum. If you go for Ruby, take a look at http://hackety.org/, I think it's awesome for young programmers.

I guess it wouldn't be fun anymore if you got your fun from being seen as edgy, feeling like you're subversive, or from your chatting it up with other developers about it.

But if you got your fun from playing around with the language itself, exploring its nooks and crannies, and bring what you learned to other languages, there's no end to what fun you can have.

_why re-discovered adding and removing mixins from digging around the late Guy's archives, and implemented it as mixico
http://hackety.org/2008/10/06/mixingOurWayOutOfInstanceEval.html

And hell, this guy implemented fizzbuzz using C++ metaprogramming. http://web.telia.com/~u43518104/articles/fizzbuzz.htm

You scared me when you claimed that Hackety Hack is "on hiatus".

But, no, a look at http://hackety.org/ suggests that _Why is just on one of those epic hacker side-tracks, like Knuth went on when he took a decade-long break to invent TeX. To make Hackety Hack work well cross-platform, _Why had to invent a cross-platform Ruby-based toolkit for web-like apps (Shoes) and he's still kind of polishing that. So I don't think Hackety Hack is dead, yet. It may merely be cocooned, preparing to burst forth like Mothra and blow us all away with hurricane force.

Io has runtime macros. Messages are evaluated by the receiver and which can do whatever it wants with the message arguments (evaluate them, tear them apart and create new messages ... etc)

list(1, 2, 3, 4) select(isEven) map(+(1))
==> list(3, 5)

isEven and +(1) are messages that select and map evaluate.

Also see:

http://hackety.org/2008/01/05/ioHasAVeryCleanMirror.html

I just noticed that _why apparently deleted his twitter account. I then found that that wasn't all he deleted:

http://twitter.com/_why
http://github.com/why
http://whytheluckystiff.net/
http://poignantguide.net/
http://hackety.org/
http://shoooes.net/

All disappeared...

For those who don't know who I'm talking about: http://wikipedia.org/wiki/Why_the_lucky_stiff