🚀 go-pugleaf

john ousterhout from uc berkeley and now sun microsystems has done
the sprite operating system (with a hoard of grad students) and the
the tcl/tk languages.  he will be here in boulder for a usenix program
committee meeting and i arm twisted him into a colloquium talk

here are the details, stolen from the recent fruug announcement:


OUSTERHOUT TO SPEAK IN BOULDER

On August 18th at 2:30 in the CU Engineering Center, room ECCR 2-28, John
Ousterhout of Sun Microsystems Laboratories will be giving a talk entitled
Scripts and Agents: The New Software High Ground.  Evi Nemeth has graciously
extended an invitation to FRUUG members to attend this talk.  Following is
the abstract for John's talk.

What would it mean to program the Internet?  The Internet today combines
heterogeneity and inflexibility in a way that makes it impossible to
manipulate its resources in a general-purpose way.  The solution to this
problem is a universal scripting language that can run on all the Internet
platforms and be embedded in all the major applications.  With such a lan-
guage, scripts become first-class objects in the Internet: the same script
can run anywhere, and scripts can be used as a powerful and flexible
communication mechanism between the entities on the Internet.  In this new
world, operating systems as we know them today are mostly irrelevant.  I
will use the Tcl scripting language, the Tk toolkit, and the Safe-Tcl
security extensions to describe how a universal scripting language might
work.  I will also talk briefly about the kinds of application that might
result, such as active documents, and compare Tcl/Tk with alternatives such
as Telescript, Java, and Visual Basic.


-evi