What if someone were crazy enough to make graphics do lisp, and then create a visual emacs for them to live in?
Hi, I'm Fred Lakin of the Performing Graphics Company.
The vmacs project is about giving people a
performance medium for text graphic
improvisation.
The goal is to build a visual instrument with the same
agility and ready to handness that lisp hackers have
enjoyed for years in emacs.
Why lisp? Programs can be visual data if you play your cards right.*
And, why emacs? Well, emacs, the favorite textual manipulator of lisp hackers, is congenial, extensible**, and most of all, agile.
But, in a performance graphics system, agility must be more than skin deep.
Analogous to the experience of using a lisp/emacs system,
vmacs supports and encourages nimble text graphic manipulation of
all kinds, programmatic as well as manual.
And so, speaking programmatically, if I may, because graphics do lisp in
vmacs and thus can perform text graphic computation the processing
power of a visual evaluator is available
with the same ready to handness as drawing and dragging.
This means on one hand that simple text graphic manipulation, the nucleus
of vmacs, can naturally extend to encompass the tasks of everyday
computing (and making coffee):
And it means on the other hand that all the
processing power of a full blown visual
lisp is available to measure and support
to mediate the user's text graphic performance.
And finally of course in the tradition and spirit of lisp/emacs, vmacs also makes a great programming environment.
* McCarthy, John, "Recursive functions of symbolic expressions and their computation by machine", Comm. ACM, 1960, vol. 3, no.4.
** Stallman, Richard, "EMACS the Extensible, Customizable Self-Documenting Display Editor", MIT AI Memo 519a, March 1981.
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Copyright 1986, 1996, 2003 PGC
Note: "vmacs" is a trademark of the Performing Graphics Company.
