[Grace-core] Grace

[James Noble]

Hi Eric

> I read about your on-going effort with Grace. Unfortunately I  
> couldn't attend OOPSLA this year.
> I am deeply interested in this effort and would very much like to be  
> involved in one way or another, or rather, in many ways.

well that sounds great!  we'd love to have you involved.

> To start, as a supporter of the effort. And more, obviously, since  
> at Univ of Chile I am involved in teaching programming languages and  
> can/will get involved in introductory teaching in the next couple of  
> years (for now I have mostly looked into PLT's HtDP approach).

where we are now is working out a strawman language specification.
This is mostly coordinated by Andrew Black, Kim Bruce, and I - our
most repeated piece of advice was "don't do this by committee" - so
for the time being, we're holding the language design.  As we get
things together, we will post details of this on the blog, at
www.gracelang.org - as you can see, web design is *not* one of our
stronger points :-).  By putting things on the blog, we hope to
be clear we're after a truly open language - and also to involve
more people and build a community: we can't do this on our
own.

As well as the public blog, we have a private mailing list, and Wiki -
this is where we prep stuff before it goes on the blog. It's obviously
all a bit random now - if you'd like to have a look, if you email
Andrew (black at cs.pdx.edu) an htpasswd name & password pair, then he
can set you up with mailing list and wiki access.

So,  there are many ways you could be involved, from commenting
on the evolving design, checking details, or looking at implementation
or IDE work - we hope to have enough of the version 0.1 design to
start on that by Christmas  (although, there's probably stuff worth
doing there already, actually).

> I appreciate if you can let me know how to get involved.

so, I don't know how much time or effort or resources (students?)
you have - or what you're most interested in looking at. But I'm
sure there are things you could do here - and hopefully this
will become clearer as we start organising more details.

cheers

James