Glenelg Smith

Hi, Glenelg Smith from Hobart, Tasmania, Australia.

Recently (Mar 2010) discovered this site, and am fascinated by some of the information and discussions herein.

First considered contributing partway into a page called TopMind, but at the time wasn't aware that I didn't have to register or anything to edit. Is top still active or has he moved onto greener pastures?

I have been interested in computers since the very early 80s, just after leaving university (degree in pure mathematics). My prime interests have all revolved around computer languages and language design. Have generally managed to avoid everything mainstream, and tended to work in isolation. My first great love was FORTH, which I first heard about from an article in Byte magazine. I was so impressed by the description of the language that I went home and implemented a simple version of it on my TRS80 in Z80 assembler! Soon after, bought a C64 and a proper implementation of Forth. I was in heaven! I haven't used Forth in 20 years or so, but it still colours my thinking. Currently, I use various flavours of Unix, am interested in Free Software, and work mainly in shell-script because that is the nature of my day-to-day work. Favour languages that are interactive, highly abstract, extendable (?extensible?) and based on one or two concepts, with a simple syntax. That doesn't mean I actually use them. Enjoyed two years of work using SharpAPL in the late-80s.

My latest passion is a collection of SourceForge projects based on a technology called Offsiders (http://offsider.sourceforge.net/). To quote a phrase I found on this very site (PersistentLanguage), Offsiders provide a "concurrent, persistent language with shared mutable state" .. which .. "is just a few steps away from being a (not necessarily relational) database." .. Except that it is not a language. It is, however, object-oriented in the sense of being message-based with ExtremeLateBinding? everywhere. Built on this technology is Weave (http://weavedb.sourceforge.net/), which is a navigatable object database. Until I visited this site, I didn't even realise that NavigationalDatabase was an existing concept. Nor did I realise that the Relational/Navigational war has already been fought and lost. Nevertheless, I use both Offsiders and Weaves in my day-to-day work, to great effect.

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