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Welcome to functional! (working title)

This is putting finger to keyboard on implementing a vision of what software should be that I've been pondering for 20 years or more.

The software we use today is usually rigid. You buy or download a program, and it does what it does and that is that. But if anything should be plastic, it's software. We should take it for granted that the software we use can be modified by us, and we shouldn't have to be programmers to do that.

Which also means that software should be heavily customizable even for non-programmers. I'll have a lot more to say about how that will work, but note that the most successful paradigms for non-programmers to develop software are:

• Excel; and
• Filemaker/Access

What do these have in common? Functional programming. Ordinary mortals can work out how to do functional things much more easily than they can work out how to do imperative programming.

Visual Basic does a great job of making it relatively easy to learn to program. But anyone can sit down with a couple of examples and start getting stuff done with Excel.

So this will be something akin to Excel or Filemaker. But not the same. I've some novel ideas thrown into the mix here also.

This all works transparently across the internet, as well. Different sites that use this Framework will be able to interact, embed each other's content and so on pretty much seamlessly.

Oh, and this will make APIs a first-class concept. Anything you can show can be made into an API with just a click. Not unlike what Wolfram's new language does (but I thought of it a long time ago, honest!).

Early days yet.

Stage 1 will be a sort of basic Filemaker like thing. Define a table with a set of fields and get forms, table views and query capability. The more advanced stuff will come later. Stand by.