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Sol language project

Richard W. DeVaul
Vision and Modeling Group, MIT Media Lab

Description

Sol is a new Internet programming language designed as an elegant alternative to Java. Sol has a beautiful Scheme-derived syntax and is an ideal choice for coding computational design work, simulation, or any other application in which coding elegance and portability are an issue.

News

I finally finished my masters thesis, so I can now spend time on the Sol project again (it was languishing for a few months). I've also changed research groups, and received permission from my new advisor (Prof. Alex "Sandy" Pentland) to release Sol under an MIT open-source license, which is something I've wanted to do for over a year now. The code is in pretty rough shape right now, but I will put together an early-alpha release by the end of the week (June 13, 1999). I will also try to contact those of you who have expressed interest in working on Sol and explain the new situation in more detail.
Tue Jun 8 14:33:10 EDT 1999

Update:
I haven't contacted anyone because I'm still waiting on the official wording of the license. I'm also writing some README stuff for the distribution and fixing some other minor problems. I'll release the alpha as soon as I'm sure the license is right, hopefully by the end of the week (June 20, 1999). We're getting closer...
Mon Jun 14 03:23:11 EDT 1999

Update II, the sequel
Ok, I've persist in being totally lame. I haven't managed to get the Final Word on the open-source license at the media lab. I'm now heavily involved in a SIGGRAPH project and won't be able to do more on this until July 4, at the earliest, and maybe not until mid August after SIGGRAPH. Yes, I really am going to make this work. I've spent two years on Sol and I'm not going to let it die.
Thu June 24 00:35:15 EDT 1999

Table of Contents

SolDesign icon

The Sol Language Project

The Sol project explores the relationship between language design and creative expression. The Sol language grew out of our desire to create a syntax for expressing computation elegant and expressive enough to be an artistic medium in its own right. Sol provides an extremely powerful set-theory based typing system and features a lexically parallel structure - concurrent operations can be seen at a glance in Sol source code.

Sol extends the syntax of Scheme LISP with concepts borrowed from set and category theory, to create a language that is beautiful, powerful, and concise. Although inspired by abstract and formal ideas from mathematics, the intent of Sol is to provide means of expressing parallel and sequential computation that is practical and useful, as well as elegant and beautiful.

Sol is inspired by the idea that there is an underlying aesthetic to coding, that the beauty of algorithms (like the beauty mathematics generally) is a wonderful and real thing, but that the means of expression commonly available to programmers is pretty ugly. There has long been the notion of a trade-off between the practicality of a programming language and it's elegance. Sol is an attempt to create a language which is both practical and beautiful, in which it is possible both to get the job done and to express the underlying beauty of the solution. Every programming language is a medium of expression --- Sol is an attempt to create a medium as beautiful as the message.

Much of Sol is currently implemented as an embedded language in R4RS Scheme. However, Sol is moving towards an optimized Java implementation based on the Kawa Scheme to Java-VM compiler. For more information on Scheme, see the MIT Scheme home page at http://www-swiss.ai.mit.edu/scheme-home.html.

$Revision: 1.5 $ last updated $Date: 1999/06/14 07:29:29 $
rich@media.mit.edu