I rarely play computer games, probably because i find programming so fun (or maybe just because i’m a dull boy). Therefore, this recent Wired News article was a total surprise to me. It reviews playsh, a pretty interesting collaborative programming environment.
If you’re not as dull as i am, you’ll already know about MUDs and MOOs, the popular distributed role-playing platforms. Playsh substitutes the grues and spells of your typical MOO by whatever program code you’re working on. Actually, not only you, but any other coder connected to your server. The idea of wondering around rooms where you find your programs objects and APIs and pick and modify them possibly in collaboration with other programmers in the room is quite amusing. We are just taking the living environment of dynamic languages one step further, making it collaborative.
Playsh is Matt Webb‘s (of Mind Hacks fame) brainchild, and he has already released a Python-based proof-of-concept implementation developed in collaboration with Ben Cerveny. Documentation is still scarce, but this blog entry of Matt’s gives a good overview of his goals and plans for the future, and there’s also some info around on Matt and Ben’s recent Etech session on playsh. Also worth reading are Matt’s ideas on the history of physics and the future of computing and his essay on modernity and protest, which provide the intellectual background that has led Matt to playsh.
Playsh depens on quite a few external modules and installing it is currently a bit of a chore, but if you get it running you’ll have a text-based interface that allows coding network objects (accessed via standard web protocols like RSS or HTTP) as you wander around its MUD-like rooms together with any other player, er, programmer. Each object you encounter has a set of shared properties (akin to instance variables) and verbs (methods on them), the latter being user specific. To modify and add verbs or objects, one drops from the navigation environment into and interactive Python interpreter. The nifty thing is that not only the objects, but the interpreter itself is shared among programmers: you can see your colleagues typing their code and have your say on it!
Interesting as they are, these ideas are by no means completely new, as any Croquet user will tell you. But still.
March 23, 2006 at 3:28 am
Very interesting. I didn’t know MUD or MOO earlier, I am as dull as you are :-).
March 23, 2006 at 4:50 am
[...] Update: People are trying playsh and liking it. Cool. [...]
March 24, 2006 at 1:01 pm
Mud Object Orientated on LambdaMOO and the like is actually the first object orientated system I used. In fact I can say I really learnt C and OOP through MUD’s and the like, rather than the lectures I took. Afterall, it’s much more of an incentive to get your programming right if you’re getting positive feedback about your “cool spawning viking”. Man, those were the days … ;-)