I have been so lazy: I cannot believe it.
What is happening?
Well many new findings: and discussions: and I think we shall have a roadmap soon.
But in this blog I will proceed one by one, illustrating each construct through examples.
Because of the difficulty and subtlety of our goal, because of the beauty and simplicity we want, because of the coverage of the descriptive tools we are making, it is best we proceed one by one.
Since interactions are everywhere and since many people seem to be approaching this idea from many angles --- from the observation that transaction is too restrictive for huge systems; from the observation that sharing and using financial protocols together is really beneficial for users; from the obvervation that we should share the infrastructure for message passing since in business we deal with messages not call-return; and from the need to describe applications and even operating systems as concurrent modules communicating with each other --- it does seem a good paradigm for describing interactions is being desired.
A paradigm --- or abstraction: we surely need a good abstraction or abstractions to articulate, model and describe, as well as building such interactional systems. And tools. And rules. And of course good implementation ideas. Everything. But we need some abstractions to start from.
A conversation is only one of possible such abstractions, a modest proposal from us and some of our friends. We recall it was once named session: it was also named contract; it was also named protocol. All these names give one side of this idea. Whatever it is there seems to be something which may be usable here: something concretely usable, at least for some purposes, for scribbling interactions nicely and clearly. Scribble is an experiment to create a new piece of a descriptive tool (or a family of tools) based on this abstraction.
It is for scribbling: so it should work with a simple setting of pencil and paper: but of course it will make the best of all software tools and artifacts and infrastructure we can avail.
And starting from a smallest conversation which is just one-time interaction done alone, and reaching a conversation which consists of 10 million messages or even more (in the large scale this is a norm in international financial protocols such as SWIFT; and in the minuscule level this is again a norm in on-chip interconnect which easily allows 1 million message passing in a second), we have many conversations and its phenomenology (or zoology if you like) never ceases to surprise this one of the humble designers of scribble. These are what we should capture and I now realise it is a fascinating journey we are now going through.
Today I finish here: I will continue with the choice example in the next blog. There are some who have new examples --- which we may be introduce when here is a chance. Let's also treat it here. Scribble is about a conversation so it is not surprising we are starting have several conversations. And conversations are never just one way: ideas are merged and interwoven and will lead to further budding ideas. This blog is just a record of such conversations surrounding scribble.
