filling out the plan for the talk tomorrow

notes/racket-days-abstract.txt

@@ -49,3 +49,71 @@ What were some of the technical challenges?
 What needs to be done next?
 
     Adding enough primitives to run racket/base
+
+
+----------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+The story for the presentation:
+
+What's Whalesong?  It's a Racket to JavaScript compiler.  Here's an
+example of it in action.
+
+(Compile a very simple program to a web page, a computation, then show
+that it's effective.)
+
+
+Whalesong will be used to support World programming for the web.  For
+example, we can support simple animations, as you'd expect:
+
+(Show a world program: the falling rain drops program.)
+
+
+
+But we can also do programs that have interactivity, such as:
+
+(Show another world program: pacman.)
+
+
+
+A core idea behind Whalesong is to reuse Racket's infrastructure as
+much as possible.  I'm not a compiler person.  I can piggiback on
+Matthew's work, though.  Whalesong reuses the bytecode compiler, and
+translates the bytecode to JavaScript.  I really am reusing the
+linguistic features of Racket.  For example, let's look at the
+less-than-impressive program output below.
+
+(Show the hello world program)
+
+
+This is not too impressive.  But let's look at the source code.
+
+(Show the BF program.)
+
+
+Yeah.  So we really are using Racket's underlying language features to
+handle things like macro expansion.
+
+
+
+Because we're on the web, we may even want to use functions that we've
+written in Racket as a part of regular web pages.  Whalesong lets you
+do this.
+
+(Show the factorial example, and how it can be used by external
+JavaScript on a web page).
+
+
+
+There's quite a bit that's missing: we don't yet have all of the
+primitives necessary to compile racket/base, so all Whalesong programs
+have to be in a language that ultimately bottoms to (planet
+dyoo/whalesong/lang/base).
+
+I'm going to get a release out in the following month, and the new
+versions of Moby Scheme for Smartphones, as well as the WeScheme
+environment, will be using the underlying evaluator of Whalesong.
+
+
+
+If you're interested, please talk to me during the break.  Thanks!