once upon a time i had the chance to listen to dan ingalls, who - as other say who know well - has the ability to write the best code. asking what good code means to him he simply says: "typically good code, if you look at it, it is doing what it is doing and usually there aren't any distracting things that get in the way of understanding that", adding:

IngallsGoodCode (audio/mpeg, 349 KB)

three reasons why the lively kernel project is called lively: reason one: 01LivelyKernel (audio/mpeg, 296 KB)

reason two: 02LivelyKernel (audio/mpeg, 220 KB)

reason three: 03LivelyKernel (audio/mpeg, 194 KB)

someone wrote somewhere that the idea for the lively kernel came up while drinking coffee somewhere. that might have been so, yet as dan ingalls recalls there was more than just coffein involved: a thought about web programming and simplicity ...

... and it all seemed much more complicated than it needed to be. the two of us who had the FirstIdea (audio/mpeg, 469 KB) to this had both built simple virtual machines in the past and we thought how can this be, it is 20 years later and things are much more complicated; the ought to be simpler, so we decided we should just do what we had done before which is take a dynamic language and a graphics kernel and but them together and see what we can do on the web ... ... the web could have been based on s-expression and it would have been a very different world; and it wouldn't have needed the lively kernel." | dan ingalls, may 2008, potsdam.