I have been playing with yahoo pipes. Super cool. All in all it is a great step for yahoo in showing how "the network is the computer" and trying to enable end user programming. I am very skeptical that it will get more users than Apple's Automator, but it is a great idea for a product.

I think the product is still in beta. The UI is buggy. Many pipes don't behave as expected, such as using a sort pipe on a Date type uses an alphanumeric sort, instead of a date sort.

I was trying to build a content publishing pipeline for many of the different web apps I use, such as flickr, yelp, etc. I will be keeping an eye on pipes to see when I can get it working. Cheers to the yahoo team!

I read Alan Kay et al's NSF proposal to re-envision how we program computers. Also there is a video Alan talking at Intel Research at Berkley. Lastly I was really intrigued with his description of "Albert" a bootstrapping VM compiler. After much googling I found Ian Piumarta's Open, extensible dynamic programming systems paper from DSL 2006. What an ambitious and worthy project! The idea of a self describing exploratorium which is 20,000 lines of code to produce a new personal computer is brilliant. There is a lot to think about with the dozen or so principals he delineates and the many experimental fields of computation which they are going to explore. Quite inspiring.