Designing a language for the itemized environment

In this lab report, we look at Wonderful, the language purpose-built for handling items and interfaces in the itemized operator environment.

I’m in the midst of building a new user environment with the kinds of ideas that I’ve been exploring for personal computing’s future. Over the course of several lab reports, we’re looking at how this user environment works, inside and out. In the last lab report, we explored the Item Store, a database of chronological facts that serves as our persistent storage layer in the itemized environment.

Now, we’re going to take a look at the programming language purpose-built for handling items and interfaces in this environment. It has several features that help interfaces connect to the item store, and for users to iterate on their interfaces and programs from within their normal operating spaces, interacting with code items with the same benefits they gain from the rest of their things existing in an itemized environment.