PPIG 2021 - 32nd Annual Workshop
Markup-driven polymorphism: A little journey (Work in Progress)
Antranig Basman
Abstract: This paper describes a little journey through an interesting design space. As the author sat as a humble contractor in Cambridge University’s “Centre for Applied Research in Educational Technologies” in 2005, it struck him how useful it would be if people who had the capability to edit markup, but who were not necessarily very technical, could use that capability as far as possible to edit entire applications. This started a journey through many technologies and revisions of worldview, a whiteboard in Boulder in 2009, a realisation that there was not in fact any useful number of people in the target audience, and on finally implementing the capability (again) 16 years later, a realisation that everything had been designed wrongly and must be rebuilt from the start.