I agree that it only makes toy demos, but it definitely goes beyond WIMP. It’s a simulation of the sort of interface one might expect in a future where every surface is a screen—it’s a janky, extremely-low-fidelity simulation, which holds together barely well enough to serve the purpose, but it does serve, and it’s an interesting way to try out this interaction style.
A surprisingly large part of Dynamic Land is actually (in some sense) self-hosting. There is a small core/kernel that is extrinsic, including e.g. the parser for the language. But a lot of low-level functionality is indeed implemented inside the interpreter (as I recall, they use a sort of pseudo-Lua, crossed with Smalltalk-like agent stuff—my vague recollection is that there’s something like a Lua interpreter with a custom preprocessor underlying it.)
I agree that it only makes toy demos, but it definitely goes beyond WIMP. It’s a simulation of the sort of interface one might expect in a future where every surface is a screen—it’s a janky, extremely-low-fidelity simulation, which holds together barely well enough to serve the purpose, but it does serve, and it’s an interesting way to try out this interaction style.
A surprisingly large part of Dynamic Land is actually (in some sense) self-hosting. There is a small core/kernel that is extrinsic, including e.g. the parser for the language. But a lot of low-level functionality is indeed implemented inside the interpreter (as I recall, they use a sort of pseudo-Lua, crossed with Smalltalk-like agent stuff—my vague recollection is that there’s something like a Lua interpreter with a custom preprocessor underlying it.)