Speaking fondly of an operating system usually misconstrued by a younger generation as merely an ancient text editor older than Stallman's beard, Steve Yegge states that "Emacs is the world's last Lisp Machine. All the rest of them are at garage sales."

While that's indeed the case in a strict sense, in a slightly wider sense the essence of the legendary Lisp machines has managed to survive to the present day in at least one other closely related fork in the road, namely the Squeak project. And now, from Dan Ingalls — the original designer of Squeak and one of the fathers of Smalltalk — comes Lively Kernel, a self-hosting, metacircular prototyping and development environment implemented in JavaScript, a programming language that itself has considerable Lisp ancestry.

A little something that I hacked up this afternoon to get to grips with the new Canvas HTML element...

The Game of Life is the best-known example of a two-dimensional cellular automaton. It was invented by the mathematician John Conway in 1970 and has become a textbook demonstration of emergence: complex and counter-intuitive behavior arising from fundamentally simple rules and interactions. The Game of Life is based on just four simple and elegant rules, but the patterns it is capable of producing are far from trivial; indeed it has been shown to be capable of acting as a universal Turing machine.