We discuss the claim that a live literate editor such as Ampleforth [1] can be used as an application builder and platform. We showcase two applications constructed using Ampleforth as existence proofs of this claim: Telescreen, a presentation tool, and Ozymandias, a computational notebook, both created in Ampleforth. Our experience indicates that a self-contained persistent representation for documents, customizable by the application, is essential. Document nesting (aka transclusion) impacts this persistence scheme, and is crucial in ensuring a composable document model that avoids the siloing of applications. The conclusion is that the initial claims made for Ampleforth are valid.

Gilad Bracha is the creator of the Newspeak programming language and a well known researcher in the area of object-oriented programming languages. He was awarded the senior Dahl-Nygaard prize in 2017. He is currently a Technical Fellow at F5, and has held positions at Google, SAP Labs, Cadence, and Sun. He has authored or co-authored several books including the Java Language and Virtual Machine Specifications, and the Dart Programming Language. Prior to joining Sun, he worked on Strongtalk, the Animorphic Smalltalk System. He received his B.Sc in Mathematics and Computer Science from Ben Gurion University in Israel and a Ph.D. in Computer Science from the University of Utah.