[nfbcs] FW: [program-l] Quorum 3.0 and Sodbeans 5.0 released

[Rasmussen, Lloyd]

This programming language and environment, specifically designed to help young blind people learn computer programming, has evolved and branched out for the past several years. Many of its components may prove to be useful. The project leader’s e-mail address is:
 Andreas Stefik <stefika at gmail.com> .

Lloyd Rasmussen, Senior Staff Engineer
National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped, Library of Congress
Washington, DC 20542   202-707-0535
http://www.loc.gov/nls/
The preceding opinions are my own and do not necessarily reflect those of the Library of Congress, NLS.

From: program-l-bounce at freelists.org [mailto:program-l-bounce at freelists.org] On Behalf Of Andreas Stefik
Sent: Tuesday, June 30, 2015 7:00 PM
To: program-l at freelists.org
Subject: [program-l] Quorum 3.0 and Sodbeans 5.0 released

Folks,

I know there are some folks that follow some of the programming my lab works on and I'm pleased to announce that Quorum 3.0, which took approximately 16 months of work and is a near rewrite of the programming language, has now been released publicly. Here's our release notes with the highlights:

http://quorumlanguage.com/documents/release.php

This is the most significant milestone on our projects, probably ever, as Quorum is now scalable enough that it can be, and is, written in itself. It now also includes basic support for a game engine in OpenGl, an audio engine in OpenAL (3D sound support), support for Lego Robotics (which is accessible), and considerable changes to the backend (e.g., ASM5 bytecode generator, Antlr 4 parsing). In regard to accessibility, many accessibility features can now be flipped on or off, which we hope will be helpful to people, as this has long been requested. We'll be showing everything at the Quorum conference soon (EPIQ: http://quorumlanguage.com/epiq.php)

Folks that want to try it out can do so with the following update center from NetBeans 8.0.2 (or you can download Sodbeans separately if you prefer):

http://quorumlanguage.com/updates/quorum/updates.xml

This release has been a long-time coming and I want to thank the myriad of folks in this community that have helped us along the way. In terms of Accessibility, I want to thank the Washington State School for the Blind, which has helped fund the accessible lego robotics project, the National Science Foundation (which gives us the bulk of our funding) and Sina Bahram for answering more questions than he should probably be willing to answer.

Andreas Stefik, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor
Department of Computer Science
University of Nevada, Las Vegas