Reactors is a visual programming system I wrote in Macintosh Common LISP . It sprang from an idea Professor Lee Spector used in his Advanced Topics in Artificial Intelligence course when I took it in the fall of 1993. The idea was to create a hierarchy of reactive black boxes which communicated via time-stamped events and could be linked together to create complex behaviors out of simple components. I created a visual interface to these objects, heavily influenced by the MAX environment. The basic reactor is a little box on the screen, with input ports and output ports .
Input ports are along the top, output ports along the bottom.
A reactor with 5 inputs and 2 outputs. Some reactors have parameters which the user can edit visually. CLicking on the disclosure triangle will zoom open the reactor to display its' insides. Each little box inside it directly edits the value of a CLOS slot. The Same reactor, zoomed open to edit its' slots.