Yes, a group of us are working on this, and we're finally making
progress. Most of the group are from MIT, which should surprise
no one, and I'm the lone California member.
However, our initial target was for use with network management and our
goal has been means by which one machine can get a remote machine to
act on its behalf, even if the net is partitioned. This is, I think,
quite a different thing than a "smart document" (which is what I think
we are talking about on these lists.)
We are finding security to be a real tough nut to crack. In our
definition, programs can create yet more programs on other machines.
It's necessary to add mechanisms to keep track of chains of privilege
and prevent mutations, etc. simply having a "safe" execution
environment isn't enough if it is possible to establish a collection
of interacting machines which is not also "safe".
I suspect before we get into picking a language we really ought to
cogitate for a while and try to understant how much power we want to
put into smart documents.
--karl--