Tunes Concept of the Week

[Francois-Rene Rideau]

> Hello All --
>
> This list has seemed awefully quite this past month.
Quite quiet? Well, not that much (though it sure isn't the most active weeks).
Check the WWW index for any message you might have missed.
BTW, another independent subproject for anyone willing to help
might be to reorganize the mailing-list archive...

It is now time for implementation and finer thought,
no more for general design.


> What I wanted to suggest to you all was an extension to our idea that
> users and programmers are no different: that users and _programs_ are
> also really not that different.

>[example of great programs that couldn't interchange data but
>through manual human copying]
That's exactly what sucks about existing OSes:
they have only two disconnected interfaces,
one for the very-low-level components,
the other for the "end-user";
nothing in-between, no glue, no structure, just hack.
Sure there exist a lot of "user-level"
(actually, rather advance-programmer-level) protocols
for a lot of things, but the OS offers no support to manage consistently
identification, use, upgrade, extension, recovery,
of any of 


> In Tunes, let us not write applications, which perform a set of tasks in
> a straight, linear manner, but "packages", which extend the "basic
> system" by making availible additional types, editors with which a human
> can modify and examine the values of data of these types, and functions
> to work on these types, to the system at large.
>
That's exactly the plan from the beginning;
that's the meaningful essence of what lies inside the "OO" noise.

>[vision of the system]
That's exactly how I see things.

> Am I making sense?  Do others of you have similar thoughts?  Comments?
That's exactly what we're at.
Perhaps you could write a consistent article about that,
to enhance the Tunes pages,
using or not my drafts on the subject.

> How can we make this vision -- and the whole Tunes vision -- come to be
> before we're all 90 years old and running out of steam?
>
By working a lot, and convincing key people to work in the same direction
together with us. Kick my ass so I do it, or better, do it yourself.


--    ,                                         ,           _ v    ~  ^  --
-- Fare -- rideau@clipper.ens.fr -- Francois-Rene Rideau -- +)ang-Vu Ban --
--                                      '                   / .          --
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