Having time&knowledge

[RE01 Rice Brian T. EM2]

>> Surely someone here who is so inclined can help me, or at
>>least help me
>> in contacting someone who would be inclined to help me in my
>>endeavors.
>Like you can see we are just a few here, and the only thing our
>leader does well is to not give up the project. As far as I know,
>he has no clear ideas on how the reflective system should be 
>implemented. He seems to have no time to put on the project.
>But he's the only one that accept the role of leader. Besides,
>he is the more knowledgeable among us.

i'm disappointed by that.

>Fare seems to find RScheme is not good enough, so for him, an
>intermediary project to write a better Scheme seems to be needed
>before working on Tunes.
>
>Fare seems to be the only one to really know Scheme or any other
>functionnal language here. Me, I am limited with my small 85Mb
>hard disk, I tried Linux Debian, but came back to the small
>Oberon system. But I have tried many languages since I first came
>here on my sister's bigger computer and found thah I don't like
>Lisp syntax. My favorite language change every month. This month
>it is a prototype based language with some reflective features.
>This language is Agora.
>
>We have been waiting for the new version of the OS toolkit for
>about one year almost without doing anything.

what?!?  why low-level stuff?  why products designed by conservative
thinkers?  'favorite language'?!?  you're addicted to the old system.
we're here to make a new system.  and since the project is a
cybernetical one, one of ideas and concepts, your own thought patterns
affect how you work on the project and whether or not you help it.

>If you think you are near the goal, then you did a very poor job
>at explaining yours ideas. You are talking about performance of
>a directed graph and I have no ideas what you want to put in
>the nodes. Are you trying to do graph-rewriting techniques like
>the Clean compiler do or what?

no compiler yet.  the nodes would be nothing, be other arrows, or be
groups of arrows (read 'be' as 'point to').  no code, as yet, would be
generated until complete reflection is achieved.  this entire
development is centered around building a population of data-structures
from which can be read logical meaning.  in other words, these
data-structures would form a reasoning system (interpreted by the
underlying c-program at first, that is.)

>I am not very good at mathematics. Trying to read papers from
>Luca Cardelli "http://www.luca.demon.co.uk/", I was amazed to see how
>mathematicians are able to express simple concepts in such weird notation.
>In a sense I feel that only if I was able to decipher those notations would I
>be able
>to help you with your 'system'.

the key to reading that kind of writing is that you must learn to work
with totally arbitrary symbols, for the purpose of removing any
preconceived notions about the system.  this is the real benefit behind
symbolic logics and mathematics.

>If you think you know how the internals of a Tunes-like system
>could work, I suggest you take a month to try to write a 20 pages
>paper to describe it.
>If you want us to tell you how we think Tunes should work, than
>the truth is that I don't know and I have not much to suggest.

for now, i don't believe that that is possible.  i've discussed earlier
how a full tunes system would be capable of ontological relativisation,
giving itself new meaning for every context.  this property alone means
that no definition is complete for tunes, since it will not suffice for
millions of contexts which could be constructed from within tunes. in
addition, how do you explain to the average person what a system is
which has no true data encapsulation?  it's like saying that nothing
means anything, except to the system as a whole.  people just don't
explicitly think that way on the average.