to brian

[RE01 Rice Brian T. EM2]

>You seem very upset, and it's probably partially triggered by myself
>getting upset in the last post.  My feelings are making issues out of
>things that are not important.  Let me explain why I am having trouble:
>I don't understand why you seem so rushed.  It is impossible for me to
>discuss anything else with you until you clarify this.  Not even the
>direction we are going.
	I joined the group because I had already been researching the ideas
behind making an object system "work" for quite a while.  If I wanted to
join to simply share ideas, I would have done so quite a long time ago,
near the time when I discovered the project.  However, at the time, I
was in the process of leaving college and was to lose my internet
account, so that my joining would not have been very rewarding over the
long run.
	Let me rephrase this: I believe that I have found a foundational
framework for most of the conceptual answers for which you are looking.
It is contained in a plethora of papers published within the last five
years from some of the less public voices in research mathematics and
computer science.  I have collected a well-rounded representative group
of those results.  I'm already sick of the discussions which I have had
with fellow programmers who follow profits with the addiction of a
junkie.  I _need_ to act to prevent being overcome by this pressure.
You see, right now I have a job which gives me no satisfaction, involves
too much stress to deal with, reduces my personality to nil, treats me
as less than human and dumb as a post, and places me in the 'reject'
category of society if I quit the job.  I could be making three times
the salary in a civilian job _right_now_, even without a college degree,
and work half as much.  My _only_ consolation is the research I am doing
and the possibility of entering the college which I was not allowed to
attend, though I received a full scholarship: MIT.
	Furthermore, I believe that this project, with the appropriate social
substructure, could succeed in relatively little time.  Consider that
most of the work is conceptual.  This means that development could be
accelerated immeasurably by the correct thought pattern, and that deep
reflection and learning can achieve that acceleration quite readily.
This development can cut away most of the coding time by the _correct_
application of study.  I believe that I have already accomplished a lot
of this.  However, the stresses from my job have forced me to stop the
work for months at a time, which is why the project has taken much more
time than it should.
	Now, my ship is about to be deployed for over six months in the Persian
Gulf, with my only connection to the western world through e-mail and
limited web access.  Since I will shortly achieve the senior
classification for my job, my workload will _finally_ be reduced, and
with little distractions I could complete the VM-supported version of
the project within that time frame.  However, I will need help.  The
sort of help I need requires people who will see beyond words.
	Indeed, my project will resemble yours (David's) in some ways.
However, I already have plans to turn it into a proto-Tunes system, with
horrible efficiency at first, which will allow us to have a persistent
system to reason about in terms of its semantical problems as well as
its efficiency problems.  For instance, I'm interested to know what kind
and how large the minimal object system will be which can reason about
itself (on the VM) in a computationally-complete way.  Keep in mind that
my objects are not computational objects in the conventional sense, but
mathematical (logical?) objects within a temporal context (an inadequate
description, I know, but perhaps you will get the gist of it).
Everything at first will have to be an explicit object (defined as
elements of main memory) to the VM.  Their fields will not even directly
be attributes, since those will be separate objects themselves.  Other
objects will not exist, at first.  I believe that this kind of rigorous
definition will give us the appropriate framework to start from.  We
should develop a VM which will represent in itself with an (eventually
appropriate) structure of objects (remember that I mean to have each
structure an individual object as well).  I want to trace the operations
of the system as it interacts with the user through a dialog interface
and study the results to evaluate our design considerations for the VM.
Eventually, the VM should be able to deal with objects not explicitly
laid out in memory as separate atoms.  Even the creation of new contexts
should be done without changing the scheme for representing objects,
until that is we have developed the ideas necessary to include this
within the system's capabilities in a Tunes-friendly way.