Stuff

[Maneesh Yadav]

There is some stuff going on in the Tunes "project" that irking me..feel
free to respond...

With respect to the people who are working on Brix and RetrOS etc...
There are more important things to do...you have invested lots of time and
effort to writing an OS...not totally different from any other.  We don't
need bootstrapping linkers drivers loaders and compilers right now,
they're all available and better than the ones any single coder could
make.  You can only develop you OSes so far...distributive computing,
symmetric multiprocessing, advanced techniques in memory managment, widely
implimented video suppourt, network cards simply can't be done without a
sizeable development effort, and furthermore scuh an effort is simply not
justified for the OS's mentioned.

As far as I I understand THIS IS THE EXACT TYPE OF THING TUNES IS AGAINST.
A good deal of work that you are doing is tedious (if you want to write
your own HD driver you have to look up specs and implement calls, ditto
for video, network blah blah blah...).  Someone slap me with a tuna if I
am wrong, but Tunes is about metaprogramming, coming up with a way to
specify information and methods for computers to work with that
information and be able to produce from it...(i.e. here's the
specifications for file system, please make it)...minimize the time from
the idea to the product.  As programmers we spend way to much time doing
the translating between specification and impliementation.  If we can
achieve this goal of having a unified system that can work with
information in such a manner (and do it dynamically) we can write anything
under it we want.  A system that could dynamically determine the optimum
scheduling algorithm and change it's own to that algorithm...have a
specification of a video card and write the driver...understand and API
and glue two different apps that use two different ones together, on it's
own (read no human editiing of code and recompiling etc.).  This is what
is wrong with software, we end up writing huge cathedrals and they become
so hard to change (look at any large freeware project...POV, fractint (I
love POV)) and eventually there are ideas that can't be easily represented
in those systems, and we have to build a new building or use an obscene
amount of glue. We want the building that can change itself...then we can
build anything out of it..anything at all.

Do you see how your proposed systems are leading to a brick wall?  Your
already defining API's writing stuff in asm...if TUNES is what I think it
is..some of the first things to produce under the TUNES environment would
be filesystems, thread schedulers etc,.  IT would be quite silly to claim
TUNES is removing all bad practicies in software design when it itself was
written in those principles and drag on the same problems.  

But we NEED to formalize how we represent ideas in this system first
(something that Brian's arrow stuff seems to have potential, but no paper
yet)..once we can define ideas and specify meaning..we are on are way.
And we can do thus under any environment...there is no need to bootstrap a
new one...yet.