Request (Humble): Reading list for TUNES!

[Lachlan Pitts]

Hi TUNESers,
   Congratulations to all for the now frenzied activity on the TUNES
list.... good to see.
   (So says a long term lurker).

<Request Attitude="HUMBLE">
However, as my declarative programming experience is EXTREMELY limited and
my mathematical background equally as laughable, I was wondering if some
kind soul could perhaps/maybe, possibly see their way clear to creating a
notional "Reading list for TUNES", where someone like me... (and I hope
there are others) could start small, churn through lots of coffee and then
(in a year or so of Sundays) manage to vaguely abstract a notion of what
Brian and the rest are talking about?
</Request>

The following borrows heavily from the notion that fools can SOMETIMES ask
questions that
 geniuses (irregular plural?) don't.  So please bear with a humble recent
student's meanderings.

Some time ago I did screw up the courage to ask a question about Intentional
Programming which had two responses - both of which stated that since it was
notionally a Microsoft Technology it was not worth the bother....

Question 1.
Will TUNES borrow from the Intentional Programming paradigm? (And do/could
intentions correspond to global program properties a la Xerox Aspect
Oriented Programming?)

Question 2.
With all of the semantic constructs and metadata and meta-programming being
bandied about has anyone ever thought of using less abstract and more
concrete methods of information systems a la SGML / XML for the information
definition and retrieval?  (With its new languages for resource description,
linking, pointing, schema definitions etc XML and some sort of mostly
declarative ARROW based language over the top might be a good initial start
for the TUNES system).

[Actually - it might be a good test for the new system - design a
cross-platform XML/SGML browser / miner / server system - what do you say?]

Question 3.
Would the Java Virtual Machine provide the necessary basis for our
computational / processing unit abstraction? (It might make bootstrapping
platform independent code a lot easier).

Ah well, thats my thoughts too late/early in the morning.... please don't
let me disturb any real TUNES work being done...


Regards,

Lachlan Pitts
Technical Consultant
Softworks Australia Pty Ltd

e-mail: L.Pitts@uq.net.au