Everyone chill

[Tril]

On Tue, 27 Apr 1999, Maneesh Yadav wrote:

> Yikes, the mailing list is getting heated....LET"S NOT START A FLAMEWAR.
> These things start by miscommunication, let's all understand that, and I'm
> not for the bad karma generated.

Hear hear.

> On the other hand, I can understand Brian's point of view, it brings the
> frustration of this "project" to the forefront.  Nothing useful has been
> done, I've been on this list since high school and I'm now in University!
> We've got to face a bit of reality and realize that with current rate, we
> won't get anywhere

I'm doing quite a bit of work in the background.  Yeah, you don't have to
believe me.  But go read my specs page, which is very rough:
http://tunes.org/~dem/tunes/Specifications.html.  Fare calls it "Design
Notes" instead of specs.  Whatever you call it, he said it was right.

> As for tcn
> and _QZ (I am speaking
> objectively here, please do not take this personally); you're efforts
> really are going to waste..the world doesn't need a half baked ukerenel.

_QZ is NOT part of the TUNES project.  You can ignore him completely.
tcn is writing Retro in the HOPE that it will be useful for TUNES.  That's
entirely his perogative.  Whether it will or will not be useful remains to
be seen.  Anyone is free to help him OR not help him.  Criticism should be
sent to /dev/null.  Instead of criticism, do your own work instead.  If
anyone can't figure out what to do, e-mail me.  I'll make a list if you
want.  Most of the work needed is lots of reading and summarizing, of the
mailing list, as well as lots and lots of papers out there on the net, and
reviewing systems in the Review project.  But if you have an idea for a
reflective architecture, that's welcome too.  I personally agree that
writing microkernels is useless, but if someone is writing one, they
obviously don't believe that, so let them.  And hope they make a good one!

> We need to introduce a sort of metric over ideas so that we can work with
> them.  Some say Scheme is good enough for this, I don't, if that's what we
> really think than we should call ourself a scheme group.  English also
> isn't a good idea, simply for the fact that it makes the task of
> representing and working with ideas harder than it should be (much of the
> compiler science involves figuring out what you wrote, and doesn't have to
> be that way).  Is Brian's system the answer or full of meta babble?  I
> don't know, but just looking it over I feel that there is something
> important there.  And I believe that's where our focus should be,
> everyone's.

The focus should be on the papers, including Arrow and the two papers Fare
has recently written.  New papers are encouraged.  They don't need to be
long.  Papers in the sense of, write down what you think of the papers you
read, to start a discussion.  If you have enough to say that it makes a
new paper , great.

> Also we come from varying degrees of background in CS...

For a while now I have thought that the Review project needs to be
expanded to include a section on Computer Science, the parts of the field,
I know there are a lot, but if anyone wants to take this up, I'd
appreciate it.

> I believe it is
> possible to coordinate such an effort, but the goals must be written down
> in one clear cut manner such that there is no ambiguity (which we are
> soaked in right now).

Well, if you think coordination is needed, ok.  I'll help.  My first
suggestion is to resist the temptation to spend enormous amounts of effort
on updating the web pages.  We need to reach a stable point before the
page even matters.  If that makes any sense.  Still, if someone is good at
web stuff and wants to throw themself at it, they're welcome.

> Ok so what's the point?  Before we do anything we have to explore concepts
> of how to represent concepts...once we agree how to do it then we can go
> on.  For now I suggest that everyone read Brian's paper, read up on
> catagorey theory and other background took...then we can decide.
> Hopefully it won't take us long.  I also want to us to get a group
> agreement to stay away from designing a traditional OS...it's been done
> many many times;  so why doesn't everyone who agrees with the idea of
> focusing on the metaprogramming aspect and leaving the OS design alone for
> awhile please say so.

Concepts are best represented by how they relate to other concepts.  I.e.
intensionally.  I've been working on this for a long time, it parallels
the arrow system, with differences.  Direct linking between abstract
entities, whether you call them arrows, or objects, or foobar, is the key.
Note that the entities are abstract, and their meaning is defined by what
links go to them.  A set of links to an entity is a context.  Some links
are implicit which means we want to ignore them at the moment.  The rest
are explicit, so we can look at them and mess with them.  Changing whether
one is explicit or implicit is what I mean by an algebra of context.  I
better shut up because Brian might start yelling at me again for missing
some point of the arrow paper.  Yikes.  I'll go finish it.

> I don't mean to come across liek the big boss, but something has to be
> done about the confusion and lack of direction and it might take a bit of
> forced opinion to get there.

You're welcome to be the big boss.  but we're also welcome to not follow
you.  Oh, such is the internet.

David Manifold <dem@tunes.org>
This message is placed in the public domain.