Brian's Arrow System

[James Little]

On Thu, 27 May 1999, Maneesh Yadav wrote:
> On Thu, 27 May 1999, Tril wrote:

> > > > Not at all.  There is no advantage to coding at the retro level compared
> > > > to coding at the posix level or LISP VM level or Smalltalk VM level.  If
> > > > we run our HLL on retro it's just to be able to say we wrote the whole
> > > > system, not for any practical reason.  I don't care which lower layer is
> > > > used to bootstrap.  If my post suggested otherwise I apologize, that was
> > > > just one possible approach.

> So you're going to set back your development effort so you can say you
> wrote a the bottom part of the OS?

Pardon me for jumping in here, but Maneesh, I think you're
misunderstanding the TUNES development process.  It's not a
rigidly-controlled process with a extraordinarily strong sense of
direction.  Rather, it's more of a philosophy, a shared vision of the
future.  A bunch of people have started projects which they feel will
result in that future, but no single one of these projects IS TUNES.
They're TUNES-potential, nothing more.

You may feel that Retro is a waste of time, that it times spent on Retro
would be better spent on other tasks.  I won't agree or disagree, but I do
think the point is moot.  The people working on Retro are working on Retro
because it interests them, not because they're part of the TUNES project.
If TUNES were to go away, I imagine Retro would keep on chugging.  So the
development effort spent on Retro ISN'T wasted, because that effort isn't
available for other TUNES efforts anyway.

The same goes for Arrow, Prism, and everything else discussed here, I
imagine.  As far as I can tell, the only people seriously contributing to
any of these projects are the people who founded them.  There's no pool of
labor here, no resource allocation.  People are collectively working on
their own thing and discussing it here.  That's pretty much it, as far as
I can tell.  So don't worry that resources are being wasted on frivolous
projects -- there aren't any resources.  :)

If you want to work on a controlled project with a strong sense of
direction, though, Prism is available.  :)  I need somebody to write user
interface tiles.  How about it?  Want to be TUNES' first resource?  You'd
be in high demand, I assure you.  :)

-Jim Little  (jiml@inconnect.com)

---
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