TUNES website homepage draft

[Brian Rice]

At 5:02 PM +0100 7/3/01, PB wrote:
>I am having a look at the draft, but I haven't finished it
>yet so I will give an opinion further on. But, as a
>"still newbie" I have an opinion which matured in time
>while reading the stuff in the TUNES site. Hope this
>will not transform in a useless rant, but rather it will be
>of some help.

I find that doubtful, having seen similar comments before and their 
affects on discussions here.

>I think that sometimes the matter is treated in a way
>too oriented towards mathematics. My  impression
>is that if someone - especially an hacker with scarce
>mathematical background - looks at the pages and
>has the impression that to do something useful, or
>even to understand what's up, must know arrow
>logic, categories, lambda calculus and so on, he
>will never try. I think that a more "friendly" text
>should be written as an introduction.

Please don't take this the wrong way, but I actually wrote that 
description with the *intent* of keeping hackers away who don't have 
a good knowledge of mathematics. Obviously TUNES has many faces, and 
intends to relate to end users better even than current systems, but 
it seems very strongly obvious to me that the people who have not 
contributed at all to the improvement of TUNES ideas are those who 
have no idea what e.g. category theory means and how it could be 
related to the end user. Basically if you don't learn from some good 
theory (and category theory is one of the nicest to learn, believe 
me), you will wind up re-inventing the wheel, as Lisp programmers 
will tell you of any programmer who hasn't learned Lisp. Besides, I 
have already mentioned a good introductory text to category theory.

>Pietro

TUNES has to be worked out with something beyond common sense, 
particularly not the sense of the modern programmer, as Tril's 
manifesto I believe makes clear. This is one of the more common 
misconceptions (or dare I say arrogances?) of average programmers to 
think that a knowledge of C and Perl (for example) and their use in 
any way constitutes the ability to hack TUNES by brute force.

This is a rant, because it's one of the most annoying and 
disempowering things about newbies that I have seen on the mailing 
list since it's inception (yes, I have looked at the mailing list's 
content for the last almost 7 years). This mailing list is not for 
learning those concepts (we simply don't have the bandwidth, plus 
many places on the net focus on such things), but TUNES core design 
simply requires them.

I am making a formal statement here that if you don't make this clear 
on the very first page, that there will be confusion. Most 
importantly, if someone encounters the TUNES front page who DOES 
understand those concepts, and doesn't see them on TUNES' front page, 
that person would not be wrong to dismiss us as a dis-organized bunch 
of idiots. It also encourages quacks to join the list and tell us how 
wrong and dis-organized we are, and I simply refuse to have that any 
more.

Bottom line: if you don't grok a concept, Google: "intro category 
theory" or "intro arrow logic" or "intro type theory", or go buy a 
book on it.

Thanks for listening,
~