The web site

Joerg F. Wittenberger Joerg F. Wittenberger" <Joerg.Wittenberger@pobox.com
Thu Dec 5 02:46:02 2002


Brian T Rice <water@tunes.org> writes:

> On 4 Dec 2002, Joerg F. Wittenberger wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > Araneida, CLiki etc. ...
> >
> > may I suggest to evaluate Askemos, the redundant distributed agent
> > operating system.  It comes with a Wiki application (the pages at
> > www.askemos.org are served from that), which is based on a XSLT/DSSSL
> > mixture, it is going to be extened with
> > http://www.ccs.neu.edu/home/dorai/tex2page/tex2page-doc.html and
> > possibly Scribe capabilites.  It already plays nicely with Lout and
> > htmldoc to produce pdf and ps page transparently.  Guys, this might
> > fit your needs.
> 
> Nope. It doesn't. The standard Wiki approach is horrible, and we need

Sorry, it's not standard Wiki, it has some more workflow oriented
featurs etc.

> something that will have Very Low technical support overhead that we can
> get going very soon. Askemos is an unknown.

I feel sorry to say it, but if I was you, I would not talk like that. **

> > I just did the byzantine aggreement implementation, so soon it will
> > run distributed and fraud proof without any central server, authority
> > whatsoever.
> 
> This is totally beyond what we are considering right now. Maybe in a year
> or two, or if Askemos were written in a high-level language.

How about Scheme, almost without side effects?

Sorry, no CL, Askemos is requires application code to behave formally
proofable.  Also the runtime system will have to undergo formal
verification one day.

> > One of the next steps will be to port it to guile, than the
> > environment can run distributed in gimp, gnucash, texmacs, you name
> > it.
> 
> I'd prefer Common Lisp strongly over guile.

I don't really prefer guile, because of the confusing implementation,
but CL is not that better.  Also code developed over the course of
several years and somewhere working in production is not going to be
ported just for the fun of it.  If you want to port to another
language environment, you are welcome.  Actually I would rather
consider ML or Haskell for that.  But that's just me.

> > (Never mind the web site itself, it needs quite some work, especially
> > now, that the full proof of it's designed feature set is available.)
> 
> Well, without a decent web site, I'm not going to use it, because that's

Again you are welcome to help.

> where I'll go when I have a configuration issue or something breaks. It's
> ironic that you're mentioning using it to fix Tunes' web site. I don't
> like that kind of irony.

;-) (** applies, don't make a fool of yourself, please)

> > BTW: this GPL project is slowly taking the commercial route.  To
> > develop it's full potential, servers needs to be run by independant
> > legal bodies in a contract network (best if distributed
> > internationally).  Please get in touch if you are interested to form
> > the network.

regards

/Jörg

-- 
The worst of harm may often result from the best of intentions.