Your remarks on the Wiki

[Brian T Rice]

This is in reply to your remarks on http://cliki.tunes.org/Tril about
TUNES and recent developments. This seems very inconsiderate to make
remarks like this about the project outside of an interactive forum like
the mailing list. To quote:

"Less talk, more code

I have come to believe that writing about TUNES is just spinning thin air.
I prefer not to say anything any more until there is working code. This is
why I am not active in the specifications discussion or other discussion
threads on TUNES.  I believe this is also why none of my writings ever
became more complete: Because there is no practical code, or experience
with code, to make the writing have any substance, I always simply trailed
off without any clue of how my ideas went together.

So, anyone can post my old writings to CLiki if they want, but keep in
mind that the words have no substance and that I don't intend to edit
them until there's code.
"

If you don't mind my saying so (on your CLiki node), there is plenty of
code which demonstrates many aspects of the TUNES goals, they just happen
to do it separately. Furthermore, I don't see anything special about Slate
or Max that forwards our goals in any significant way other than /being
code that advances the state of the art/, so I have to regard this stance
as being lazy and actually rather foolish. It's fairly difficult to "code
for TUNES" and know what that means without refining the definition.
Anything else is "spinning thin air", and honestly Max has nothing in it
that makes it anything but just another programming language; sure, a
functional language with a persistent store is great, but it doesn't offer
TUNES anything except educating /you/ since it's not documented, not open,
and it doesn't accomplish many of the things that other languages do, even
if I grant that it'll have "special powers" which are not even advertised
on its home page. The fact that you're not discussing this on the mailing
list is cowardly.

So, Tril, what shall we code and why? Max seems to be a program to educate
/yourself/, since you seem perfectly unwilling to learn about anything
else. I have repeatedly solicited comments from you about Slate, which has
HAD CODE for over a year now, a growing amount of it. Apparently this
doesn't count for you, and you believe that the specification effort does
not relate in my mind to what I'm working on. This is a complete fallacy,
but if you believe so, tell me why you believe it so we can discuss it
openly, instead of parcelling out tiny bits of information about each
others' projects once every few months.

I also don't mind suggesting that you've not "done your homework" for
TUNES... probably 3/4 of the research that Fare draws from just to build
TUNES basic ideas consists of material which I know you're not familiar
with in any way, so basically this amounts to making your judgements
fairly useless. It took me several years to get to the point where I could
have an argument with him on equal footing, and I don't expect anyone to
presume such abilities of judgement (as you have just done) without
demonstrating a similar level of familiarity and commitment to what's
required to express the design goals.

In short, it's /you/ who's full of air.

P.S. to Fare: Tril suggests that the Definition and Architecture pages are
not consistent with TUNES' goals. Do you believe this has merit? If so,
why?

-- 
Brian T. Rice
LOGOS Research and Development
mailto:water@tunes.org
http://tunes.org/~water/