Status of the Review

[Brian T Rice]

This is a response to an old email from Tril, since what's said pretty
much still stands, although the CLiki has gotten us part way along some of
these efforts. From:

http://lists.tunes.org/archives/tunes/2001-July/003178.html

He wrote:
> It seems that even though it is probably pretty clear that no existing
> system is capable of hosting or mutating into a tunes-system, the review
> project has kind of never taken off much after Fare's initial lists of
> systems.  I believe in order for tunes to progress the reviews must go
> on.

Still very true. We then have these:

> 0. Find a list of features that are desired for tunes
> 1. Examine existing systems (languages being central focus)
> 2. Categorize the systems by which tunes-features they possess
> 3. Write recommendations for the systems: How would we change them
>    (what is the first step) to make them more tunes-like?
> 4. Update list of tunes-features and repeat.

(0) seems to be done, or at least is being refined.
(1) has definitely flourished, although there's no way to measure how
aware people are of the content there, or how many people are looking.
(2) is only touched on slightly.
(3) seems really important, and is totally missing.
(4) obviously is just getting started.

> I will commit to heading up the review project to make the above steps
> easy and to organize the data accumulated.  I have the time.

Well, that was a long time ago. Thankfully the CLiki can be worked on by
many people at once, in case you don't have time now.

> [Ironically the best system to handle such reviews is a tunes-system
> itself.  That is another reason the reviews never got off the ground.
> That's because "if we had tunes it would be easier to make tunes."]

Well, we have a better basis for it, CLiki, which we can extend if we
really must. But again we don't need technical solutions just yet.

> The first step is the list of features.  Let's have a brainstorming
> session to list features (at any scope) that should be in tunes and that
> we can "sift" existing languages or software environments by.

Are we closer? I was hoping my rewrite of the HLL area and the attempt at
a specification would help this, but apparently people disagree and don't
want to debate on it.

> --
> Tril 0. Byte <tril@tunes.org> http://tril.tunes.org/
> This message is placed in the public domain.

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