6 ms·

I can't believe this group of incredibly smart people have produced this not-so-impressive paper. Sure, the size of source codes is a big problem. but is LOC th

by wangii 10y ago

I can't believe this group of incredibly smart people have produced this not-so-impressive paper. Sure, the size of source codes is a big problem. but is LOC the most cost-effective issue to investigate into? Why none of the existing module approaches work? Is this really a language problem can be magically solved by FPR? Can this 20k app handle Chinese characters? How many corner cases does it handle? Abstraction leaks, and I don't believe in any silver bullet.

e12e 10y ago
It's not "an app". It's an Operating System that runs on bare hardware, and the applications one would need. It aims to do the useful work that a word processor, DTP program, drawing program, web browser and the file system, drivers, rendering sub-system, networking stack and much more does. All in ~20kLOC. I seem to recall they support full unicode, by the way (which makes sense today, there's not many good reason to not try for full utf-8 compliance unless you want to do some entirely different encoding (like a simpler, prefix-based one) and then do conversion at the edges of your system)).
- NotUsingLinux 10y ago
  Like in my other reply I make a strong demand for reproduce able science. Where is the integration build of frank? Just one binary with source that work, alan kay did run some demos on a mac. Its too bad that this great software is now starving on some researcher archives :( I call for reproducible science: https://twitter.com/KyleCranmer/status/728644857288372224 https://twitter.com/KyleCranmer/status/728644857288372224 Where is the CI Server of the project? It can't be that hard.
  - vajrabum 10y ago
    You're looking at the cleaned up final summary report to the funder of a research project. There isn't any CI. This wasn't a project to build a system. This was research to explore the possibility that operating system and application software can be radically simpler than it is today. Over a number of years they investigated many different systems which addressed aspects of the problem, wrote papers about them and yes made source codes and other artifacts available. It's (mostly) all here http://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php http://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php, http://tinlizzie.org http://tinlizzie.org, and http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/ http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/. So no, CI is not that hard. It's also not what they were paid to do.
david927 10y ago
It's not about LOC being cost-effective, it's about orthogonality. When you're gaining knowledge about something, you're expanding your data set. When you're getting wisdom(understanding) about something, you're contracting it. Everything that we're doing currently points to a huge scattering of knowledge but little-to-no understanding. So that's what Alan was shooting for: trying to express everything with as little as possible. The reason we can't do it yet is that, while we think we know what we're doing, we still don't understand what we're doing. You may not believe in a silver bullet but very smart people believe we can do vastly better. I think you may agree that we need to at least try.
- wangii 10y ago
  Thank you very much for the explanation. I think I get the point but remain skeptical. Is knowledge (even a totally man-made subdomain like OS/App) fundamentally scattered in nature, or can be modelled in the scale of 0.1% of the original size? It's kind of odd that Alan Kay, the visionary of DynaBook, who advocates the importance of exchanging of ideas, has the belief that a single man should be able to handle thing of the scale of industry. Karl Max believes in social labour division, and I think he is right.
  - david927 10y ago
    As you know three sub-atomic particles (electrons, protons and neutrons) give us the 118 elements which construct everything. All hardware can be founded on a single NAND gate. I think he's looking for that kind of fundamental core to software -- and it's missing. I am personally quite sure that software construction will one day be a form of mathematics with symmetry being found in everything from biology and neurology to physics.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      Whaaaaat?? Just a NAND gate? Nah, hardware is done on a combination of standard cell library, RAM, ROM/flash, and analog components. You can't even get the volatage right with just a NAND gate. Far as symmetry, there's potential there given some work is reducing it to math and simple constructs. Hardware too. Ill try to rrmember to give you a link when I'm off work.
nzonbi 10y ago
This effort, and many previous ones lack of dramatic results, highlight the fact that reinventing programming is very difficult. The human mind is not very well equipped for computer programming. So it seems that the real programming revolution, will come when artificial intelligence becomes capable enough to do the programming by itself. Based on natural human language descriptions, or completely from the machine initiative. Probably that time is not too far off. As an interesting note to this, my personal take on the matter is not to reinvent programming, that is too hard. But to reinforce it with a graphical user interface. A programming GUI will simplify programming in a similar way that an icon based file manager simplifies file manipulation. The main benefit is to free users from having to memorize textual command patterns. I haven't done a good job of explaining my vision of it, but here it is anyway: https://nzonbi.github.io/xoL/ https://nzonbi.github.io/xoL/
- greydius 10y ago
  > The human mind is not very well equipped for computer programming That may be the case on average, but I know of at least one counterexample for certain.
- kpil 10y ago
  I think you are probably correct in your first paragraph although I think it will take quite a while until we get to AI good enough that it could develop new systems autonomously. Software development is a hard problem. Even a small system or ruleset easily explodes into incomprehensible complexity, a phenomenon called emergence. There is also a certain fragility in how computers and computer programs work. Even the slightest error or failure can stop a system completely. But then you lost me. I do not think that graphical programming is the future. Next to nothing of the essential complexity of developing anything, from small algorithms to large systems, comes from the syntax, although it can contribute to the accidental complexity, together with the used tools, lack of time, and other factors. Replacing a formal written language with symbols or flowchars have been tried and retried, and it never really took off. I believe there are good reason for this, and one of them is that you can not simplify a complex problem by using a tool that has less power - or expressiveness. These tools typically make simple problems simpler and harder problems next to impossible. An other problem is that visual tools, and especially flow charts based tools, actually tends to be harder to comprehend when the graphs and visualisations are getting larger, compared to their equivalent textual representation. Anyway, while selecting a good language is important and can improve or reduce the accidental complexity, the accidental complexity is just a small fraction compared to the essential complexity in larger systems, as argued by Fred Brooks in 1975. But I agree that graphical symbols and drawings, pictograms and other visual elements could possibly enhance the readability and comprehension of written text, just as a small graph can help in natural language texts. But then it is perhaps more along the lines of Knuths literate programming ideas, where the program is also the documentation. Knuth didn't quite made it right though as described here: http://akkartik.name/post/literate-programming http://akkartik.name/post/literate-programming . Not really his fault as he tries to build on top of existing languages, and just about all of them have have a rather backwards structure for technical reasons. However, that link also quotes Fred Brooks and this nugget of wizdom from 1975. (or is it -85.) “Show me your flowcharts [code] and conceal your tables [data types], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious." In other words the data types are the main characters in the narrative. To sum up: The essential complexity is more or less impossible to get at, at least without AI (but then it just exists but we can spend more artificial brainpower on it while we are slacking off - and hope we are not killed and used as raw material for neural compute machines somewhere in the process.) The accidental complexity on the other hand could possibly be reduced with better languages and editors that formats and displays the code in the most visual effective way for our poor minds, and I'm all for editors were the comments would be nicely typeset and where I could insert images and graphs, and also all other visual improvements that could enhance our awareness of the global structures.
corysama 10y ago
Is it the magical solution to all of life's problems? No. It is damn impressive. Yes. Right now we live in a world where everything we do depends on multiple layers of 10s-100s of millions of lines of code each for the compilers, the operating systems, the browsers or platform libraries (ex Qt). It's physically impossible to read a significant amount of the code in any of these layers, much less understand it. Then we get to add in modules and libraries like Boost or Js-Framework-Melange-Of-The-Week and we don't even know how anything we are doing with the topmost platform level even works. We've gone from Fortran to this in 60 years. What is this going to look like in another 60 years? An alternative future is something like Nile. Reading Nile's code requires some up-front study. That sounds like work compared to "I can look at a for-loop in any package and know instantly that it is for-looping er... something... for some reason..." But, it's the kind of up-front study that is reasonable for a smart high schooler to pull off. With reasonable effort, that kid could understand literally every character of the Nile source and start making major, sweeping modifications. Contrast that with Cairo --which at a high level is not much more complex than Nile, but I'll be damned if anyone but it's maintainers can claim to understand every line and make major changes.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  Spot on. That's the whole point. The closest thing I've seen to this in something even near a mainstream language is REBOL/RED projects. They're sending whole apps that fit on floppies using DSL-based methods while majority are rendering web pages & doing basic libraries in mere megabytes. (!?) Keeps growing and how could we possibly handle it? Good to see some work in a different direction.
- andreapaiola 10y ago
  In 60 years the software will write itself http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/siri-creator-shows-off-first-public-demo-of-viv-the-intelligent-interface-for-everything/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/siri-creator-shows-off-firs...
  - jules 10y ago
    That's what they thought a couple of decades ago too. I've heard of some research into programming languages decades ago not getting funded because "in a few years we won't need programming languages anyway". It might be true this time, but it might not.
throwawaymsft 10y ago
LOC correlates to complexity, and they reduced it by 1000x. Complexity kills progress. We made progress in physics when Maxwell's equations elegantly simplified enormously important phenomena. They're trying to find that simplification for software.
- wangii 10y ago
  I think they are on the wrong track of simplification. In this industry, simplification does not come from elegant abstraction, technology or deep thinking, but obsoletion and concentration. When I first touched Internet, there were 6 protocols and now only 1 survived.
bitwize 10y ago
This is Alan Kay and other computer scientists having a bit of an academic wank. It says up at the top that this work is not intended to replace conventional operating systems and applications, but to speculate. Old-school coders lament that the last completely understandable computer was some model by Commodore -- the C64 or Amiga, depending on whom you ask. Computers used to ship with complete schematic diagrams and enough documentation that you could know what every byte of system code did and where every I/O register was and what they did. These days, not so much -- before the massive, proprietary OS kernel even gets loaded there are many hardware and firmware interfaces to be navigated, many of them protected by patent IP laws and only available under NDA, if at all. The intent of the STEPS paper is to explore possible answers to the question "how powerful a system can we build with modern tech, that is still completely comprehensible by a single person?"
- NotUsingLinux 10y ago
  I have kind of big issues with the results from the research. Sure they always say: ok its just research we don't mind if its not "finished". But: where is the source? Some sub systems sources are available (Nile,Gezira,Cola, Ometa..). But the state of the projects does vary strongly. Also for such a system you need something that works, you need continues integration. You need reproducible science. where is a reproducible build of the "frank" system that STEPS did create? reproducible science and build should NOT be a big problem IMO. https://twitter.com/KyleCranmer/status/728644857288372224 https://twitter.com/KyleCranmer/status/728644857288372224
chipsy 10y ago
I think it is absurd to think that the paper is not impressive. The rendered output shows no sign of corners being cut - it is nicely laid out and has well made graphics. It's about as good as TeX output, and the system is doing far more work to get to the point where it can render. The same size team and schedule with a more conventional approach might make something like Word in a similar amount of time, but without the underlying flexibility.

by wangii 10y ago

e12e 10y ago

It's not "an app". It's an Operating System that runs on bare hardware, and the applications one would need. It aims to do the useful work that a word processor, DTP program, drawing program, web browser and the file system, drivers, rendering sub-system, networking stack and much more does. All in ~20kLOC. I seem to recall they support full unicode, by the way (which makes sense today, there's not many good reason to not try for full utf-8 compliance unless you want to do some entirely different encoding (like a simpler, prefix-based one) and then do conversion at the edges of your system)).

NotUsingLinux 10y ago
Like in my other reply I make a strong demand for reproduce able science. Where is the integration build of frank? Just one binary with source that work, alan kay did run some demos on a mac. Its too bad that this great software is now starving on some researcher archives :( I call for reproducible science: https://twitter.com/KyleCranmer/status/728644857288372224 https://twitter.com/KyleCranmer/status/728644857288372224 Where is the CI Server of the project? It can't be that hard.
- vajrabum 10y ago
  You're looking at the cleaned up final summary report to the funder of a research project. There isn't any CI. This wasn't a project to build a system. This was research to explore the possibility that operating system and application software can be radically simpler than it is today. Over a number of years they investigated many different systems which addressed aspects of the problem, wrote papers about them and yes made source codes and other artifacts available. It's (mostly) all here http://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php http://www.vpri.org/html/writings.php, http://tinlizzie.org http://tinlizzie.org, and http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/ http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/. So no, CI is not that hard. It's also not what they were paid to do.

david927 10y ago

It's not about LOC being cost-effective, it's about orthogonality. When you're gaining knowledge about something, you're expanding your data set. When you're getting wisdom(understanding) about something, you're contracting it. Everything that we're doing currently points to a huge scattering of knowledge but little-to-no understanding. So that's what Alan was shooting for: trying to express everything with as little as possible. The reason we can't do it yet is that, while we think we know what we're doing, we still don't understand what we're doing. You may not believe in a silver bullet but very smart people believe we can do vastly better. I think you may agree that we need to at least try.

wangii 10y ago
Thank you very much for the explanation. I think I get the point but remain skeptical. Is knowledge (even a totally man-made subdomain like OS/App) fundamentally scattered in nature, or can be modelled in the scale of 0.1% of the original size? It's kind of odd that Alan Kay, the visionary of DynaBook, who advocates the importance of exchanging of ideas, has the belief that a single man should be able to handle thing of the scale of industry. Karl Max believes in social labour division, and I think he is right.
- david927 10y ago
  As you know three sub-atomic particles (electrons, protons and neutrons) give us the 118 elements which construct everything. All hardware can be founded on a single NAND gate. I think he's looking for that kind of fundamental core to software -- and it's missing. I am personally quite sure that software construction will one day be a form of mathematics with symmetry being found in everything from biology and neurology to physics.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Whaaaaat?? Just a NAND gate? Nah, hardware is done on a combination of standard cell library, RAM, ROM/flash, and analog components. You can't even get the volatage right with just a NAND gate. Far as symmetry, there's potential there given some work is reducing it to math and simple constructs. Hardware too. Ill try to rrmember to give you a link when I'm off work.

nzonbi 10y ago

This effort, and many previous ones lack of dramatic results, highlight the fact that reinventing programming is very difficult. The human mind is not very well equipped for computer programming. So it seems that the real programming revolution, will come when artificial intelligence becomes capable enough to do the programming by itself. Based on natural human language descriptions, or completely from the machine initiative. Probably that time is not too far off. As an interesting note to this, my personal take on the matter is not to reinvent programming, that is too hard. But to reinforce it with a graphical user interface. A programming GUI will simplify programming in a similar way that an icon based file manager simplifies file manipulation. The main benefit is to free users from having to memorize textual command patterns. I haven't done a good job of explaining my vision of it, but here it is anyway: https://nzonbi.github.io/xoL/ https://nzonbi.github.io/xoL/

greydius 10y ago
> The human mind is not very well equipped for computer programming That may be the case on average, but I know of at least one counterexample for certain.
kpil 10y ago
I think you are probably correct in your first paragraph although I think it will take quite a while until we get to AI good enough that it could develop new systems autonomously. Software development is a hard problem. Even a small system or ruleset easily explodes into incomprehensible complexity, a phenomenon called emergence. There is also a certain fragility in how computers and computer programs work. Even the slightest error or failure can stop a system completely. But then you lost me. I do not think that graphical programming is the future. Next to nothing of the essential complexity of developing anything, from small algorithms to large systems, comes from the syntax, although it can contribute to the accidental complexity, together with the used tools, lack of time, and other factors. Replacing a formal written language with symbols or flowchars have been tried and retried, and it never really took off. I believe there are good reason for this, and one of them is that you can not simplify a complex problem by using a tool that has less power - or expressiveness. These tools typically make simple problems simpler and harder problems next to impossible. An other problem is that visual tools, and especially flow charts based tools, actually tends to be harder to comprehend when the graphs and visualisations are getting larger, compared to their equivalent textual representation. Anyway, while selecting a good language is important and can improve or reduce the accidental complexity, the accidental complexity is just a small fraction compared to the essential complexity in larger systems, as argued by Fred Brooks in 1975. But I agree that graphical symbols and drawings, pictograms and other visual elements could possibly enhance the readability and comprehension of written text, just as a small graph can help in natural language texts. But then it is perhaps more along the lines of Knuths literate programming ideas, where the program is also the documentation. Knuth didn't quite made it right though as described here: http://akkartik.name/post/literate-programming http://akkartik.name/post/literate-programming . Not really his fault as he tries to build on top of existing languages, and just about all of them have have a rather backwards structure for technical reasons. However, that link also quotes Fred Brooks and this nugget of wizdom from 1975. (or is it -85.) “Show me your flowcharts [code] and conceal your tables [data types], and I shall continue to be mystified. Show me your tables, and I won’t usually need your flowcharts; they’ll be obvious." In other words the data types are the main characters in the narrative. To sum up: The essential complexity is more or less impossible to get at, at least without AI (but then it just exists but we can spend more artificial brainpower on it while we are slacking off - and hope we are not killed and used as raw material for neural compute machines somewhere in the process.) The accidental complexity on the other hand could possibly be reduced with better languages and editors that formats and displays the code in the most visual effective way for our poor minds, and I'm all for editors were the comments would be nicely typeset and where I could insert images and graphs, and also all other visual improvements that could enhance our awareness of the global structures.

corysama 10y ago

Is it the magical solution to all of life's problems? No. It is damn impressive. Yes. Right now we live in a world where everything we do depends on multiple layers of 10s-100s of millions of lines of code each for the compilers, the operating systems, the browsers or platform libraries (ex Qt). It's physically impossible to read a significant amount of the code in any of these layers, much less understand it. Then we get to add in modules and libraries like Boost or Js-Framework-Melange-Of-The-Week and we don't even know how anything we are doing with the topmost platform level even works. We've gone from Fortran to this in 60 years. What is this going to look like in another 60 years? An alternative future is something like Nile. Reading Nile's code requires some up-front study. That sounds like work compared to "I can look at a for-loop in any package and know instantly that it is for-looping er... something... for some reason..." But, it's the kind of up-front study that is reasonable for a smart high schooler to pull off. With reasonable effort, that kid could understand literally every character of the Nile source and start making major, sweeping modifications. Contrast that with Cairo --which at a high level is not much more complex than Nile, but I'll be damned if anyone but it's maintainers can claim to understand every line and make major changes.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
Spot on. That's the whole point. The closest thing I've seen to this in something even near a mainstream language is REBOL/RED projects. They're sending whole apps that fit on floppies using DSL-based methods while majority are rendering web pages & doing basic libraries in mere megabytes. (!?) Keeps growing and how could we possibly handle it? Good to see some work in a different direction.
andreapaiola 10y ago
In 60 years the software will write itself http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/siri-creator-shows-off-first-public-demo-of-viv-the-intelligent-interface-for-everything/ http://techcrunch.com/2016/05/09/siri-creator-shows-off-firs...
- jules 10y ago
  That's what they thought a couple of decades ago too. I've heard of some research into programming languages decades ago not getting funded because "in a few years we won't need programming languages anyway". It might be true this time, but it might not.

throwawaymsft 10y ago

LOC correlates to complexity, and they reduced it by 1000x. Complexity kills progress. We made progress in physics when Maxwell's equations elegantly simplified enormously important phenomena. They're trying to find that simplification for software.

wangii 10y ago
I think they are on the wrong track of simplification. In this industry, simplification does not come from elegant abstraction, technology or deep thinking, but obsoletion and concentration. When I first touched Internet, there were 6 protocols and now only 1 survived.

bitwize 10y ago

This is Alan Kay and other computer scientists having a bit of an academic wank. It says up at the top that this work is not intended to replace conventional operating systems and applications, but to speculate. Old-school coders lament that the last completely understandable computer was some model by Commodore -- the C64 or Amiga, depending on whom you ask. Computers used to ship with complete schematic diagrams and enough documentation that you could know what every byte of system code did and where every I/O register was and what they did. These days, not so much -- before the massive, proprietary OS kernel even gets loaded there are many hardware and firmware interfaces to be navigated, many of them protected by patent IP laws and only available under NDA, if at all. The intent of the STEPS paper is to explore possible answers to the question "how powerful a system can we build with modern tech, that is still completely comprehensible by a single person?"

NotUsingLinux 10y ago
I have kind of big issues with the results from the research. Sure they always say: ok its just research we don't mind if its not "finished". But: where is the source? Some sub systems sources are available (Nile,Gezira,Cola, Ometa..). But the state of the projects does vary strongly. Also for such a system you need something that works, you need continues integration. You need reproducible science. where is a reproducible build of the "frank" system that STEPS did create? reproducible science and build should NOT be a big problem IMO. https://twitter.com/KyleCranmer/status/728644857288372224 https://twitter.com/KyleCranmer/status/728644857288372224

chipsy 10y ago

I think it is absurd to think that the paper is not impressive. The rendered output shows no sign of corners being cut - it is nicely laid out and has well made graphics. It's about as good as TeX output, and the system is doing far more work to get to the point where it can render. The same size team and schedule with a more conventional approach might make something like Word in a similar amount of time, but without the underlying flexibility.