5 ms·

Houyhnhnm Computing

73 points by _qc3o 10y ago

harveywi 10y ago
Looking forward to the chapter on Mmrnmhrm Monad Transformers. [1] http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/X-Form http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/X-Form
guard-of-terra 10y ago
The discourse reminds me of Urbit: https://github.com/urbit/urbit https://github.com/urbit/urbit Alien virtual machines and that kind of thing.
- davidgerard 10y ago
  Urbit was my first thought too, at least in the ambition of starting afresh with alien assumptions. I can understand this a bit better and it doesn't trigger my "this is all batshit insane" detector. Also, decrement probably isn't O(n).
  - setra 10y ago
    decrement is not O(n) in practice just as addition is not horribly slow when defined in idris
- rhaps0dy 10y ago
  I'm starting to suspect they have the same people behind them. Either that or Loper OS http://www.loper-os.org/ http://www.loper-os.org/
- farray 10y ago
  I have a chapter in preparation that addresses the comparison with Urbit.
wrong_variable 10y ago
I am not sure how serious this is or is it just a joke.
JulianMorrison 10y ago
I have a feeling this sort of thing that looks like heaven in the present, would look like hell if we'd inherited it from the past. Everything has versioning built in - great, Subversion is wired into the One Worldwide OS. You want to propose Git as an improvement? Okay, but it's gonna require a UN resolution. And the GUI is Xerox Alto. It would be far too complicated to rework everything for an improvement there.
- wrong_variable 10y ago
  I agree. There is a price to be paid for tightly coupled system. I forgot but there was this good book on mathematics that paul graham recommended. That book talks about the fact that every 100 years in mathematics there is an explosion of innovation and then at the end of a period there is integration. Having diversity is how things improve - its also the basic law of physics - entropy. By creating chaos we learn more about how to do things better, either it be software or mathematics. So to those software craftsman who are complaining about diversity - grow up, this is how all of science works.
- JulianMorrison 10y ago
  To draw this out further: our expectation of ultimate transience, which has resulted in enormous numbers of files being stranded on now-unreadable media or simply obliterated into thermal noise when someone kicked the plug, has an upside: it allows us to be wrong. We can go down blind alleys like Microsoft Bob. We can afford to throw a hundred different approaches at a problem and see which one sticks. Even if it sticks for a dumb reason like "everyone already uses Word", we can gradually improve what stuck, or propose new approaches like Google Docs. Or we can toss it all and move to tablets. There was an OS that had a similar component oriented model to what was being imagined here, and that was Apple Taligent. It was built around the component embedding model "OpenDoc" and had editors for types of content not types of file. It turned into a never-arriving death march, and I have a feeling that part of the problem is that in the presence of diversity of choice, the component model sucks. How can LyX and Microsoft word operate as components, and share data, when their assumptions are so radically different? The answer is that they can't, and that component data will live in little silos unless flattened down to a deliberately weakened structure like plain text cut and paste. Unless you have One Twue Text Editor. And One Twue Pixel Editor. And so forth. It's an ecosystem that can only tolerate tyranny. (Microsoft's tiles UI suffers the same problem. Looks pretty and makes sense only on a phone where they have all the programs under their thumb.)
stepvhen 10y ago
The Houynhnms, from Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels", were a race of intelligent horses, whose entire society was based solely on reason. I imagine the goal here is to propose coldly reasonable concepts in computing. (And I offer this explanation because the website itself, including the about section, is done in a literary style, making it difficult to quickly scan and summarize for those of us who haven't read or don't remember Gulliver's Travels when the book was assigned in high school)
- stan_rogers 10y ago
  ...or at least to get away from the techniques of the Yahoo.
- spb 10y ago
  I think the point is not so much to present a purely logical viewpoint as it is to present a culturally removed viewpoint that still comprehends engineering fundamentals, since any hypothetical human on Earth with such a comprehension would have to be already familiar with the status quo. See, for instance, the first example, where the C programming environment is presented as "simple", but then acknowledged to be actually enormously complex, due to the many specific platform assumptions presupposing it (such as the abstraction of files and directories, which every human developer today comprehends as practically a law of nature).
_mhr_ 10y ago
This appears to be connected to François-René Rideau's TUNES project (http://ngnghm.github.io/talks/cc-lc2016.pdf http://ngnghm.github.io/talks/cc-lc2016.pdf). These slides are probably worthy of a submission themselves.
- farray 10y ago
  The slides are meant to support a talk. What will be more worthy of publication will be the video for the talk, when it's edited and uploaded. In the meantime, there is a bad recording of an earlier take on the same ideas from LispNYC. The talk at LambdaConf was definitely better delivered, though. https://vimeo.com/155517248 https://vimeo.com/155517248 http://www.meetup.com/LispNYC/events/224215944/ http://www.meetup.com/LispNYC/events/224215944/
ashitlerferad 10y ago
Started reading from Chapter 1. This is beginning to sound like HP's "The Machine".
lil1729 10y ago
vaporware computing
- farray 10y ago
  Yes, but the interesting part is wetware metaprogramming.
CurtMonash 10y ago
So this is about something better than Yahoo?

73 points by _qc3o 10y ago

Looking forward to the chapter on Mmrnmhrm Monad Transformers. [1] http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/X-Form http://wiki.uqm.stack.nl/X-Form

guard-of-terra 10y ago

The discourse reminds me of Urbit: https://github.com/urbit/urbit https://github.com/urbit/urbit Alien virtual machines and that kind of thing.

davidgerard 10y ago
Urbit was my first thought too, at least in the ambition of starting afresh with alien assumptions. I can understand this a bit better and it doesn't trigger my "this is all batshit insane" detector. Also, decrement probably isn't O(n).
- setra 10y ago
  decrement is not O(n) in practice just as addition is not horribly slow when defined in idris
rhaps0dy 10y ago
I'm starting to suspect they have the same people behind them. Either that or Loper OS http://www.loper-os.org/ http://www.loper-os.org/
farray 10y ago
I have a chapter in preparation that addresses the comparison with Urbit.

wrong_variable 10y ago

I am not sure how serious this is or is it just a joke.

JulianMorrison 10y ago

I have a feeling this sort of thing that looks like heaven in the present, would look like hell if we'd inherited it from the past. Everything has versioning built in - great, Subversion is wired into the One Worldwide OS. You want to propose Git as an improvement? Okay, but it's gonna require a UN resolution. And the GUI is Xerox Alto. It would be far too complicated to rework everything for an improvement there.

wrong_variable 10y ago
I agree. There is a price to be paid for tightly coupled system. I forgot but there was this good book on mathematics that paul graham recommended. That book talks about the fact that every 100 years in mathematics there is an explosion of innovation and then at the end of a period there is integration. Having diversity is how things improve - its also the basic law of physics - entropy. By creating chaos we learn more about how to do things better, either it be software or mathematics. So to those software craftsman who are complaining about diversity - grow up, this is how all of science works.
JulianMorrison 10y ago
To draw this out further: our expectation of ultimate transience, which has resulted in enormous numbers of files being stranded on now-unreadable media or simply obliterated into thermal noise when someone kicked the plug, has an upside: it allows us to be wrong. We can go down blind alleys like Microsoft Bob. We can afford to throw a hundred different approaches at a problem and see which one sticks. Even if it sticks for a dumb reason like "everyone already uses Word", we can gradually improve what stuck, or propose new approaches like Google Docs. Or we can toss it all and move to tablets. There was an OS that had a similar component oriented model to what was being imagined here, and that was Apple Taligent. It was built around the component embedding model "OpenDoc" and had editors for types of content not types of file. It turned into a never-arriving death march, and I have a feeling that part of the problem is that in the presence of diversity of choice, the component model sucks. How can LyX and Microsoft word operate as components, and share data, when their assumptions are so radically different? The answer is that they can't, and that component data will live in little silos unless flattened down to a deliberately weakened structure like plain text cut and paste. Unless you have One Twue Text Editor. And One Twue Pixel Editor. And so forth. It's an ecosystem that can only tolerate tyranny. (Microsoft's tiles UI suffers the same problem. Looks pretty and makes sense only on a phone where they have all the programs under their thumb.)

stepvhen 10y ago

The Houynhnms, from Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels", were a race of intelligent horses, whose entire society was based solely on reason. I imagine the goal here is to propose coldly reasonable concepts in computing. (And I offer this explanation because the website itself, including the about section, is done in a literary style, making it difficult to quickly scan and summarize for those of us who haven't read or don't remember Gulliver's Travels when the book was assigned in high school)

stan_rogers 10y ago
...or at least to get away from the techniques of the Yahoo.
spb 10y ago
I think the point is not so much to present a purely logical viewpoint as it is to present a culturally removed viewpoint that still comprehends engineering fundamentals, since any hypothetical human on Earth with such a comprehension would have to be already familiar with the status quo. See, for instance, the first example, where the C programming environment is presented as "simple", but then acknowledged to be actually enormously complex, due to the many specific platform assumptions presupposing it (such as the abstraction of files and directories, which every human developer today comprehends as practically a law of nature).

_mhr_ 10y ago

This appears to be connected to François-René Rideau's TUNES project (http://ngnghm.github.io/talks/cc-lc2016.pdf http://ngnghm.github.io/talks/cc-lc2016.pdf). These slides are probably worthy of a submission themselves.

farray 10y ago
The slides are meant to support a talk. What will be more worthy of publication will be the video for the talk, when it's edited and uploaded. In the meantime, there is a bad recording of an earlier take on the same ideas from LispNYC. The talk at LambdaConf was definitely better delivered, though. https://vimeo.com/155517248 https://vimeo.com/155517248 http://www.meetup.com/LispNYC/events/224215944/ http://www.meetup.com/LispNYC/events/224215944/

ashitlerferad 10y ago

Started reading from Chapter 1. This is beginning to sound like HP's "The Machine".

lil1729 10y ago

vaporware computing

farray 10y ago
Yes, but the interesting part is wetware metaprogramming.

CurtMonash 10y ago

So this is about something better than Yahoo?