I am quite interested to hear if anybody has any thoughts on the work of Valentin Turchin, the author of Refal. In an interview [1] conducted by Joe Armstrong,

I am quite interested to hear if anybody has any thoughts on the work of Valentin Turchin, the author of Refal. In an interview [1] conducted by Joe Armstrong, Alan Kay traced some of the key ideas of Erlang and Smalltalk to early papers by John McCarthy (Advice Taker), Carl Hewitt (Planner), Simula, and other work (including META 2, which apparently inspired OMeta). The theme here seems to be a favorite of Kay's: "late binding of meaning" used to build systems that scale just as well as biology. In his interview, Kay mentions Minsky's Computation: Finite and Infinite Machines, which discusses various models of computation. Now, Alan Kay has long looked to biology for hints on how to scale. (For example, in the interview I mentioned, he says that a computer is a "universal atom of meaning".) I mention all this because what I am reading of Valentin Turchin [2] is making me very tempted to add (English) expositions of his work alongside my reading of Minksy's Computation. Specifically, Turchin's work on Supercompilation [3,4], which seems to draw upon a tradition of cybernetics [5], seems to me to be in somewhat of the same spirit as that of Kay's, at least when you consider that the influence of cybernetics largely means that we take cues from biology and attach meaning to existing patterns in nature and technology alike in our endeavors to replicate its success (and of course couple our constructions with them in feedback loops, as in the elecrical engineering that largely inspired cybernetics). Turchin appears to be a key figure [6] in the Principia Cybernetica project. (Whereas Kay appears to be more influenced by North American McLuhan and the Pragmatist traditions in philosophy and psychology, Turchin seems to come from a more European tradition of cybernetics. Both traditions seem to be scratching the same itch, though, especially when it comes to biologically inspired notions of computation and meaning.) Seeing that so much of Turchin's work took place in Russia, and was only understood in the West many years later, I would be interested to hear what people make of it. Simon-Peyton Jones is quoted in [4] as surmising Supercompilation to be a "ball of mud", in which understanding anything at all required understanding the entire thing. (Ben Goertzel, listed as a co-author of the 2002 paper on supercompilation [3], has made further remarks about Principia Cybernetica web on his website [7].) [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOHn9TClXY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fhOHn9TClXY [2] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/TURCHIN.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/TURCHIN.html [3] http://goertzel.org/papers/SupercompilingJavaMay2002.htm http://goertzel.org/papers/SupercompilingJavaMay2002.htm [4] https://themonadreader.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/super-final.pdf https://themonadreader.files.wordpress.com/2014/04/super-fin... [5] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/DEFAULT.html [6] http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/BOARD.html http://pespmc1.vub.ac.be/BOARD.html [7] http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/PrincipiaCybernetica.htm http://www.goertzel.org/benzine/PrincipiaCybernetica.htm