5 ms·

From the number of times I've seen it mentioned, there seems to be very little that Tree Notation isn't in some way related to. But for the life of me I can't

From the number of times I've seen it mentioned, there seems to be very little that Tree Notation isn't in some way related to. But for the life of me I can't figure it out. From the examples it seems like a newline deliminated text format that uses spaces for indentation with indentation levels representing nested structure. Which seems fine enough but I feel like I'm missing some sort of philosophically profound implication of this format or something.

breck 7y ago
> From the number of times I've seen it mentioned, there seems to be very little that Tree Notation isn't in some way related to. But for the life of me I can't figure it out. Change the word "Tree Notation" to "binary Notation". What we discovered is that there is a remarkably simple notation that is all you need for representing abstractions and higher level languages. Just as Leibniz in the 1600's discovered that all you need is 0 and 1 to represent all information, we discovered that all you need is trees to represent all structures(and tree notation -- the most minimal way to encode trees), that has profound implications, just like binary. Think about all the things you use that depend on binary. All of the systems that depend on our modern will programming languages, Tree Notation will make all of those systems better in the decades ahead. People will say this is just "S-Expressions". Exactly! Except S-Expressions done correctly! When you try to reduce S-Expressions to perfection, you get Tree Notation. If you know S-Expressions and you still don't get that, this might help: https://medium.com/@breckyunits/removing-the-2s-from-trinary-notation-is-a-terrible-idea-848c2d7c6665 https://medium.com/@breckyunits/removing-the-2s-from-trinary...
- wrnr 7y ago
  With we you mean you? You should read "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance", it a autobiography of a man who develops a meta-physical system existing of the holy trinity of a thing, the representation of a thing and the essence this representation is missing. Don't read it for the theory but the slow decent into madness.
  - breck 7y ago
    > With we you mean you? No I mean "we". This is a huge collaborative effort. We wouldn't be getting anywhere if not for the help of many dozens (more like hundreds, at this point) people helping out. > "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" I have that book, I can't remember reading it, however. Thanks for the rec. I'll give it another look. > Don't read it for the theory but the slow decent into madness. The reason why you see my name everywhere and no one else's is merely because of comments like this. I have very thick skin and can take it, but I don't want to subject my friends and collaborators to this kind of gaslighting. We are almost at the point where the evidence is overwhelming that this theory is correct, and we have peer-reviewed papers in the works (with dozens of collaborators with fancy edu positions whose full names will be on the paper), and then it's game over. In the meantime you can either look at the increasing piles of extraordinary evidence (for example, I made a language today called Dumbdown in less than an hour http://treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20dumbdown http://treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20dumbdown that I would not be surprised if a variant evovles to be bigger than markdown) and think about things for yourself, or jump to a (wrong) conclusion simply because this is a low probability/black swan/outlier event. Black swans are rare. But they do happen.
- liability 7y ago
  I don't know man, I like those parens. They turn basically any text editor into a basic structural editor. Commands like Vim's % can jump to the matching paren easily, and pretty much all programmer text editors have a feature to highlight the matching paren. So to me it's not a matter of subjective taste but rather pragmatism. S-expressions are just easier to edit.
  - breck 7y ago
    I totally agree that in the world without tools designed for Tree Notation, stick with the parens. But I also think the world without parens will be a much better place, once we get there with the tooling and ecosystem. I don't know how long that will take. 2020 I hope?
lonelappde 7y ago
Please see my website and github repo where I present Newline Notation, a universal programming technique that will revolutionize software.

breck 7y ago

> From the number of times I've seen it mentioned, there seems to be very little that Tree Notation isn't in some way related to. But for the life of me I can't figure it out. Change the word "Tree Notation" to "binary Notation". What we discovered is that there is a remarkably simple notation that is all you need for representing abstractions and higher level languages. Just as Leibniz in the 1600's discovered that all you need is 0 and 1 to represent all information, we discovered that all you need is trees to represent all structures(and tree notation -- the most minimal way to encode trees), that has profound implications, just like binary. Think about all the things you use that depend on binary. All of the systems that depend on our modern will programming languages, Tree Notation will make all of those systems better in the decades ahead. People will say this is just "S-Expressions". Exactly! Except S-Expressions done correctly! When you try to reduce S-Expressions to perfection, you get Tree Notation. If you know S-Expressions and you still don't get that, this might help: https://medium.com/@breckyunits/removing-the-2s-from-trinary-notation-is-a-terrible-idea-848c2d7c6665 https://medium.com/@breckyunits/removing-the-2s-from-trinary...

wrnr 7y ago
With we you mean you? You should read "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance", it a autobiography of a man who develops a meta-physical system existing of the holy trinity of a thing, the representation of a thing and the essence this representation is missing. Don't read it for the theory but the slow decent into madness.
- breck 7y ago
  > With we you mean you? No I mean "we". This is a huge collaborative effort. We wouldn't be getting anywhere if not for the help of many dozens (more like hundreds, at this point) people helping out. > "Zen and the art of motorcycle maintenance" I have that book, I can't remember reading it, however. Thanks for the rec. I'll give it another look. > Don't read it for the theory but the slow decent into madness. The reason why you see my name everywhere and no one else's is merely because of comments like this. I have very thick skin and can take it, but I don't want to subject my friends and collaborators to this kind of gaslighting. We are almost at the point where the evidence is overwhelming that this theory is correct, and we have peer-reviewed papers in the works (with dozens of collaborators with fancy edu positions whose full names will be on the paper), and then it's game over. In the meantime you can either look at the increasing piles of extraordinary evidence (for example, I made a language today called Dumbdown in less than an hour http://treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20dumbdown http://treenotation.org/designer/#standard%20dumbdown that I would not be surprised if a variant evovles to be bigger than markdown) and think about things for yourself, or jump to a (wrong) conclusion simply because this is a low probability/black swan/outlier event. Black swans are rare. But they do happen.
liability 7y ago
I don't know man, I like those parens. They turn basically any text editor into a basic structural editor. Commands like Vim's % can jump to the matching paren easily, and pretty much all programmer text editors have a feature to highlight the matching paren. So to me it's not a matter of subjective taste but rather pragmatism. S-expressions are just easier to edit.
- breck 7y ago
  I totally agree that in the world without tools designed for Tree Notation, stick with the parens. But I also think the world without parens will be a much better place, once we get there with the tooling and ecosystem. I don't know how long that will take. 2020 I hope?

lonelappde 7y ago

Please see my website and github repo where I present Newline Notation, a universal programming technique that will revolutionize software.