On 2/26/2012 8:23 PM, Julian Leviston wrote:
I'm afraid that I am in no way a teacher of this. I'm in no way
professing to know what I'm talking about - I've simply given you my
observations. Perhaps we can help each other, because I'm intensely
interested, too... I want to understand this stuff because it is chock
full of intensely powerful ideas.
yep, generally agreed.
I generally look for interesting or useful ideas, but admittedly have a
harder time understanding a lot of what is going on or being talked
about here (despite being, I think, generally being fairly knowledgeable
about most things programming-related).
there may be a domain mismatch or something though.
admittedly, I have not generally gotten as far as being really able to
understand Smalltalk code either, nor for that matter languages too much
different from "vaguely C-like Procedural/OO" languages, except maybe
ASM, which I personally found not particularly difficult to
learn/understand or read/write, but the main drawbacks of ASM being its
verbosity and portability issues.
granted, this may be partly a matter of familiarity or similar, since I
encountered both C and ASM (along with BASIC) at fairly young age (and
actually partly came to understand C originally to some degree by
looking at the compiler's ASM output, getting a "feel" for how the
constructs mapped to ASM operations, ...).
The elitism isn't true... I've misrepresented what I was meaning to
say - I simply meant that people who aren't fascinated enough to
understand won't have the drive to understand it... until it gets to a
kind of point where enough people care to explain it to the people who
take longer to understand... This makes sense. It's how it has always
been. Sorry for making it sound elitist. It's not, I promise you. When
your time is limited, though (as the VPRI guys' time is), one needs to
focus on truly expounding it to as many people as you can, so one can
teach more teachers first... one teaches the people who can understand
the quickest first, and then they can propagate and so on... I hope
this is clear.
similarly, I was not meaning to apply that children having knowledge is
a bad thing, but sadly, it seems to run contrary to common cultural
expectations.
granted, it is possibly the case that some aspects of culture are broken
in some ways, namely, that children are "kept in the dark", and there is
this notion that everyone should be some sort of unthinking and passive
consumer. except, of course, for the content producers, which would
generally include both the media industry (TV, movies, music, ...) as a
whole and to a lesser extent the software industry, with a sometimes
questionable set of "Intellectual Property" laws in an attempt to uphold
the status quo (not that IP is necessarily bad, but it could be better).
I guess this is partly why things like FOSS exist.
but, FOSS isn't necessarily entirely perfect either.
but, yes, both giving knowledge and creating a kind of "safe haven" seem
like reasonable goals, where one can be free to tinker around with
things with less risk from some overzealous legal department somewhere.
also nice would be if people were less likely to accuse all of ones'
efforts of being useless, but sadly, this probably isn't going to happen
either.
this is not to imply that I personally necessarily have much to offer,
as beating against a wall may make one fairly well aware of just how far
there is left to go, as "relevance" is at times a rather difficult goal
to reach.
admittedly, I am maybe a bit dense as well. I have never really been
very good with "abstract" concepts (nor am I particularly "intelligent"
in the strict sense). but, I am no one besides myself (and have no one
besides myself to fall back on), so I have to make due (and hopefully
try to avoid annoying people too much, and causing them to despise me, ...).
like, "the only way out is through" and similar.
I don't think it was a prank. It's not really hidden at all. If you
pay attention, all the components of Frank are there... like I said.
It's obviously missing certain things like Nothing, and other
optimisations, but for the most part, all the tech is present.
sorry for asking, but is their any sort of "dense people friendly"
version, like maybe a description on the Wiki or something?...
like, so people can get a better idea of "what things are about and how
they all work and fit together"?... (like, in the top-down description
kind of way?).
My major stumbling block at the moment is understanding OMeta fully.
This is possibly the most amazing piece of work I've seen in a long,
long time, and there's no easy explanation of it, and no really simple
explanation of the syntax, either. There are the papers, and source
code and the sandboxes, but I'm still trying to understand how to use
it. It's kind of huge. I think perhaps I need to get a grounding in
PEGs before I start on OMeta because there seems to be a lot of
assumed knowledge there. Mostly I'm having trouble with the absolute,
complete basics.
Anyway I digress... have you had a look at this file?:
http://piumarta.com/software/maru/maru-2.1/test-pepsi.l
Just read the whole thing - I found it fairly interesting :) He's
build pepsi on maru there... that's pretty fascinating, right? Built a
micro smalltalk on top of the S-expression language... and then does a
Fast Fourier Transform test using it...
my case: looked some, but not entirely sure how it works though.
I'm not really sure how it relates to this, tho:
I actually have no idea about how to run one of the experiments you're
talking about - the mbox files... from what I've read about STEPS,
though, I think the mbox files are Frank documents... and I think
Frank is kinda DBJr... at least, if you go to this page and look at
the bottom, pay some careful attention to the video that appears there
demonstrating some of the patchwork doll that is frank.... (if you
haven't seen it already)...
http://www.vpri.org/vp_wiki/index.php/Gezira
http://tinlizzie.org/~bert/Gezira.mp4
<http://tinlizzie.org/%7Ebert/Gezira.mp4>
In the tinlizzie.org/updates/exploratory/packages
<http://tinlizzie.org/updates/exploratory/packages> you'll find
montecello packages that contains some of experiments, I'm fairly
sure, one of which is: (yep, you guessed it)
FrankVersion-yo.16.mcz
However, having not tried this, I'm not sure of what it may be ;-) (if
I were you, I'd take a squizz around those packages)
You probably what the Lobjects stuff and the doc editor, I'm
guessing... :-S
Fairly patchy at the best, but that's the point - it's called Frank,
as in frankenstein's monster - as in... it's a patchy mess, but it's
alive... this stuff is a fair way off having a full stack that
operates beautifully... but it's a start... (it seems).
Julian
ok.
it does stuff, but beyond this I am not sure what exactly I am looking
at (well, besides more obvious things, like that the code fragments
being edited drive the graphical operations).
On 27/02/2012, at 12:14 PM, Martin Baldan wrote:
Julian,
Thanks, now I have a much better picture of the overall situation,
although I still have a lot of reading to do. I already had read a
couple of Frank progress reports, and some stuff about worlds, in the
publications link you mention. So I thought, this sounds great, how
can I try this? Then I went to the wiki, and there was a section
called "Fundamental new computing technologies", so I said "this is
the thing!". But no, the real thing was, as you said, hidden in
plain sight, under the unconspicuous titles such as "Other prototypes
and projects related to our work" and "experiment". I wonder, is that
some kind of prank for the uninitiated? hehe. By the way, I've played
a little with Squeak, Croquet and other great projects by Alan and
the other wonderful Smalltalk people, so I did have a sense of their
focus on children. I must confess I was a bit annoyed with what
seemed to me like Jedi elitism (as in "He is too old. Yes, too old to
begin the training. ") but hey, their project, their code, their rules.
So, to get back on topic,
I've downloaded Maru, The contents are:
boot-eval.c boot.l emit.l eval.l Makefile
So, the ".l" files are
So this is the file extension for Maru's implementation language
(does it have a name?).
Sure enough, the very first line of "eval.l" reads:
;;; -*- coke -*-
This made me smile. Well, actually it was a mad laughter.
It compiles beautifully. Yay!
Now there are some ".s" files. They look like assembler code. I
thought it was Nothing code, but the Maru webpage explains it's just
ia-32. Oh, well. I don't know yet where Nothing enters the picture.
So, this is compiled to ".o" files and linked to build the "eval"
executable, which can take ".l" files and make a new "eval"
executable, and so on. So far so good.
But what else can I do with it? Should I use it to run the examples
at "http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/"; ? All I see is files with a ".lbox"
file extension. What are those? Apparently, there are no READMEs.
Could you please give me an example of how to try one of those
experiments?
Thanks for your tips and patience ;)
On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 3:48 AM, Julian Leviston <jul...@leviston.net
<mailto:jul...@leviston.net>> wrote:
As I understand it, Frank is an experiment that is an extended
version of DBJr that sits atop lesserphic, which sits atop gezira
which sits atop nile, which sits atop maru all of which which
utilise ometa and the "worlds" idea.
If you look at the http://vpri.org/html/writings.php page you can
see a pattern of progression that has emerged to the point where
Frank exists. From what I understand, maru is the finalisation of
what began as pepsi and coke. Maru is a simple s-expression
language, in the same way that pepsi and coke were. In fact, it
looks to have the same syntax. Nothing is the layer underneath
that is essentially a symbolic computer - sitting between maru
and the actual machine code (sort of like an LLVM assembler if
I've understood it correctly).
They've hidden Frank in plain sight. He's a patch-together of all
their experiments so far... which I'm sure you could do if you
took the time to understand each of them and had the inclination.
They've been publishing as much as they could all along. The
point, though, is you have to understand each part. It's no good
if you don't understand it.
If you know anything about Alan & VPRI's work, you'd know that
their focus is on getting children this stuff in front as many
children as possible, because they have so much more ability to
connect to the heart of a problem than adults. (Nothing to do
with age - talking about minds, not bodies here). Adults usually
get in the way with their "stuff" - their "knowledge" sits like a
kind of a filter, denying them the ability to see things clearly
and directly connect to them unless they've had special training
in relaxing that filter. We don't know how to be simple and
direct any more - not to say that it's impossible. We need
children to teach us meta-stuff, mostly this direct way of
experiencing and looking, and this project's main aim appears to
be to provide them (and us, of course, but not as importantly)
with the tools to do that. Adults will come secondarily - to the
degree they can't embrace new stuff ;-). This is what we need as
an entire populace - to increase our general understanding - to
reach breakthroughs previously not thought possible, and fast.
Rather than changing the world, they're providing the seed for
children to change the world themselves.
This is only as I understand it from my observation. Don't take
it as gospel or even correct, but maybe you could use it to
investigate the parts of frank a little more and with in-depth
openness :) The entire project is an experiment... and that's why
they're not coming out and saying "hey guys this is the product
of our work" - it's not a linear building process, but an
intensively creative process, and most of that happens within
oneself before any results are seen (rather like boiling a kettle).
http://www.vpri.org/vp_wiki/index.php/Main_Page
On the bottom of that page, you'll see a link to the tinlizzie
site that references "experiment" and the URL has dbjr in it...
as far as I understand it, this is as much frank as we've been shown.
http://tinlizzie.org/dbjr/
:)
Julian
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