teliva VS todomvc

Thanks for reply and for have shared your project first!

> I think we can refresh some the things that make it powerful with a fresh coat of paint, to make it more accessible to a “younger generation.”

That's what scare me, again in general: I see regular small complaint of modern absurdity, posts like:

- https://tiramisu.bearblog.dev/your-desktop-is-not-a-destinat... | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33838697

- https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/61535.html

- https://vermaden.wordpress.com/2022/02/07/epitaph-to-laptops...

- https://rsapkf.org/weblog/q2z/

- https://tomcritchlow.com/2022/04/21/new-rss/

- https://jfm.carcosa.net/blog/computing/usenet/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33510169

- https://dianne.skoll.ca/projects/remind/ | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28363453

- https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

- https://akiflow.com/

- https://onezero.medium.com/the-document-metaphor-desktop-gui...

- https://den.dev/blog/user-hostile-software/

- https://www.charlieharrington.com/smart-phone-dumb-terminal/

- https://mattmower.com/2021/08/02/what-we-lost/

and COUNTLESS others, similarly many "new stuff"/innovations appear and are actually partial, limited and limiting solutions to problems already solved decades ago in a more broad and superior way.

Emacs itself is a bit horrific in the sense that it's codebase is hard to be kept up by modern developers who have troubles knowing it, but at least represent the classic model. If we lost the memory of the past it will takes decades to reach the level of evolution we have already achieved witch is really a shame.

Anytime I see new software, yours, LogSeq, some "new shiny file manager", Tiidly Wiki and so on, witch actually are a BIG effort to achieve something already existing with far less efforts thanks to an already made ecosystems who makes their development easier I have a sore smile: end users suffer from limits of modern software, DEVELOPERS suffer equally because craft something on top of modern systems it's equally terrible but we seems to be unable on one side to reach again a critical mass of users to being able to innovate again, on the other sides most people simply ignore the past so ignore what's lost.

A stupid example: link an email in SB means essentially or support a specific MUA, tracking it's evolution since breaking changes might happen all the time or add an MUE inside SB. In Emacs it's just a simple function since anything is already there. In Plan 9 to cite a project often considered hostile from and to Emacs write an MUA is damn simple limiting mails to Plan 9 itself, an MUA it's just a specific viewer of some text stream read form some user-configured filesystems mounts and so on.

The sore part is that's I can easy state the above, even in my poor English, but I have no practical solution because resurrecting the classic model for present times demand an effort ONLY a public funded body or a large community can made. We have dismissed "for business reasons" essentially all public research and we have essentially pushed to irrelevance all communities...

I question the need for scale in 90% of the places where the tech industry has cargo-culted it. Clearly I'm still failing to articulate this. Perhaps https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30019146#30040616 will help triangulate on what I mean.

> Can you clarify what you see as the alternative? Implementing everything from scratch seems absurd and so costly that there’s no point in considering this an actual option.

Not using, reimplementing and copying are the closest thing to solutions I have right now. You're right that they're not applicable to most people in their current context. I have a day job in tech and have to deal with some cognitive dissonance every day between my day job and my open source research. The one thing I have found valuable to take to my scale-obsessed tech job is to constantly be suspicious of dependencies and constantly ask if the operational burdens justify some new feature. Just switching mindset that way from software as asset to software as liability has, I'd like to believe, helped my org's decision-making.

> We have probably invested dev-millennia into managing copies. This is exactly what source control does. This is not a new area of investment. Merging is a giant pain in the ass and very possibly always will be. Accepting merge pain better come with some huge benefits.

Not all copying is the same. We've learned to copy the letter 'e' so well in our writings that we don't even think about it. In this context, even if I made a tool to make copying easier and merges more reliable, that would just cause people to take on more dependencies which defeats the whole point of understanding dependencies. So tooling would be counter-productive in that direction. The direction I want to focus on is: how can we help people understand the software they've copied into their applications? _That_ is the place where I want tooling to focus. Copying is just an implementation detail, a first, imperfect, heuristic coping mechanism for going from the world we have today to the world I want to move to that has 1000x more forks and 1000x more eyeballs looking at source code. You can see some (very toy) efforts in this direction at https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

> It’s untenable to have, e.g., everyone who works on Windows be an expert in every part of the code.

It's frustrating to say one thing in response to counter-argument A and have someone then bring up counter-argument B because I didn't talk about it right there in the response to counter-argument A. I think this is what Plato was talking about when he ranted about the problems with the newfangled technology of writing: https://newlearningonline.com/literacies/chapter-1/socrates-.... I'm not saying everyone needs to be an expert in everything. I'm saying software should reduce the pressure on people to be experts so that we can late-bind experts to domains. Not every software sub-system should need expertise at the scale at which it is used in every possible context. My Linux laptop doesn't need to be optimized to the hilt the way Google's server farms do. Using the same scheduling algo or whatever in my laptop imposes real costs on my ability to understand my computer, without giving me the benefits Google gets from the algo.

There are options between those possibilities, though. Here's my preferred point[1] in the state space:

It's impossible for people to effectively use software over the long term without learning about its internals. Software can help people learn about its internals.

https://github.com/akkartik/teliva#readme

I work on ways to write programs that help outsiders understand their big picture (rather than insiders understand incoming contributions).

The goal: you (any programmer) should be able to use an open-source program, get an idea for a simple tweak, open it up, orient yourself, and make the change you visualized -- all in a single afternoon.

More details: http://akkartik.name/about

What I have so far: https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

Lately I'm spending a lot of time on the sandboxing model. It's nice to be able to download and run untrusted programs. How to permit this without letting them cause too much damage, by explicitly giving them arbitrarily fine-grained permissions that are still easy to take in at a glance.

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

It's hard. Building Mu has given me more of a flavor for just how hard it is. Some limitations of Mu:

* It still requires firmware. There's a whole lot of C down there. How deep do you want to go?

* No mouse. This is just my own ignorance. I can't get the damn IRQs and interrupts figured out.

* Doesn't work yet on real hardware. I live in Qemu. Debugging that is a whole new set of skills I need to learn.

* No networking, almost no persistent storage. Mu has a very simple and slow driver for ATA disks, but that probably won't suffice on most real-world machine configurations. There's 0 network drivers right now. I probably need a dozen to get any sort of coverage.

The stuff you mentioned around graphics and OS file dialogs, that feels easier once you're willing to put up with constraints like Mu's 1024x768 and so on. But yeah, there's major challenges on this road.

Partly due to these challenges, I've actually started to hedge my bets and make some compromises. My new project is https://github.com/akkartik/teliva which doesn't try to eliminate C, just minimize it. Linux kernel, libc, Lua (12k lines of C), some libraries for https. A gemini client is actually on my todo list there. I think I have everything I need to build it.

with chromatic backgrounds deserve whatever happens to them."

That's a lot of cognitive dissonance in a work about UI design. Let's try to do better in making TUIs mainstream. That requires encouraging people to use the few features terminals _do_ provide.

I've been doing a fair amount of ncurses hacking recently[1], and I prefer to always explicitly specify colors. People won't get their preferred colors by default, but they'll always get a legible configuration by default.

[1] https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

Repo

The odd thing is unison started purely as a language. Now there's a platform.

I often find the best way to understand complex things is to dig all the way back to when they were being thought up. In this case there's a blog post from 2017 that I still find useful when thinking about Unison:

https://pchiusano.github.io/2017-01-20/why-not-haskell.html

Key quote:

Composability is destroyed at program boundaries, therefore extend these boundaries outward, until all the computational resources of civilization are joined in a single planetary-scale computer

(With the open sourcing of the language I doubt it will be one computer anymore, but it's an interesting window into the original idea)

Personally I find there's a lot to this. It's interesting that we're really, really good at composing code within a program. I can map, filter, loop and do whatever I want to nested data structures with complete type safety to my heart's content. My editor's autocompleting, docs are showing up on hover, it's easy to test, all's well.

But as soon as I want cron involved, and maybe a little state-- this is all wrecked. Also deployment gets more annoying as they talk about a lot.

So I think Unison always had to have a platform to support bringing this stuff into the language, even though they built the language first.

I'd love to hear some opinions from outside Unison about how they like using this language, tooling and hosting.

I'd like to hear this too.

Also, it would be great if there was something like https://eugenkiss.github.io/7guis/ or https://todomvc.com/ for platforms that we could use to compare Unison, AWS, etc etc. Or is there already a 7GUIs for platforms that I don't know about?

git clone --depth=1 https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc.git

The problem with this question is that, if it's not engineering, what is it? A better question is motivated by studying the history of chemistry and its progenitor, alchemy. That is: is software development alchemy or chemistry?

Software development alchemy. Just like alchemy, software dev is not standardized, everyone has their own idiosyncratic naming systems, classifications and rules-of-thumb. Like alchemists, software engineers are often jealous of their proprietary knowledge. Just like alchemists, they admired, feared and loathed for having secret knowledge. And just like alchemists, you have to be exceedingly brilliant to work in such a chaotic field and get anything done.

What changed alchemy into chemistry, and what is the analog to that in software? Arguably the change started with notion of conservation of mass and energy, and the development of the periodic table (thanks to Lavoisier and Mendeleev, respectively). As for what that analog is for software, first we need a characterization of the field. With alchemy and chemistry both, it's essentially mixing stuff together, heating and cooling it, and seeing what happens. But what is it for software?

Software engineering is often mistaken for computer science. Computer science is a tiny subset of software engineering. In practice, almost all of computer science is encapsulated in a few, tiny standard libraries - the places where bubble-sorts and hash maps live. (This mistake is consistent, and leads to "leet code" style interview questions which are irrelevant to actual work). I'd characterize software engineering as the set of solutions to a boundary value problem[0] described as "a set of interacting screens with behaviors pleasing to humans". The current solutions to this problem have been idiosyncratically shaped by resource constraints that rapidly relaxed over time[1], and characterized by elements discovered at random by necessity: e.g. kernels, processes, files, procedures, terminals, etc. In this analysis "language" functions as a kind of "coordinate system" as in physics[2][3], within which each of these elements are described, and within which elements are combined to make new elements, which eventually yield a solution to the boundary problem (which is termed "application").

I don't particularly know what the standardization of software engineering will look like, but I'm certain that this analysis, or something similar to it, is the first steps in the right direction. Personally, I look forward to the day we can shed the considerable weight of our alchemical origins.

0 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boundary_value_problem

1 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore's_law

2 - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coordinate_system

3 - https://www.rosettacode.org/wiki/Rosetta_Code - the same problem is solved in many languages. For applications: https://todomvc.com/

Compare the source code at https://todomvc.com/ to see what various frameworks bring to the table. VanillaJS is generally 2-3x as much code since you have to implement the MVC logic yourself.

There is an example (not mine) of AnjularJS controllers, how much JS I have to write:https://github.com/tastejs/todomvc/tree/gh-pages/architecture-examples/angularjs/js

Learn by doing. You could recreate the TodoMVC app.

How easy or hard to build Shopify without zero coding experience? Shopify is a big thing =) So that would be hard to build with zero coding experience. Start with a todo list, micro blog, or something small in scope that interests you. https://todomvc.com/ is interesting since it is the identical app, written in many different ways, different languages and frameworks - and you can use them as reference to see how others have built something.