Kurt Stephens

Nerd Up!

The only way to implement the future is to avoid having to predict it. -- Piumarta
Fighting entropy one day at a time...

COLAs or CLOAs? : are lambda systems fundamentally simpler than object systems?

Kurt on Sat, 2012-02-11 20:16.

Should Combined-Object-Lambda-Architecture really be Combined-Lambda-Object-Architecture?

Ian Piumarta’s IDST bootstraps a object-system, then a compiler, then a lisp evaluator. Maru bootstraps a lisp evaluator, then crafts an object system, then a compiler. Maru is much smaller and elegant than IDST.

Are object systems necessarily more complex than lambda evaluators? Or is this just another demonstration of how Lisp code/data unification is more powerful?

If message send and function calls are decomposed into lookup() and apply(), the only difference between basic OO message-passing and function calling is lookup(): the former is late-bound, the latter is early bound (in the link-editor, for example). Is OO lookup() the sole complicating factor? Is a lambda-oriented compiler fundamentally less complex than a OO compiler?

Brain simulation is the new frontier

Kurt on Tue, 2011-12-06 23:58.

Brain simulation research is more important than putting a man on Mars or starting wars.

We will see exoscale computers simulating raw human bandwidth in within 10-15 years.

http://fora.tv/2011/11/02/David_Eagleman_Will_We_Ever_Understand_the_Bra...

“We perceive because we decide.”

CheapAdvice

Kurt on Thu, 2011-09-29 14:44.

  • Dumb Code is Clean Code.
  • Smart Code is Dirty Code.
  • Advice is not Aspects.
  • Advice is objects.
  • Advice is dynamic.
  • Slides

Alan Kay at OOPSLA 1997 - The computer revolution hasn't happened yet

Kurt on Sun, 2011-07-24 23:55.

http://ftp.squeak.org/Media/AlanKay/Alan%20Kay%20at%20OOPSLA%201997%20-%...

It still hasn’t happened.

Dr. Kay said “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol”
Gregor Kiczales, Jim des Rivières and Daniel G. Bobrow was the best book in 10 years, but wished it had not be written with a Lisp frame-of-reference.

The Broken Promises of MRI/REE/YARV

Kurt on Wed, 2011-07-06 16:34.

Joe Damato drills deep into the implied contracts of the MRI/C API:

http://timetobleed.com/the-broken-promises-of-mrireeyarv/

The need for RB_GC_GUARD(v) is probably due to faulty register spilling in the MRI eval/thread/GC machinery; the PRE_GETCONTEXT() and POST_GETCONTEXT() macros in MRI eval.c might be the real problem.

In contrast, the Boehm-Demers-Weiser (BDW) GC library manages to scan registers without demanding client code to explicitly flush pointers to the stack.

However, in general, it is problematic, in language design practice to make GC contracts completely transparent to API client code. This difficultly is explicitly solved in the design of Lua:

Rule 110 in HTML5 + CSS3

Kurt on Fri, 2011-07-01 14:11.

Interesting post over at http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4222

http://elilies.com/rule110-full.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

Wasn’t familiar with Rule 110, but this caught my attention:


While working on the development of NKS, Wolfram’s research assistant Matthew Cook proved Rule 110 capable of supporting universal computation. Rule 110 is a simple enough system to suggest that naturally occurring physical systems may also be capable of universality— meaning that many of their properties will be undecidable, and not amenable to closed-form mathematical solutions.[4]

Year Million

Kurt on Mon, 2011-06-06 00:17.

http://www.amazon.com/Year-Million-Science-Edge-Knowledge/dp/1934633054

Entertaining essays. However, it’s absurd that this book is not Kindled. I hope we are not pulverizing living things into sheets so we can encode bits with such low throughput in the year 1,000,000.


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