(unknown)

Plans

Greetings...

I met up with Fare for another informal planning session 2 weeks ago.  
(I apologize for the delay; I've spent those 2 weeks trying to make the 
Commonwealth of Massachusetts live up to its promise of affordable 
health insurance.  But that's another story!)  Anyway, without further 
ado, here is a summary of our discussion:

WEB SITE

1. I will upgrade the CMS any day now (and rename it according to RMS's 
terminology - Website Revision System - which makes more sense to me!)  
Major changes include WSGI support, simplifications, and integration 
with the Member List, so any member/lurker can easily edit the website 
once granted permission.

2. Set up a GIT repository for code projects.  (forget DARCS, SVN, Monotone)

3. Fare has volunteered to set up UML - UserMode Linux.  Hopefully, this 
will give us a lot more flexibility while making life easier for Tril.

CODE PROJECTS

(What's needed is for a few core members to start something to show 
we're not all talk)

4. Let's declare Common Lisp our "platform of choice" for current 
development.  We recognize that it's far from ideal, and intend to 
replace it with The Right Thing eventually.  Meanwhile, at least we can 
use try out Tunes ideas as we write *useful* programs that run on 
*existing* systems.

 (a) Write a short guide on getting started with CL quickly and 
painlessly (short short version: install Debian/Ubuntu; install sbcl, 
emacs21, slime, cua.el)  I'll do this since I'm new to CL.

 (b) Add PLT-style embedding of different syntaxes, to make CL 
attractive to people like me who hate its syntax [see DrScheme, DrPython]

 (c) Add a "compembler" [see Movitz]

 (d) Add Erlang-style concurrency, Software Transactional Memory 
(essentially a language-independent version of SQL transactions), 
Algebraic Data Types, and so on... (see item #6 below)

5. Take a thorough look at the following projects to see what we can 
learn/borrow from them, or add to them:

 - Movitz (a Lisp OS)
 - POP-11 (an old multi-paradigm language system)
 - McCLIM (a Lisp user interface system *similar* to Tunes UI ideas)
 - PLT Scheme (with its innovative IDE) and related work

6. Begin preparations for Google SoC 2008.  For starters, see Fare's 
term project proposals 
[http://fare.tunes.org/computing/term-project-proposal.html]

RESEARCH / BRAINSTORMING

7. Imagine a future Internet with standardized content-addressable 
storage, decentralized name lookup, a meaningful concept of identity, 
peer-to-peer wireless mesh networks, or whatever innovations you can 
think of.  In that context, address the "Tunes Distributed Publishing" 
problem...

Anyway, that's my take.  Fare may have something to add.  Comments most 
welcome.

- Tom

Membership database

A few years ago, Tril set up a membership database [1].  There was some 
talk [2] about the need to distinguish between Lurkers, Members (who 
read this mailing list), and Contributors.  It's simply "too much 
information".  So I'm dealing with that now.

This is the one place you can post your "profile" on the Tunes website, 
now that the Wiki/Cliki is down.  You should be able to edit your 
information.  Email me if you have any trouble.

Later, I'll tie this into some other stuff on the website, like that CMS 
I was working on.  I don't think we want to run a blog... this is fairly 
permanent material... but some interactivity would be nice, so that all 
members (that we trust) can help with website editing.

1. Membership database: http://tunes.org/members/
New short form: http://tunes.org/cgi-bin/members

2. Discussion: 
http://lists.tunes.org/archives/tunes/2003-February/003570.html

Aside from that, I've been musing on those 2003 discussions... For one 
thing, I think we need a new, simplified Charter; the current one 
addresses the concerns of a big rapidly-developed project, and offers 
little guidance for the current reality.  And it seems too democratic, 
especially now, when we hardly have a quorum, and we really have more of 
a rotating dictatorship.

Another subject that came up was: How do we include "novices" who are 
eager to help?  Or shouldn't we?  And should we try to lay out a 
curriculum (the "Learning Lounge") or just let them figure it out 
themselves?  I think there are too many programming language 
"subcultures" out there, all with their own peculiar terminology, to 
distract novices (and not-so-novices).  We need a unifying culture shift 
before we can fully and coherently explain the key concepts of 
computing.  This shift seems to be happening, and we can help it 
along... The challenge is *communication*, and for that, you don't have 
to be part of the academic elite.  Don't expect a leadership role or any 
great recognition, but as far as I'm concerned, if your technical 
knowledge is only "novice" or "intermediate", you're still welcome here, 
even if you do ask "stupid" questions from time to time.  Just don't 
push your luck.  [End Rant]

- Tom Novelli

Functional Computer from the ground up

Misters,

Let me introduce myself : Guillaume FORTAINE, French Engineer in 
Computer Science. Some people know me and some other don't. In all the 
cases, it's an honour for me to send to you this mail. I am currently 
doing researches about FPGAs engineering and Functional Programming 
Languages.

I am currently involved in the OpenFlightLinux project :

http://openflightlinux.org/

“The Open FlightLinux Project is an open source paragon that strives to 
provide sustainable technology through superior engineering, 
next-generation design concepts, and open standards.”

and I am currently thinking about the design of a true next-gen 
Operating Sytem. After many thoughts, I believe that it could be of 
interest for
everybody to have a common basis for Next-Generation Systems to promote 
research and to skip reinventing the wheel every time. As you are the 
main leaders of the most promising functional stuff research, I decided 
to contact you. Here is the starting point of my reflexion :

http://lists.tunes.org/archives/tunes/2007-July/004097.html

I have to say I'm impressed with Ubuntu Linux... it was painless to
install, and it just works. I won't be thinking about how to improve
Linux anymore, just looking forward to its successor... which just might
be Tunes. (Doubtful 

One challenge remains : to obtain FAA Flight Certification, the highest 
degree of reliability in software verification at the current time ( 
EAL7 can't be tested on the "field", or in the sky ;) ! ).

http://www.ghs.com/linux/security.html

Until Linux is certified to DO-178B Level A, our soldiers, sailors, 
airmen and marines should not be asked to trust their lives with it.

Here is my proposal for a functional way of thinking computers from the 
gound up ! :)

*Hardware Design*

http://funhdl.org/wiki/doku.php/atom

Atom is a high-level hardware description language embedded in the 
functional language Haskell. Inspired by the work of Arvind and his 
students at MIT, Atom compiles conditional term rewriting systems into 
Verilog and VHDL for ASIC and FPGA synthesis.

*Programming Language*

http://www.e-pig.org/

*Processor*

http://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/~mfn/reduceron/index.html

The Reduceron is a processor for executing Haskell programs on FPGA with 
the aim of exploring how custom architectural features can improve the 
speed in which Haskell functions are evaluated. Being described entirely 
in Haskell (using Lava), the Reduceron also serves as an interesting 
application of functional languages to the design of complex control 
circuits such as processors.

*Operating System Design*

-Basis :

http://www.ninj4.net/kinetic/

Project Summary

Kinetic is an operating system which is written primarily in Haskell, a 
purely-functional programming language.

Kinetic is not the first operating system to be developed in Haskell; 
however, to my knowledge all previous efforts in this direction have had 
seriously limited scope (mostly academic and proof-of-concept systems). 
The long-term intention is for Kinetic to be a serious, useful operating 
system.

-Future :

http://tunes.org/

TUNES is a worldwide, loose-knit group of computer enthusiasts working 
toward a new vision of computing, based on these principles:

* All users are programmers... more or less
* Computing Freedom - open source, re-usability & extendability
* Integration & Consolidation of programming languages & tools
* High-level programming: Automate what can be automated

Our work is focused on programming language design, compiler techniques, 
development tools, and user interfaces.

I look forward to your answer,

Best Regards,

Guillaume FORTAINE

--

-- 
"I consider life itself instinct for growth, for durability, for accumulation of forces, for power : where
the will to power is lacking there is decline"

Friedrich Nietzsche

"Knowledge is Power."

Sir Francis Bacon

Website Plans

CLIKI/WIKI

Yesterday I sorted out the Wiki stuff... out of 1200 CLiki pages, 150 
were modified after importing to MediaWiki, but only about 20 had 
substantial changes.  I'll merge those with Armin's CLiki snapshot.  All 
old URLs like tunes.org/wiki/* and cliki.tunes.org/* will be redirected 
to this new archive.

OLD SUGGESTIONS

I found an old post by David Jeske with some good website suggestions, 
even 8 years later:

- Write polished, coherent "documents" or "papers" to summarize big 
ideas.  These don't have to be too formal, but they should include a 
thesis statement, example(s), and context (background, vocabulary, etc.)

- Sift through "Review" entries and Mailing List archives, and write 
papers on noteworthy ideas.  And, I would add, search the web for 
post-mortem analysis of dead projects listed in the Review.

- Create a "Showcase" for papers & projects, to encourage people to 
write stuff and show it off.

- "Monthly minutes"... I promised to do this a few months ago, but there 
hasn't been much action.  Maybe quarterly is more realistic at this 
relaxed pace 

David's original post: 
http://lists.tunes.org/archives/tunes/1999-January/001772.html

PROPOSED CHANGES

Fare thinks we should setup Subversion to manage the website and some 
new coding projects (I'm not sure what he's got in mind, but I'm working 
on a parser & "compembler" in Scheme).  We had talked about Monotone and 
DARCS, but SVN is lighter-weight and seems to have more tools available, 
which is nice.

We probably want to run SVN under Apache2 with SSL.  (I did a trial run 
at home, and I'd be happy to share my notes...)  As far as I can 
discern, this combination only works with "basic authentication", i.e. 
user:password pairs in a "htpasswd" text file.  It sounds old-fashioned, 
but I don't see a problem with it.

A major motivation for my CMS project was that CVS made it so hard to 
update the website that nobody ever did it.  SVN seems better than any 
browser-based editing method.  And, I can't vouch for this, but 
apparently it supports the WebDAV/DeltaV protocol well enough that you 
can edit files "transparently" by opening, say 
https://tunes.org/svn/index.html in a text editor on any modern OS -- or 
(don't even think about it!) Frontpage or Dreamweaver.

About documents/articles/essays: I don't care if it's written in TeX, 
ReStructured Text, InDesign, some ad-hoc markup, or whatever -- as long 
as it converts to decent HTML.  Maybe they should be numbered 
sequentially like the AI Memos, E.W.Djikstra's letters, etc.  

Other ideas for web-apps:
- Review database... terse, spreadsheet-like.. use AJAX for edits.
- Annotations on static HTML files... I could adapt my CMS stuff to this.
- Comment / Bug Report form
- Nicer mailing list archive browser... They're in 
/serv/archives/public/tunes/ (on bespin) if anyone wants to take a shot 
at it.

Anyway, it's getting late, so I'll leave it there.  Any ideas?  
Criticism?  Volunteers?

 - Tom

Sketch

I thought some graphics would add a nice touch to the web site.. here's 
something I'm working on:

http://tom.bespin.org/sketch/

Any suggestions?

- Tom

Bad link in wiki page.

I am sorry if I sent this to the wrong place, if so,
please forward to correct person.

The page:
http://tunes.org/wiki/Microkernel

contains a link for 'abstraction inversion'. However it points
here:
http://tunes.org/wiki/index.php?title=abstraction_inversion&action=edit
Which is an empty page if you do not have edit privledges.
I think you wanted it to point here:
http://tunes.org/wiki/Abstraction_Inversion

since this is a trivial bugfix, I would have edited it
myself except that your login page:
http://tunes.org/wiki/Special:Userlogin

labeled "Create an account or log in" does not seem
to provide anyway to create an account!

--

-- 
Paul Elliott                       1(512)837-1096
pelliott <at> io.com                    PMB 181, 11900 Metric Blvd Suite J
http://www.io.com/~pelliott/pme/   Austin TX 78758-3117

House, NixOS, LispM emulators (links for Tunes)

Some links for TUNES:

* HOUSE, an OS in Haskell: http://programatica.cs.pdx.edu/House/

* plenty of Lisp machine emulators at http://www.unlambda.com/lisp/
See also a Genera emulator for x86_64,
http://www.unlambda.com/download/genera/ and Movitz, an OS in Lisp for
x86, http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/

* NixOS, a Linux distribution based on a purely functional package
manager: http://nix.cs.uu.nl/about.html

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
"To alcohol! The cause of... and solution to all of life's problems!"
        -- Homer Simpson, quoted by H. Duray about Addiction to Government

Back in action

Hello everyone... I've been very busy the past two months, with the 
wedding, honeymoon, home renovations and stuff.  Work is slow, and I 
could have been working on Tunes if I wasn't so busy studying up on all 
the latest buzzwords (J2EE, Django, Joomla, etc.) to put in my resumé.  
I'm not ready to fully learn Lisp and apply to ITA, but I think about it 
every time Faré says how busy they are!

I have to say I'm impressed with Ubuntu Linux... it was painless to 
install, and it just works.  I won't be thinking about how to improve 
Linux anymore, just looking forward to its successor... which just might 
be Tunes.  (Doubtful 

I'm also dabbling in Lambda-the-Ultimate... I'll be discussing some of 
our ideas, hopefully getting some attention, or at least figuring out 
where to draw the line between Tunes and LtU.

Picking up where I left off on the Tunes website, we were discussing 
WSGI and various database wrappers.  Now I'm thinking we should just use 
Django.  It handles all the mundane stuff.  I was afraid it would be 
slow, bloated, limiting... but it's not... it's exactly what I wanted.  
Sound good?

As for the CMS, I'd like to 1) tidy up and improve what I've done so 
far, 2) add note/blog features, and 3) add a "Review" database to 
collect _very terse_ summaries and citations for projects, experiments, 
etc. of interest to Tunes (the goal is to avoid having an entire "page" 
about every toy OS)

Tom Novelli

Pile system (2nd wave Cybernethics)

I've been recently contacted by Peter Krieg from the Pile System www.pilesys.com

TUNES is more like 1st wave and a half ("symbolic" stuff, but with
humility on the results and faith in external evolution to make the
system better). These guys are more like 2nd wave: faith that you can
directly program a non-symbolic program that can then evolve
internally.

PS: as for me, I'm more overworked than ever in my job at ITA
software, but this is rather good, as I am becoming a better
programmer and manager, and get to work fully in Lisp and partly on
distributed systems.

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
So that there be reality, there must be an observer.
"I am, therefore someone thinks."

Conferences

This week-end, there is the "History of Programming Languages III"
conference <http://research.ihost.com/hopl/>  in San Diego.

Next weekend, this conference with Alan Kay in Pisa on June 15 was
announced that may interest some:
   http://medialab.di.unipi.it/Event/AlanKay/

More interesting conferences happen may be worth mentioning on this list.

[ François-René ÐVB Rideau | Reflection&Cybernethics | http://fare.tunes.org ]
That man who dares to waste one hour of time, has not discovered
the value of life. -- Charles Darwin