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petar | 10 years ago | on: I Want to Run Stateful Containers, Too

Have you looked at gocircuit.org and the accompanying language for connecting templates Escher.io? They are still not production ready, but aiming to solve your problem in a general way. The circuit simply says you should be able to write the logics that build out your software as programs against a simple live Cluster API, provided by the circuit. Escher helps mix and math such functional logics. But the bottom line is this. Every framework is a language. Adding frameworks adds complexity. This is why circuit reuses the go language for its concurrency and abstracts your cluster into a programmable dynamic data structure

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher – A language for connecting technologies using pure metaphors

Yes, the handbook is a complete Escher application. It simply creates a static file hierarchy while patching snippets of things together. Escher is experimental and I am iterating on other variations too. This one however is stable and complete and people are welcome to play with it.

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher: A language for programming in metaphors

The language for expressing constraints is what different, not the meaning. People are confused because they properly evaluate that you can do with this language what you can do with any other. But only up to a point of scale. Then the bugs that other languages make you introduce catch up with you. And you can't produce more software because you have to spend too much time fixing bugs of old software. In Escher, every circuit without valves is forever closed as design: for the same reason electrical circuits are rarely recalled. Did you ever wonder why that is?

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher: A language for programming in metaphors

Yes. Be patient a few more weeks, as I have other obligations too. I will have demos how you can make your own gesture-controlled robotics at home, using Escher bindings for the gobot.io library

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher: A language for programming in metaphors

I apologize, if it's a little over the top. But being over the top is the only way to get people to really think: out of anger to prove you wrong. It's just true. But I have no intention to offend anyone.

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher: A language for programming in metaphors

Choiceless Computation is how the "outside" world looks to an Escher program. This is easier to understand, if you study go circuit.org because it is a concrete product not just a semantic. There:

A program starts and sees nothingness. Then a host emerges out of nowhere. (A human provisioning engineer must have turned it on in the data center.) Then the program can do something with it (like start a database) or it can wait (indefinitely) for another emergence of a host (before it sets up an elastic DB, say). The point is that objects emerge in your "sight" and they are nameless. The namelessness is the choicelessness. And this might seem like a small difference, but it is huge.

Chomsky tells Linguists: Try to imagine the world from the new-born baby's point of view; and trust me that the baby is born knowing nothing. The only difference is that the baby sees a "blooming buzzing confusion" (i.e. many hosts are online already). But the connection is that everything is nameless (at first). The baby sees many visual pixels. They have no meaning (i.e. no linguistic names). Later the baby sorts out the confusion and assigns names to all phenomena in its sight. Same for circuit programs. They see a nameless army of live hosts. They are all equally good, hence nameless. Then the program start purposing them differently (some are dbs, some are https, etc.). This is the same as the baby assigning names to pixels in its sight until it wakes up one day at age 5, thinking it understands the world. Ha :)

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher: A language for programming in metaphors

That's correct. For instance, I discovered the link to Choiceless Computation AFTER I invented Escher. It is a real mathematical connection, and I only bothered with it, because academics will not look at my work unless you shove some terms of their own into it. So I do, and it is real, because you can go and verify that Shelah's paper exactly matches the sematics of Escher. And the conclusion is that Shelah's paper wasn't necessary for my invention. It was necessary to convince an audience of a specific kind. (Not that this is accomplished yet. But it will. With time.)

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher: A language for programming in metaphors

Thanks for the link! It's time to meet my peers. I will say to all people who find similarities between my work and cognitive scientists or neuroscientists: I have never read a line of text on either of these subjects, nor have I ever read anything written by Chomsky (other than email exchanges). I've only listened to Chomsky's you tube vides and skimmed the titles of his book. This was suggestive enough.

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher: A language for programming in metaphors

I am glad. The truth is: Eventually every mind, in trying to save itself from "repetitive" work, reaches the same conclusion: recursive metaphorical programming. It comes out in different buzz words "flow-programming", "metaphor mechanics", etc. They are all fuzzy but roughly correct. The only way to propose a theory of 1st-person consciousness, which is not ambiguous (the theory as communicated to others), is to give a programming language. This supersedes a philosophy paper that no one reads and is predicated on the author's "knowledge". And if the author is an academic, they can just assume "people don't know math" and people assume "we don't know math", so no knowledge is transferred at all.

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher: A language for programming in metaphors

Yes. All the functional programming language had the right idea (as you point out). But not the right grammar. Escher has 3 grammar rules (reflex, circuit and valve). All these other languages have much much more. That's the point.

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher: A language for programming in metaphors

The whole point is that the gate-designer decides if their gate works in various directions (there are usually much more than 2 or 3). And this simply means that if they get a stream of events coming in in the wrong order, they can choose how to "complain": They can stay silent and ignore the broken language sent to them. Or they can throw a panic and halt the entire program. You decide. The NAND gate makes little sense to go in anything but one direction. But a PLUS gate or the REASON gate make sense in multiple directions. You can read more about this here: http://www.maymounkov.org/memex/abstract

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher: A language for programming in metaphors

It looks familiar to every other language you know and yet to no one in specific. That's the point: It unifies them all as a common denominator and you have to break out of your conventional thinking to see the differences. Alternatively, you have to try to write many programs in Escher and then you will gradually start "getting it"

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher: A language for programming in metaphors

Yes: At a smentic linguistic level. Not as a physical substance. At which point you ask: What is a physical substance formally? Well, that depends on your dictionary of the world. Cognition is relative, people don't get that :) There is no absolute knowledge. There are only interpretations of individual participants. And our programming languages have to reflect that.

petar | 11 years ago | on: Escher: A language for programming in metaphors

Not incidentally. The Voynich manuscript simply demonstrates that if you mix concepts at all scales of visual perception (color, texture, page organization, etc.) the document looks un-intelligible yet familiar. Incidentally, so do Escher's painting, and so does my documentation (to you). Now think about why? Think about Escher-Godel-Bach, think think :)
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