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Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

project-mage.org

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Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#11

Post by JonChesterfield »

selestify wrote: post #10
JonChesterfield wrote: post #9

Flexibility interacts poorly with composability. When everything is specialised at the whim of the developer, tying different pieces together is difficult. A lot of the rigidity in programming languages is there because it gives programmers (and programs) common ground to work from. Flexibility usually interacts poorly with performance as well. Specialisation to a domain is usually faster and can be dramatically fast…

Do you have examples of other "rebuild the world in lisp" projects? I'd be curious to see how and why historical attempts have foundered

Not great examples. Hazy memories of readme files for projects that sound interesting but fizzle out, sometimes decades ago.

Emacs is probably a success story in that genre. It's possible to use it as the first process booted iiuc. I certainly have days where it's the only process I run after gnome has booted.

Guix has replaced a lot of Linux userspace infra with scheme. Successfully as far as I can tell.

I think there are (non-emacs...) operating systems in various states of progress written in lisp.

Sometimes one finds a compiler written in lisp which doesn't have a runtime in C. Jitawa, Maru are the only two I know of. All the others I've looked at seem to be built on top of C. I think they're both finished/abandoned.

My rebuild everything project is still in the better compiler phase so I might be projecting. Hopefully I'll remember better anecdotes later.

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#12

Post by esrh »

I feel like your campaign would benefit from explaining a little bit about who you are, what you've written before, and why we should believe you can actually accomplish this (understandably big project). People like to feel like they're paying a person, not an idea...

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#13

Post by renox »

some-mthfka wrote: post #2

Hi! I am the author of the project. There's a discussion on Emacs is Not Enough that has been taking place today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375137 The Emacs is Not Enough is quite ranty, and its style is not to some people's taste (well, it is kind of a rant, after all). If you want the meat, indeed, please see any other articles on the homepage, or, for an overview of the project, this: https://pro…

I haven't finished reading everything but so far I like what I read.

In a way, it reminds me of the software research project STEPS which aimed to reinvent computing with much less code than normal software. I consider this project a failure not because its funding got cut before the end but because nobody managed to reproduce their achievements (non reproducible research isn't research).

I wish you more success!

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#14

Post by mwcampbell »

some-mthfka wrote: post #2

Hi! I am the author of the project. There's a discussion on Emacs is Not Enough that has been taking place today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375137 The Emacs is Not Enough is quite ranty, and its style is not to some people's taste (well, it is kind of a rant, after all). If you want the meat, indeed, please see any other articles on the homepage, or, for an overview of the project, this: https://pro…

Have you thought about how your system might be adapted for power users that have accessibility requirements, such as blind people? I'm guessing you'd rather not implement the current GUI accessibility APIs, but would rather have something like Emacspeak that directly implements the alternative UI (e.g. speech output) inside the Lisp environment.

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#15

Post by snewman »

renox wrote: post #13
some-mthfka wrote: post #2

Hi! I am the author of the project. There's a discussion on Emacs is Not Enough that has been taking place today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375137 The Emacs is Not Enough is quite ranty, and its style is not to some people's taste (well, it is kind of a rant, after all). If you want the meat, indeed, please see any other articles on the homepage, or, for an overview of the project, this: https://pro…

I haven't finished reading everything but so far I like what I read. In a way, it reminds me of the software research project STEPS which aimed to reinvent computing with much less code than normal software. I consider this project a failure not because its funding got cut before the end but because nobody managed to reproduce their achievements (non reproducible research isn't research). I wish you more success!

This (STEPS) sounds interesting, do you have a pointer? (It's not the easiest word to google...)

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#16

Post by Jtsummers »

snewman wrote: post #15
renox wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I haven't finished reading everything but so far I like what I read. In a way, it reminds me of the software research project STEPS which aimed to reinvent computing with much less code than normal software. I consider this project a failure not because its funding got cut before the end but because nobody managed to reproduce their achievements (non reproducible research isn't research). I wish you more success!

This (STEPS) sounds interesting, do you have a pointer? (It's not the easiest word to google...)

Research out of VPRI: http://www.vpri.org/

The "writings" page has a long list of publications you can check out.

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#17

Post by 0x445442 »

renox wrote: post #13
some-mthfka wrote: post #2

Hi! I am the author of the project. There's a discussion on Emacs is Not Enough that has been taking place today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375137 The Emacs is Not Enough is quite ranty, and its style is not to some people's taste (well, it is kind of a rant, after all). If you want the meat, indeed, please see any other articles on the homepage, or, for an overview of the project, this: https://pro…

I haven't finished reading everything but so far I like what I read. In a way, it reminds me of the software research project STEPS which aimed to reinvent computing with much less code than normal software. I consider this project a failure not because its funding got cut before the end but because nobody managed to reproduce their achievements (non reproducible research isn't research). I wish you more success!

What I want to know is why that implementation (Frank) that Kay uses for all his presentations isn’t available anywhere. Is he the only one that has a license to use it? I mean after all that research could you not zip up the result and throw it on GitHub?

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#18

Post by [deleted] »

some-mthfka wrote: post #2

Hi! I am the author of the project. There's a discussion on Emacs is Not Enough that has been taking place today here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34375137 The Emacs is Not Enough is quite ranty, and its style is not to some people's taste (well, it is kind of a rant, after all). If you want the meat, indeed, please see any other articles on the homepage, or, for an overview of the project, this: https://pro…

[deleted]

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#19

Post by some-mthfka »

esrh wrote: post #12

I feel like your campaign would benefit from explaining a little bit about who you are, what you've written before, and why we should believe you can actually accomplish this (understandably big project). People like to feel like they're paying a person, not an idea...

Haha, alright. I have a github profile

https://github.com/some-mthfka

I am not particularly proud of most of those projects. Many of them were strictly done for fun. Some of them I did because I didn't know any better.

The most sophisticated project I did was a game. You can grab it here for free:

https://ottrta.itch.io/ottrta

I don't promise it will bring you any joy, though. It was written in C++ and there's no code and there's only Windows binaries. Sorry, it was a few years back that I have published it. But, easily, that was the most interesting project I did, and the only usable one I have ever delivered.

Otherwise, I am just some motherfucker (you guessed it).

But you know what I believe? If you can think it, you can make it... That's all I want to say.

Re: Project Mage is an effort to build a power-user environment in Common Lisp

#20

Post by some-mthfka »

vindarel wrote: post #7

It was unclear to me, but some code was written. https://project-mage.org/the-power-of-structure#org63e88da > Fern is the most technical section of the bunch. Perhaps that's because much of it is implemented already (KR, constraints, basic geometry, and linear algebra). and it doesn't do everything from zero, but is somehow based on Garnet > Fern is a spiritual successor to Garnet, a Common Lisp project for building…

The linear-algebra provides a usability layer to April (an APL compiler). The geometry is just geometry with intersections (Its pretty cool in that it has planes, infinite sections, etc). Then there's KR with formulas thrown out and the constraint solver right from multi-garnet. Some utils. It's a start.

You are right, I will update that page with more explanations on the particular subsystems.

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