Road to reality – executable essay • Hacker News Board

Re: Road to reality – executable essay

#11

Post by sritchie » Fri, May 19, 2023, 11:04 PM UTC

killthebuddha wrote: post #10

It feels a little bit odd that a newsletter + project that's directly motivated by Penrose's book and also appropriates the book's title does not mention the book. For example, the GitHub repo's readme: Welcome to the Road to Reality! The Road to Reality is an essay series by me, Sam Ritchie. Starting with the basics of Lisp (the Clojure programming language, specifically), we'll build a modern computer algebra syste…

It's not just you! The last thing I want is a WTF from Penrose...

This was just an oversight from me trying to cram in too much writing, and I'll fix it tonight once the kids are down. I explained the intended connection in a different comment — basically I started the newsletter with the goal of reading Penrose's book, doing all the exercises and trying to build out a community reading it together.

But my notes were just as confusing as the book, so I spent 3 years working on a port of Sussman's computer algebra system and sewing it together with this notebook engine, MathBox for 3D rendering, Mafs, Leva, MathLive, and JSXGraph and Reagent for a declarative way of sharing state between everyone.

Then I pieced it all together in this essay, tried to keep it concise, and blew it by not filling in the whole genesis story and GOAL of following Penrose.

I'll add that, and I will cover chapters of the book too!

Re: Road to reality – executable essay

#12

Post by sritchie » Fri, May 19, 2023, 11:05 PM UTC

esafak wrote: post #9

The presentation is great, Sam. Does anyone have a list of similar presentation tools? I am trying to pick a solution for technical, interactive blog posts, so it has to support interactive visualizations, equations, and have great typography. Live editing and support for running code would be a great plus. I think of Observable, distill.pub, and Jupyter, and they all hit various points but not all of them.

Thank you! I had "dependencies between notebooks" and "collaborative mode"... the first one's covered here but I still don't know how to handle some Google Docs-style flow on these.

I would really like to publish essays like this in an environment like Maria: https://2.maria.cloud/curriculum/clojure-with-shapes , with the ability to duck out to my own editor when I'm ready to graduate.

I'm happy to talk more about this if you like!

Re: Road to reality – executable essay

#13

Post by sritchie » Fri, May 19, 2023, 11:06 PM UTC

Syntonicles wrote: post #3

Excellent, I'm looking forward to future installments! I can't tell whether the series will be related to the book of the same title, but I would personally love a Lispy / SICP style exploration into that.

I covered this in a few of the comments above... the project was initially completely aimed at the R2R book, and I expect to get back to it. I'll add more background to the project page soon!

Re: Road to reality – executable essay

#14

Post by killthebuddha » Fri, May 19, 2023, 11:16 PM UTC

sritchie wrote: post #11

killthebuddha wrote: post #10

It feels a little bit odd that a newsletter + project that's directly motivated by Penrose's book and also appropriates the book's title does not mention the book. For example, the GitHub repo's readme: Welcome to the Road to Reality! The Road to Reality is an essay series by me, Sam Ritchie. Starting with the basics of Lisp (the Clojure programming language, specifically), we'll build a modern computer algebra syste…

It's not just you! The last thing I want is a WTF from Penrose... This was just an oversight from me trying to cram in too much writing, and I'll fix it tonight once the kids are down. I explained the intended connection in a different comment — basically I started the newsletter with the goal of reading Penrose's book, doing all the exercises and trying to build out a community reading it together. But my notes were…

Awesome! I similarly blew it by not mentioning that I think this is an awesome project. I bet tons of people have been similarly inspired by the book and by Penrose (I know I have) but you've actually gone out and done a thing, mad kudos to you!

Re: Road to reality – executable essay

#15

Post by avindroth » Sat, May 20, 2023, 1:32 AM UTC

Reminds me of Bret Victor and hundredrabbits. If Lisp was more popular, we could use it as building block for UI (since it can describe both code data). An email client where all of your emails is a (lazy) list? A Figma-like where you can compose, filter, reduce the graphical elements? Lists are everywhere, and Lisp is built for it.

Re: Road to reality – executable essay

#16

Post by wtol » Sat, May 20, 2023, 4:29 AM UTC

Sam, I've been loosely following your projects / SICMutils since I landed on your Road to Reality substack (incidentally, after getting a copy of Penrose's book in early 2020 with similar goals). It's been inspiring to see it coming together - congrats on getting this out into the world!

This presentation is super clean & this kind of executable & visualizable code/LaTeX/math is (IMO) absolutely the future. Math on paper sells Lagrange & Hamilton way short. I originally wasn't able to break through the Lispy-ness of Clojure when following early SICMUtils (was a little busy having transferred to Caltech for Physics in '21 :)), but am looking forward to getting back into it and a second round with Emmy following these posts.