Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

Comment by carapace | Hacker News Reader

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(OMGOMGOMG Dude, Dr. Kay, sir, your excellency, sir! I'm a huge fan! HUGE! You have made my day. I'm going to be telling random strangers in the street "Alan Kay responded to m'comment on the intertubes today!" and whistling and dancing on lampposts. Okay, deep breath, calming down...)

Apologies for my glibness, I meant no disrespect. I knew it was someone I should remember. (He of BitBlt fame, damn I'm getting old and forgetful!)

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So... "discovered" or "invented"?

FWIW, I think the point turns on one's metaphysics. Is there some Platonic realm where e.g. each of the "Turing Drawings" ( https://maximecb.github.io/Turing-Drawings/ ) has always existed, just waiting to be discovered? Or did Maxime Chevalier-Boisvert invent them? All of them? What is the ontological status of the vast set of TDs that have never (yet) been seen by any eye, or that have never been run on any real machine?

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Er, on a tangent, may I make bold to ask you, did you know that Prolog Discrete Clause Grammar rules are very similar to the OMeta parser generators? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Definite_clause_grammar

For "discovered" vs "invented" I think you have to posit your definition of "exist". This puzzled Russell, Whitehead, Wittgenstein, etc.

The Peano axioms describe constraints for instances within a set. Is something already "there" just because we can test the constraints after it appears, or use them to make it?

The foundations of OMeta go way way back (starting with Meta II by Val Schorre ca 1964 -- and in the context of the many different approaches to parsing in the 60s). The modern addition to help make OMeta was the packrat parsing idea. It wouldn't be surprising if some Prolog lore wafted its way in, but I don't recall that any of the many parsing schemes that Prolog has been used for were in the conversations. One of the Ur-centers that most parsing theory has to contend with is "Earley Parsing". However, the idea that a dynamic proof can be used to parse goes very far back.

I pretend to be a strict constructivist, except on cloudless nights far from the city lights. When I see the stars I can believe in infinitudes.

I've been an avid reader of VPRI's papers and reports. Incredible work. It deserves to be more widely known.

Someone on a forum somewhere pointed out the similarity between DCGs and OMeta, I didn't notice it myself.

I'm working to complete a project directly inspired by your work (and Ted Nelson's "Dream Machines" book) that should culminate in a system that approaches the "20,000 lines of code" ... "from the end‐user down to the metal" limit. I'm using Prolog and Joy programming languages and targeting the RISC that Prof. Wirth developed for Project Oberon. I have a simple modeless UI modeled on Oberon OS and Jef Raskin's "Humane Interface". If anything comes of it I'll probably try to show it to you someday.

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