Ahead of my PhD defence tomorrow, I'm digging out this half-finished draft and getting it posted. At the end of June, I finally submitted my PhD thesis. As the work-over-time curve went up in the preceding months, I became increasingly struck by the sheer open-endedness of the thing I'm writing. Many aspects of writing and … Continue reading Thesis mysteries and frustrations

Of all the mysteries I've pondered over the years, the "Problem of Layout" is one I've still made little progress on. Imagine a static world: you have to design a poster. You can place boxes and text and images, move them around, and rely on a continuous cycle of feedback until you're satisfied. The poster … Continue reading Musings on Layout, Part 1

More thesis headscratchers I have to finally iron out 😦 Warning: personal notes, rambling, stream-of-consciousness even more than usual! Self-sustainability, Unix Paradigm, Large Scope: we start with a text editor T written in language L. We open T's source code in T and make some improvement. We compile a slightly improved text editor T'. The … Continue reading Connections between self-sustainability, self-hosting, meta-circularity, and reflection

I really care about three properties in my thesis, and this is the hardest one to nail down. I've satisfied myself on Self-Sustainability and Notational Freedom, but Explicit Structure is very tricky. I'm particularly struggling to define "more" or "less" explicit structure beyond a simplistic data/code split. My intuition for it is a combination of … Continue reading What is Explicit Structure?

(Binary) Files are the* common format for inter-process** communication across space and time***. (*) Because they are compacted; the only (uncompacted) alternative has too much risk of insane space cost. (**) Where the relevant part of the "process" is a flat, numerical address space. Things might be very different in a nested or name-based address … Continue reading A “File” is just a common address space for processes

This essay was sparked by me struggling to write my thesis' Background chapter and finding I had to comprehensively explain several concepts. Hopefully some appropriate slice through it will end up in the actual chapter. (Did I get something wrong? Do set me straight in the comments.) As we all learned in Computing 101, volatile … Continue reading My Two Absolute, Hands-Down Least Favourite Things in Programming

This is a draft thesis introduction chapter. Some things here may be wrong, badly named, suboptimally written or otherwise not make it into the final thing, but it's an important thing to draft now. When we have an idea for some computer software, and try and make this idea a reality, we are forced to … Continue reading Draft Introduction