I love this: a DSL that makes clocks out of birds and math. Really, this is a glorious little project.
The thing I bounced off isn't the high-concept art, or the abstract math. It’s the combination of the two without enough bridge between them. You have to infer too much about how the poetic layer, the mathematical notation, and the actual machinery relate.
You can do mind-expansion by induction in a math journal. This is not that venue. And this project is too good to waste by letting people walk away confused.
I’d love a very plain “one clock, end to end” walkthrough: primitives, composition, graph, rendered result.
> Even among "great minds", narrow domain-specific knowledge can matter.
Yes, but it never matters at first. The first thing you do, always, is hack a prototype together. Computers are fast. Basic algorithms and data structures are usually good enough. You don't optimize until you've got what you want in principle. And sometimes you don't optimize at all. The internet is full of prototypes that escaped into the wild and then attracted enough users that they became irreplaceable.
Javascript is a good example. The version we have is several versions too early, and it's warty. JS would be a much better language if someone had paid more attention to the low-level details. But I would argue that JS is a huge success in spite of this. An awful lot of work has been done in JS, including work that couldn't have been done in most other languages.
The grandparent of this post is right that ideas are the important thing. JavaScript succeeds because it borrows good ideas from Scheme and Self.
Smart is not necessarily nice. Without nice, incremental returns to smart may be negative. Furthermore, the terminal goal of a market is to give some group exactly what it wants. Such groups are often large, and their wants are defined by how their members act -- usually when others are not looking. A market does not care what anyone says they want.
The thing I bounced off isn't the high-concept art, or the abstract math. It’s the combination of the two without enough bridge between them. You have to infer too much about how the poetic layer, the mathematical notation, and the actual machinery relate.
You can do mind-expansion by induction in a math journal. This is not that venue. And this project is too good to waste by letting people walk away confused.
I’d love a very plain “one clock, end to end” walkthrough: primitives, composition, graph, rendered result.