If you wish to make a malleable system from scratch you must first invent the universe.
When Carl Sagan talked about making an apple pie from scratch, I think he meant that it’s impossible: everything depends on everything else.
In any creation project, you have to get something from someone else.
A pie needs flour. If you want to make your own flour, you’ll need wheat, and milling equipment. To get that, you’ll need farms and metal, which needs soil and minerals. To truly say you made it, you’d have to make the dirt and minerals. To make iron you’ll need a star to form iron out of lighter elements.
And to make a star.. All the way back to the Big Bang.
In the physical world, we’re not so evolved yet to snap our fingers and let there be light. But in the software world - and other fields like mathematics and literature - it is possible to make an apple pie from scratch by inventing a universe. Not the universe, but a standalone microcosmos in the sense of MicroWorlds and Knowledge Machines in Seymour Papert’s research.
An example is Drifblim, the Uxntal assembler in the Uxn ecosystem. Uxn programs are written in the Uxntal language, whose assembler is self-hosted.
..written entirely in Uxntal, doing away with any dependencies beyond the thin emulation layer of the virtual machine. The assembler is written in the language it assembles and is bootstrapped from a minuscule binary seed.
I find it conceptually beautiful. Like John McCarthy’s original Lisp evaluator in Lisp - as Alan Kay called it, the Maxwell’s equations of software.
The code for
evalis a beautiful expression of the core ideas of Lisp, written in Lisp...Just as with Maxwell’s equations and electromagnetism, there is a sense in which if you can look at this compact little program and understand all its consequences, then you understand all that Lisp can do.
And because Lisp is universal, that means that inside these few lines of code is everything that a computer can do.
Another example of inventing a universe is Mu.
無 (mu) means “nothing” or “emptiness” in Japanese (wu in Chinese).
It’s funny how a word for nothing requires so many lines to represent it. Originally it was used for the word “dancer” (wu), but the character came to be used for “not, without” (wu). A more intuitive symbol is the empty circle, called Enso.
Compilers are often written in the language they are compiling. This creates a chicken-and-egg problem that leads users and distributors to rely on opaque, pre-built binaries of those compilers that they use to build newer versions of the compiler.
To gain trust in our computing platforms, we need to be able to tell how each part was produced from source.
Stage zero is a way to bootstrap an entire operating system from scratch - from hex and macro assemblers, to C compilers and POSIX-compatible tools (stage0-posix). It looks insanely difficult though.
The other day I read an article, Writing Toy Software Is A Joy.
Some will tell you to avoid reinventing the wheel, but they’re wrong: you should build your own wheel, because it’ll teach you more about how they work than reading a thousand books on them ever will.
..The beauty and craft of writing software is being eroded. Software development needs more simple joy, and I’ve found that creating toy programs is a great way to remember why I started working with computers
From the list of toy programs the author has attempted:
- Regex engine
- x86 OS kernel
- Gameboy emulator and/or game
- Physics engine
- Dynamic interpreter
- Compiler for a C-like language
- Text editor
- Async runtime
- Hash map
- 3D graphics render engine
- Threaded virtual machine
- GUI toolkit
- CHIP-8 emulator
- Chess engine
- POSIX shell
That’s plenty material for many microcosmoi (plural). But the creation of such will require a deeply technically fluent person - unless they create a universe in which it’s easier for a less technical person to create their own universe within it. Like certain cosmologies where lesser gods rule over the lower realms.
My point, if there was one, is that even a tiny toy universe can be self-complete and free in a malleable sense, within its space and set of rules.
