I keep trying to think about this Sequent thing but keep getting distracted by you-know-who. Unless you are not me, in which case you may now be wondering who. It's that bodhisattva from last summer, the one who sorta drove me crazy and made me have an emotional breakdown and spend the next nine months healing. So, how about that? Perhaps I am stronger now.
Anywho, I'm just playing piano on Pearl street a lot. Making my rent and food, hopefully some left over to take with me to New Orleans, if I am in fact going there, or to buy a Haken Continuum, or something. When I'm not doing that I'm hanging out with Amanda (not to be confused with she-who-shall-not-be-named above) or practicing Liszt's Mephisto Waltz no. 1, which I ought to have to Pearl-performable in a couple weeks.
And now I am sitting here listening to pandora, and journaling. It was going to be about Sequent but that has not gone according to plan at least in the first two and a half paragraphs. Maybe it was like an introduction, just to get it out of his system, and later in the entry he gets to the meaty technical stuff. Or maybe he hasn't been thinking of any meaty technical stuff and it's just kind of whims and feelings. That really is more his style.
What are those whims and feelings, Luke, I'm really interested? you ask. Well that's what I was hoping to get at in this journal entry if you would stop interrupting me. Ooh Saturn from The Planets just came on Pandora. One of my favorites.
So I was refactoring the existing little javascript interactive environment into chunks that could potentially be Sequent objects, in an effort to bootstrap myself into using the editor to edit its own source. But I also wanted to at least handle some meta-information, at least have a clue about where that goes and how it interacts with the system. Then I got lost on this big category-theory tangent in which the environment operated on the category of descriptions with code as the arrows. This led to the idea of endofunctors on this category, which might serve as an "interpretation" of code. But then I got lost in the world I had set out to explore on that walk which was how the meta-information interacts with the environment in some cool metacircular way. Having endofunctors did not seem to make this picture any clearer, and I probably ought to abandon this category-theoretic view because I don't know enough category theory to be able to imagine how I would use that structure for gain, so it would probably end up just complicating the vocabulary. I need to learn what a topos is, just in general -- it seems relevant.
Functors are so common and powerful in Haskell, it is hard to imagine them not lending a hand in Sequent, since Sequent aims to be a powerful modeling environment. The weird thing is that a functor operates on descriptions... what exactly is a list of "x is prime"s? Maybe list isn't an example of a functor we would use. I can imagine a nontermination monad, which I guess would be like an "inconistency monad" in the description case; yeah my Haskell examples are failing me. Okay time to set the category line to rest, at least temporarily.
Sec, smokin a bowl (let's see if insight, stupidity, or blankness follows this line, as an experiment).
So I just played piano for about half an hour. Shoulda guessed. I wrote a new song. It goes like this:
Verse:
-----
(Db7)
Have a drink.
Have a think.
Have a seat.
Let yourself sink.
(Cb7)
Contemplate
about your fate
(Gb7)
and create.
Chorus:
-------
(Gb7) (G7) (Ab7)
Take your time with it
(Gb7) (Db7)
Relax your worried mind
(Gb7) (G7) (Ab7)
If you love it enough
(Gb7) (Db7)
Why not take your time?
Verse:
-----
Watch on your wrist,
your laundry list,
let them go,
they won't be missed.
Give it space.
Find your place.
Give it peace. (Feel it out) (Be amazed)
(Chorus) x 2
Nice little bluesy tune. I find it very peaceful. Still not sure about that last line in the second verse. I came up with something great when I was playing it, then forgot it! Thanks, drugs. Sincerely then sarcastically.
I don't really feel like talking about Sequent, I guess. Could you tell? How could you tell? Anyway my current goal is to bootstrap into the "final" codebase so I can start working on the real thing instead of toys. I mean, it'll be a toy for a while, but improvements will stick. And it will be the first test of the Sequent development process, which is what the whole thing is about, of course.
I'm gonna go hang out with Amanda.