Lambda the Ultimate

Perhaps I am a bit dense, but I find this only mildly amusing, not ROFL material. Still, it is amusing enough to share at this time of year.

Happy holidays!

Recently doing research into Wiki's, I've gained a renewed appreciation for the discussion that went on (and still goes on somewhat...) in Ward Cunningham's original Wiki dedicated to pattern discussions. Topics are organized by topic using Wiki words, and there is usually a vibrant discussion that goes on in the page. These discussions are sort of hard to follow since the wiki doesn't have built-in support for discussion threading. On the other hand, discussions are expected to be refactored into the body of the topic's documented by the community. Wikipedia refines this concept a bit by having a talk page behind every document (they are separate but connected).

LtU on the other hand, is more like a newsgroup: you can post a forum topic, but the body of the topic is rarely edited (if only to make corrections) after the topic is started. The discussion is not re-factored into the body of the topic, while some topics are repeatedly revived in slightly different ways and cannot be consolidated into one discussion because refactoring isn't supported. Some topics act kind of like articles, but content is necessarily added as comments since only the owner of the topic can edit the body.

So what's my point? Obviously Ward's wiki is not as popular as it used to be, while LtU is a growing community. Is this because what people actually want are forums and not wiki's? I see a lot of value in the wiki approach myself, and would like my so-called cake and eat it to (that is to say wiki topics with threaded discussions and refactoring).

Anyways just a thought.

Hello all,

I'm really not academic (I don't even have a B. Sci. :(, but I try to keep myself up to date enough on theoretical topics, and that I really care about in general, by the way.

Some background info on my current experiments relevant to this post and some rationale, is available there :

#1 http://www.ysharp.net/the.language/rationale

Not wanting to waste anyone's time, just know upfront that it's about this formerly codenamed "Oslo" and what it is, maybe, missing (as my intuition suspects) for it to scale well enough (— but, as one's own intuition is never enough to draw any useful conclusion to build upon, of course, hence my current effort at formalizing my feeling "at a minimum").

Then, as I intend to publish more about it using a specific notation, and that I leveraged for my purpose, I had to "push the envelope" further with this notation, testing my uncommon usage of it against better known topics, that have been studied for much longer(*) until today.

This is for me to see if that would lead me too easily to anything absurd/unconstructive.

Here's the result:

#2 http://www.ysharp.net/the.language/rationale/T_Party_0.html

If (and only if) this latter draft of ideas is not totally non-sensical to you and you find it interesting enough, I'd love to hear from you and about your advice on how I/we could formalize it more seriously.

Or I'd just love anyone to show me where are the biggest reasoning flaws in my statements.

Note I'm well aware it's unlikely I've found anything really new from a theoretical PoV, but I have some ideas about a hopefully useful application, to address the issue at hand.

Thank you in advance, & merry end of year holidays to all.

(*) (> 70 years or more...)