Today we had two comments on the list that make me proud and sad at the same time. Raoul wrote:
i sure am glad there are smart people who are trying to think things through > and not just do the same-old-same-old. wish i were experienced and smart > enough to contribute, but nevertheless it is fun to be a fly on the wall > :-) And Nigel responded: Me too! > My excuse for this somewhat content-free post is to instead express support > for the sterling efforts we are witnessing. I expect many lurkers are > eager to see BitC/Coyotos breakout once this crucial design work is > completed. I'm sure there will be future opportunities for those of us in > the 99% to contribute where it matches our skills and competencies. I have mixed feelings about these posts. On the one hand, I'm flattered that so many of you stuck with this for so long, and have returned after the long hiatus. Thank you. I'm grateful for the help that many of you have given me. But I'm ashamed at how bad a job I have done at enabling "the other 99%" from contributing productively to the effort. The timing is actually fortuitous, because I'd been thinking about this myself. I'm a horrible person to be doing BitC. I know a lot about microkernels, debuggers, and compiler front ends, a fair bit about microprocessors, less about optimizers and type theory, and very little about much of anything else in software. My only "deep" skill as an integrator is that I have a fairly good memory of my own experience and some ability to translate small examples back to real cases. The truth is that the type theory stuff in BitC is very hard for me. If I don't keep at it, more or less every day, it seeps out of my head and is lost. With the help of some of the people here and a few elsewhere, I can just barely keep this stuff straight *some* of the time. So if you're holding back because you think it takes a genius to do this stuff, it doesn't. It takes someone with the ability to read precisely, serious determination, and iron discipline. Mind you, if you discover along the way that you were actually a genius all along, that's not a bad thing. :-) So the first thing I want to say here is: don't let intimidation hold you back. Dive in! OK. On to the second thing: I want to open this project up more and bring in outsiders to help. There are a lot of pieces of this puzzle that take up my time, and the more of that time I can spend on the compiler and keeping the type theory in my head, the happier we are all going to be. To that end, I'm going to migrate the bitc-lang website to Drupal.. I'm hoping that this will let us get more people involved in the 101 things that are necessary to make this work usefully. Here are some things that I think we need to be doing better. A lot of these things are things where many of you could help: 1. Curating: We have very useful discussions on the mailing lists, and we arrive at useful conclusions. I sometimes find that I can't remember what the conclusion was or how we arrived at it. I think it would be really helpful if we could gather the major discussions in linear form by having someone curate an article-style note from the discussion. 2. Forums: If BitC launches, we are going to need a place for people to come for help, and we are going to need to curate FAQs from that. 3. Site administration: it would be a big help, and not all that much work, if someone could deal with accepting new user requests and so forth. 4. Site architecture: it would be really nice if someone who knew more about the selected CMS (e.g. Drupal) could help figure out what modules would be helpful and why. I need to know the answers for site migration purposes, but this isn't something that I should be putting a huge amount of energy into. How do we get email notifications going about site updates so that people are led back to continue contributing? 5. Site customization. Drupal's native CSS handling isn't ideal for us. How do we revise that in a manageable and updatable way? 6. Examples: It would be really helpful if people could write example code and/or test code and gather it in a common place. 7. Musings: It would be kind of nice if we had a place for people to gather articles about what they want vs. what BitC actually gives them. What's done, what's missing, and what found a solution that wasn't perhaps the solution that you originally hoped for. 8. Expanding this list. I'm not really that familiar with what a system like Drupal can do, so I'm probably missing lots of things here. Maybe there are other things that Drupal could do for us. The bottom line is: I want your help, and I want to know how to enable that more effectively. I am experimenting right now with migrating the BitC specification into a Drupal test site. I'm running into some issues, but all in all it's going pretty well. I need to migrate the bitc-lang.org site to a new host machine and bring up Drupal there, and then we may be able to make progress on this stuff. shap
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