Hey Shap, Thanks for THIS post. I've been following you and BitC now ??? since "version.1", maybe more than 3-4 years now, just enjoyed the learning and background info...
Maybe it's a kick-in-the-rear for me, I'll try to be more supportive now that I've been following for soooo long. I've collected a lot of running emails, I could ??? maybe help with documents, etc... Organize by topics or whatever you'd like. Glad to see you're back !!! Lawrence On Fri, Jan 10, 2014 at 7:44 PM, Jonathan S. Shapiro <[email protected]>wrote: > 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 > > _______________________________________________ > bitc-dev mailing list > [email protected] > http://www.coyotos.org/mailman/listinfo/bitc-dev > >
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