Comment by dkarl
1 month ago
I think the downside, at least near-term, or maybe challenge would be the better word, is that anything richer than text requires a lot more engineering to make it useful. B♭ is text. Most of the applications on your computer, including but not limited to your browser, know how to render B♭ and C♯, and your brain does the rest.
Bret Victor's work involves a ton of really challenging heavy lifting. You walk away from a Bret Victor presentation inspired, but also intimidated by the work put in, and the work required to do anything similar. When you separate his ideas from the work he puts in to perfect the implementation and presentation, the ideas by themselves don't seem to do much.
Which doesn't mean they're bad ideas, but it might mean that anybody hoping to get the most out of them should understand the investment that is required to bring them to fruition, and people with less to invest should stick with other approaches.
> You walk away from a Bret Victor presentation inspired, but also intimidated by the work put in, and the work required to do anything similar. When you separate his ideas from the work he puts in to perfect the implementation and presentation, the ideas by themselves don't seem to do much.
Amen to that. Even dynamic land has some major issues with GC pauses and performance issues.
I do try to put my money where my mouth is, so I've been contributing a lot to folk computer[1], but yeah, there's still a ton of open questions, and it's not as easy as he sometimes makes it look.
[1] https://folk.computer/
Folk computer looks interesting. I wonder what it is. You'll never find that out by looking at that link.
That's fair. It's still pre-alpha, and under heavy development, but it's working on taking the best of dynamicland[1] and trying to take it a lot further.
In terms of technical details, we just landed support for multithreaded task scheduling in the reactive database, so you can do something like When /someone/ wishes $::thisNode uses display /display/ with /...displayOpts/ { and have your rendering loop block the thread. Folk will automatically spin up a new thread when it detects that a thread is blocking, in order to keep processing the queue. Making everything multithreaded has made synchronizing rendering frames a lot tricker, but recently Omar (one of the head devs) made statements atomic, so there is atomic querying for statements that need it.
In terms of philosophy, Folk is much more focused on integration, and comes from the Unix philosophy of everything as text (which I still find amusingly ironic when the focus is also a new medium). The main scripting language is Tcl, which is sort of a child of Lisp and Bash. We intermix html, regex, js, C, and even some Haskell to get stuff done. Whatever happens to be the most effective ends up being what we use.
I'm glad that you mention that the main page is unhelpful, because I hadn't considered that. Do you have any suggestions on what would explain the project better?
[1] https://dynamicland.org/
> B♭ is text.
Yes, but musical notation is far superior to text for conveying the information needed to play a song.
I don't understand, musical notation is text though so how can it be superior to itself?
I think they mean staff notation, not a textual notation like "B♭".
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For complex music, sure, but if I'm looking up a folk tune on, say, thesession.org, I personally think a plain-text format like ABC notation is easier to sight-read (since for some instruments, namely the fiddle and mandolin, I mainly learn songs by ear and am rather slow and unpracticed at reading standard notation).
Yes. And I create and manage the musical notation for over 100 songs in text, specifically Lilypond.
If we accepted the validity of this argument, then literally everything that can be represented by a computer can be referred to as text.
It renders the term "text" effectively meaningless.
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