I mostly agree with this. Replacing all of existing software isn't anywhere near on my radar. My goal right now is just for Mu to not die :) You're right about going around things rather than redesigning them. Isn't that what I'm doing? I think this is perfectly in keeping with "replace vs paper over". There's no universal quantifier attached that requires the old thing to be replaced everywhere.
I was only using the analogy with pandemics to point out that there are situations where secondary consequences exist, even if it superficially seems like one can go one's own way. I didn't intend to suggest Mu provides any sort of immunity to anything.
> Unwinding decisions exceeds individual capacity only if you're trying to rebase the rest of the stack onto your changes. That is, only if you try to save the world, which is begging the question.
I think I'm losing the thread of this particular back and forth. Perhaps we're saying the same thing, and you took papering over vs replacing to be more mutually exclusive than I intended. I think it's existential for replacing to take some mindshare away from papering over, because of the overwhelming tendency for everyone around us to go the other way. Once you start talking about not having to rebase the rest of the stack, I feel like you're in my replacing camp. Functional replacement rather than sub-system replacement.
> And now that you've done them, I don't think anyone will have to. They might want to change something, but it will hopefully be much easier to build on your work than it was for you to do it in the first place.
Hah! Thank you, but don't underestimate humanity's ability to forget.
Based on the fact that we're discussing this on the arc forum, and you've built languages to replace-ish assembly and C, and I'm designing a language to replace pretty much everything else, I'd say we're much more on the same page than nearly everyone else.
This particular back-and-forth was that I said we "don't need to save the whole world", and you "absolutely disagreed". It sounds like you've agreed with all of my points or softened yours, so I'm not really sure where that leaves us.
Somewhat ironically, I sometimes think of the design I keep hinting at basically as a rebase of most of computer science onto a virtual computer with 32byte pointers to ROM.
> > It is not necessary to save or change the rest of the world.
> I absolutely disagree.
In my mind the poles of this disagreement were zero change to the world vs non-zero change to the world. I was saying it seems futile to try only to change myself but not some others. The thought of a universal quantifier, zero vs infinity, that didn't occur to me at this point.
In my mind, "not necessary" didn't imply "necessarily not", but I can see how it might sound like I wanted to just let the world burn and walk away. I only intended to suggest not worrying about it and not putting that popular-opinion cart before your original-objective horse.
Heh, I notice now that I never actually said "replace" in the paper. I said, "take it out and think about the problem anew." That sounds like we're on the same page?
