Modernity is a modern computing system and environment.
Some of it's features are that:
- It's always "on" (never sleeps)
- Everything is dynamic / late bound
Our craft is deficient in many ways. Computer science and software engineering are 2 of the greatest oxymorons of the modern age. If we are to become a science of computation we must learn many things but foremost to stop "re-inventing a flat wheel".
Modernity is heavily inspired by many things:
- the oNLineSystem
- original ideas behind the Memex (Bush) and Xanadu (Nelson)
- The work at PARC that eventually led to the alto and smalltalk-80 (but so many more important untalked about things.
- the current work at VPRI (fonc etc)
- ...
It's my interpretation of a lot of these ideas. But much like music, interpretation is very personal and I indend to add my own ideas to the mix.
At it's core, modernity leverages a COLA (Combined Object Lambda
Architecture) to provide as much late binding, dynamism, and reflection
as possible. As a starting point, I've used Ian Piumarta's maru
.
(all interfacing with symbolic systems occurs via a language - think humans talking together)
- maru (the system) is / implements a COLA
- maru (the language) is the "lowest level" semantic way of interfacing with maru (the system). It's an s-expression style language. The language may be referred to as "coke" in some cases by Piumarta for historic reasons.