I'm going in circles:<p>http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/<p>http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=concepts<p>http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=divine_recursion<p>http://lambdaway.free.fr/lambdawalks/?view=hanoi4<p>without ever being satisfied with the result. Am I in a conceptual dead end? Am I out of touch? Dear Hackermen, would you have a few moments to look at these essays and tell me, kindly if possible, what you think of them. Even if it is to advise me to go fishing.<p>Thank you very much in advance<p>Alain Marty
> …HTML expression…written in a LISP style…<p>That’s neat.<p>> Please click on Amélie Poulain to see the 180 primitives.<p>Things have escalated rather quickly.<p>Sometimes the most helpful thing for a passion project is to take a moment away from it, spend a moment not on it, on something else, so that when you come back to it, you’re a little more of a stranger to it than you were the last time.<p>Perhaps you will retrace a path you have already cut, only to find it needs a little adjustment. Or maybe you will take a new path entirely. Maybe you will find the existing path to be perfect in ways you didn’t understand last time, or maybe it just needs a little cleanup to be so.<p>You can sense you need a break, because you even suggest that you may need to hear it is time to go fishing.<p>Do you even like fishing? Maybe it should be something else! Or maybe you already know what you need, and you just would like confirmation from someone else, just to say “go fish.”
Not going to lie, I spent 5 minutes on this, I dont understand anything you posted and I am getting big time cube vibes.<p>In the nicest way possible, take a deep breath and go fishing.
I think your building lambdawalks and prepared some concepts on how to introduce it. You're not satisfied with any of the results.<p>The way of how the information is presented is weird ( too much and too confusing). Perhaps set the vertical as default and remove the "code block" ( or add a x button to it).<p>Simplify how you're showing that ( a lot)<p>I don't know LISP, so the expressions feel weird to me, so i can't add remarks on that.<p>Try again after?
Interesting comments. I retain three points:<p>1) Regarding the form: I am surprised that the presentation in small columns juxtaposed horizontally is so confusing to many. It seems to me that this is the strength of spreadsheets, displaying a two-dimensional grid that can extend far beyond the limits of the screen and thus requiring the use of scrollbars and zoom+/-.<p>Today the use of trackpads and touch screens allows to manage very easily the displacements and the zooms+/- and the presentation which I chose is particularly pleasant on tablet and smartphone. I find it nice to be able to view the whole document at zoom=50%, then focus on a column by double-clicking. But OK it's a matter of choice. That's why I give the choice of a vertical presentation in two of the linked documents. Still it is necessary to find the top-right [vertical] button ...<p>2) Regarding the content: My goal is to build a text editor equipped with a programming language, going far beyond Markdown, just to mention it. Moreover I wanted to build it on the simplest basis in my eyes, the lambda-calculus.<p>As "simple" is not "simplistic", it is still necessary to make an effort to follow the long way from the IIFE primitive (Immediately Invoked Function Expression) to the data and control structures of a standard programming language. It is this path that I am trying to make as clear as possible and I am not convinced that I have traced it well. This is the essence of my question.<p>Once the foundations are laid, I sketch the content of the complete language with the help of a few examples, illustrating the main special forms and primitives of the language and its openness to the eco-system provided for free by the web browsers. The complete development is visible in the wiki that serves as my workshop but that's another story.<p>3) Concerning "go fishing", as my grandmother used to tell me "If you give the passer-by a stick to get beaten, don't be surprised to be beaten" or "If you shoot yourself in the foot, you'll get a hole in your shoe" and so OK I get what I deserve. Humor is the least sharable thing between different languages and English is not my native language, you guessed it.<p>Finally, dear hackers, it seemed to me that HackerNews was the perfect place to ask for feedback on the kind of research/exploration/work I do. If you know another place, please let me know, thank you in advance.<p>Alain Marty
Hi Alain.<p>What's the problem? I don't even get that.<p>The three links point to visual chaos and I don't know where to start looking nor what's the problem at all.<p>My internal firmware delivers:<p>What is the question:
"Am I crazy?"<p>What hints are given to answer the question:
Three links to a website<p>What is expected from me (brain):
To read, understand, compare and give feedback on.<p>Brain:
42.
This page looks like you can't decide whether to create a lightly interesting tech demo[0], an avant-garde art project[1], or an introductory article on s-expression markup templating.<p>Pick <i>one</i>. If you want to do all three, do so separately.<p>Regarding the project itself, as someone with quite a bit of functional programming experience, I don't see much appeal over standard HTML (at the low end) and DOM-aware templating (e.g. JSX). The Lisp language family has never delivered on the promised benefits of using an AST as the textual encoding, and to the extent nested expressions are useful in markup I think HTML/XML gets 90% of the value with 5% of the frustration.<p>Regarding your HN post's question, one part that did activate my "crazy sidewalk preacher" detector was the text on beauty of mathematical constants and symmetry. The following quote is <i>exactly</i> the sort of thing I would expect to read from a young adult who is losing their connection to consensus reality:<p><pre><code> the strangest of transcendental numbers, π = 3.141592653589793,
whose decimals are totally randomly distributed, (high
entropy), is captured in a beautiful, perfectly determined
series, (high neguentropy). Our (decimal) representation of
numbers is decidedly poor and I imagine that in the noosphere
minds use continued fractions to manipulate them.
It's endless.
</code></pre>
I don't mean to be insulting when I say this, but that sounds like a Terry Davis quote. If you find yourself thinking in that mode frequently, it might be worth asking a mental health professional for a screening.<p>[0] As a sort of personal knowledge base, I find the lambdatalk format interesting. Horizontal lists of narrow columns is a classic of printed text but rarely encountered on a screen, and I like how the figures (formulae, code blocks, etc) are integrated into the prose.<p>[1] The angled subsection, bizarre choices of example content, and long lists of links to subpqges(?) come across poorly in terms of information, but are aesthetically pleasing in a sort of surreal way.