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mrakgr / The-Spiral-Language

Functional language with intensional polymorphism and first-class staging.
Mozilla Public License 2.0
919 stars 27 forks source link

Is everything okay? #19

Closed Snoresville closed 3 years ago

Snoresville commented 3 years ago

I browsed into this repo because it was one of the only three results I had in my search, and the first thing I see is an autobiographical section in one of your commits, is everything okay?

mrakgr commented 3 years ago

Yes. It is my usual style. Eventually my activities will become shadowy and so will the journal. Until then the making of Spiral will serve as an inheritance for future historians. I produce roughly 100k lines of text in the journal every 3-4 months, so they should have a haul. I've been doing this for almost 6 years now.

The reason for this kind of style is that saying that you are going to do something in public serves as a motivator. The biggest problem behind doing something for so long without any material rewards is keeping the motivation going. Before I can push the code, I first need to push myself to be interested in making the code. I am serious so I'll take all that I can get.

The stakes are very low right now, so I do not lose anything in particular by taking this approach.

I browsed into this repo because it was one of the only three results I had in my search

What were you searching for? Spiral specifically?

MiracleBlue commented 2 years ago

I have also stumbled on this from a random search of github for new functional programming languages, which I find interesting. You seem to be blogging via commits. I find that fascinating! And they're quite detailed. Is it just your preferred way to journal? @mrakgr

mrakgr commented 2 years ago

@MiracleBlue

Yeah. I do not know why I started this way...I think my reasoning was that it is important to keep the fire going through the hardship, but at the same time if I started a blog that would specifically be a blog. I didn't want to be attention seeking regarding this, but I wanted to have my intentions be public in order to spur myself on. Since I was working on Spiral, it made sense that the commits should serve as a journal. The only thing I needed to be careful off is to not accidentally refer to other commits. I made the mistake of linking to issues on other repos a few times before wising up.

Right now, I am not programming, but studying 3d art so it might make sense to move the journal somewhere else, but I thought about it and decided that rather than fragment my writing, it should be here for posterity. Maybe once I start work on a game I'll just move to a different repo.

At some point I'll resume work on Spiral itself. The demand for better languages for AI hardware should come at some point once people figure out that they can be used for all kinds of simulations. GPUs are too restricted so C style programming is passable for them, and for deep learning their functionality can be accessed through specialized frameworks. But if you actually want to do something like implement a genetic programming system, so the hardware itself can give you a hint about what kinds of learning algorithms are suited for them, you'd need something like Spiral to make such a system in. It would be too hard and error prone to do it in C. Also on the subject of simulations, AI chips should be good for doing the kinds of physical simulations as is done in VFX. Things like water and smoke can take hours per frame to simulate at decent resolution on current hardware.

It is a pity that I can't afford this hardware right now. If anybody is willing to sponsor this kind of work, I'd be open to taking it on.