I ve published an essay

Question

I ve published an essay where I introduce a metaphor that will allow us to program computers in a game like and also in like environments The website Latent Centers is a digital garden I started recently where I will continue to publish related work The aim is to invent I m looking forward to hearing your thoughts

Tomaz Zlender · Answer

For the best experience visit it on a desktop device I haven t adapted it to touch devices

Mike Austin · Answer

For me coding comes down to functions variables and values as you mention in the article If you were to do the same personification to math for example how would you do it

Brian Hempel · Answer

The Program Counter represented as the active entity walking through function execution I like it better than I thought I would It has ToonTalk vibes but with fewer agents so much more constrained more grounded and less confusing

Tomaz Zlender · Answer

> For me coding comes down to functions variables and values as you mention in the article If you were to do the same personification to math for example how would you do it < Mike Austin> I m curious if you had in mind some examples from math when you wrote the question I assume that the subsets of math can be personified in the same way I m curious what examples you have in mind Thanks for asking

Tomaz Zlender · Answer

> The Program Counter represented as the active entity walking through function execution I like it better than I thought I would It has ToonTalk vibes but with fewer agents so much more constrained more grounded and less confusing < Brian Hempel> it does have ToonTalk vibes happy to hear you find the idea compelling For many years I tried to find something similar to beings as the personification of processes I still haven t found it Then at some point it occurred to me that maybe I can ask Alan Kay himself if he knows of anything like it explaining the idea along the way If I recall correctly I heard him claim in a couple of talks that most of the things have been invented in 80s or something along those lines So I thought well let s put it to a test To my surprise he replied back and pointed out Ken Kahn s ToonTalk It is indeed done in a similar spirit but not quite The closest thing to beings in ToonTalk I would say are robots but they can t be controlled directly as beings can They have a more specific role not as general as beings Like you say there are many metaphors in Toontalk and it gets confusing because of that Interesting that you had an association with the Program Counter What part of the article made you bring it up

Mike Austin · Answer

< Tomaz Zlender> You could say that code is mostly just logic and math If you turn variables values and function into different abstractions what about the math and logic What makes it different that those abstractions aren t changed My head is kind of cloudy today the right words aren t coming out slightly smiling face

Mike Austin · Answer

Another example how would you describe an anonymous function ` x => x + 1 5 ` It is a function but has no space portal equivalent if I understand

Tomaz Zlender · Answer

> Another example how would you describe an anonymous function ` x => x + 1 5 ` It is a function but has no space portal equivalent if I understand edited Good question the future examples will make that more clear The anonymous function has a definition which maps to a space and even though it is anonymous it is still possible to point to it one way or another I think the portal > function name is confusing I need to change it to portal > pointer to a function Does that make it more clear

Tomaz Zlender · Answer

gt what about the math and logic I don t have a good answer to this one I ll have to think about it

Brian Hempel · Answer

gt the Program Counter I watched the vid and only skimmed the writeup The Being is doing the current step of execution That s what the Program Counter Register is in hardware the current step of execution