I've had my hands full with other stuff for the past few weeks, so Hest progress has been slow (as seems to be my lot, sadly). I guess this is what you get when you start messing with the timeline. Don't mess with the timeline!

I love the dramatic pause in the very beginning where you drop down an octave. 🤣 It had a surprisingly fun bit of tension to it - i_s he really going to hit that note?_

That was delightful. Now for the real question and most important question: are Hest path defined by Hest points? Because if they are, you are about one inch away from awesome.

@ibdknox After years toying with ways to color and animate hydraulic / electrical schematics, looking to systems-y games like Factorio and SpaceChem and Mini Metro for inspiration, something Hestian feels sort of nearby to me in a way that other kinds of programming don't.

your future of coding is the most mysteriously interesting of all the ones I've seen, fast forward please! 😄

I mean the control points. Imagine a three paths, say, loops. Put a point on each. Connect each of those points to make a new time-varying path. Then points on that path could trace out especially rich trajectories.

I think this is what you have in mind. This is from an older prototype, back when I was rendering colorful trails behind moving points. It's a (sloppy, by-hand) geometric implementation of the Bezier curve algorithm.

Fascinating video! I want to know more; where are the lunchbox sessions mentioned above?

@Chris Maughan See the previous TMW Hest video for an explanation of what LBS is: https://futureofcoding.slack.com/archives/C0120A3L30R/p1586795860004500 The videos Chris Granger watched are probably here (ignore the live streams): https://www.youtube.com/lunchboxsessions If you want to take a look at the subjects we cover, I built a fun graph-based menu here: https://www.lunchboxsessions.com/explore A good freebie to check out would be Hydraulics > Fluid Power Basics > Energy Basics. That one nicely captures the tone we're going for: complex ideas and systems explored with simulation, animation, and whimsy. Any questions, feel free to DM me if you'd like to get into the weeds.

I want to somehow hook this up to my code base and watch the data flow through the system.

It's very interesting to think of the curves as defining time. When you pull a point off it's going outside of time. Moving time backwards no longer includes that point. It's like it never existed. Whoa. An editable undo tree. What else could it be good for?

One as yet unimplemented plan is that abstraction will come from building "symbols", which are a collection of graphics / logic wrapped up into an isolated unit with a clearly defined interface — typical patcher stuff. Each symbol instance will need its own sense of time. When looking at a particular instance, all child instances will execute "infinitely fast" to simulate continuous time semantics. All parent instances will execute discretely, only when necessary to satisfy the needs of the currently observed instance. The GUI, including things like pulling a point off an edge, would be the ur parent of the simulation hierarchy. So if it were possible to run time backwards outside the GUI level, your editing interactions would gradually be undone, and that pulled point would hop back onto the edge where you pulled it off, right at the moment that you had pulled it (since the flow of time of the points-and-edges simulation is happening inside the GUI). Not sure I'll end up going with this plan, though. I have stack of imagined "it would feel nice to ____" experiences that guide my development. I'm trying each of them, keeping the ones that feel most simpatico. So we'll see!

The major problem encountered in time travel is not that of accidentally becoming your own father or mother. There is no problem involved in becoming your own father or mother that a broadminded and well-adjusted family can't cope with. There is also no problem in changing the course of history; the course of history does not change because it all fits together like a jigsaw. All the important changes have happened before the things they were supposed to change and it all sorts itself out in the end.

No, the major problem is quite simply one of grammar, and the main work to consult in this matter is Dr Dan Streetmentioner's Time Traveller's Handbook of 1001 Tense Formations. It will tell you for instance how to describe something that was about to happen to you in the past before you avoided it by time-jumping forward two days in order to avoid it. The event will be described differently according to whether you are talking about it from the standpoint of your own natural time, from a time in the further future, or a time in the further past and is further complicated by the possibility of conducting conversations whilst you are actually travelling from one time to another with the intention of becoming your own father or mother.

Most readers get as far as the Future Semi-Conditionally Modified Subinverted Plagal Past Subjunctive Intentional before giving up: and in fact in later editions of the book all the pages beyond this point have been left blank to save on printing costs.

-- "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy"