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Comment by kragen | Hacker News Reader

Thanks, that means a lot! I think it kind of falls short of some of its initial promises, and clearly needs revision, but there are some good nuggets in there. As one example of what needs revision, I drew the diagrams after I wrote the text, and I realized that what I was describing in the text was far more complicated than what I really wanted to draw... but then never went back and revised the text.

If this is the kind of thing you like, you might find more things to your taste in http://canonical.org/~kragen/dercuano, which touches on, among other things, the bizarre memory model of the Zork Z-machine.

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Hi Kragen,

for a long time, I have been pondenring about a high-level 'programming' languages about structured data. It is by far finished, but I am attempting to deal with the problem of different memory models from the other end: starting with an ideal model trying to abstract from implementations.

I have not address the problem of transactions and cooperation yet. Often the problem with implementation of data models start becoming 'interesting' when several actors at the same time are querying and changing it, especially when the dimension of distribution is added.

https://github.com/FransFaase/DataLang

This is fascinating! It looks like it's inspired by linear (or affine?) typing, but isn't quite the same thing?

It's definitely true that concurrency is a common source of such complications. Serialization is another one.

Hi, Kragen!

Is Dercuano available as individual HTML pages that can be clicked around (and indexed by search engines)? So far I've only found it as a giant blob (PDF or tar) and I'm wondering why that seems to be its primary presentation.

Hi Ping! I miss you a lot! The primary representation of Dercuano is a giant blob both to improve the chances that copies of it will survive after I'm dead and to more clearly establish a publication date for purposes of patent prior art. The PDF isn't very good (I hacked together a PDF-rendering script with reportlab in five days before the deadline, and even the CSS for the HTML version is pretty amateurish) but there are a variety of places that can view or archive PDFs but not tarballs of HTML.

There's also an online mirror at https://dercuano.github.io/, which allows linking to pages like https://dercuano.github.io/topics/memory-models.html, but of course that depends on Microsoft's pleasure.

See also http://canonical.org/~kragen/derctuo/ for the sequel.

I’m only about half way through, but I’m finding it extremely helpful, clear and well-written (some of the terminology/ideas I’m not familiar with/are over my head, but I plan on going back over it again later and looking stuff up :) - Thanks so much!

Maybe the stuff that seems over your head is just stuff I wrote poorly!

This is a great teaching attitude. Thank you.

Maybe if I keep trying I'll get good at teaching some day! So far my results have not been inspiring.

Not at all! I’m obviously not qualified to say, but it seems to me to be a great overview of a very complicated topic - clear, concise, comprehensive and not patronising. Stuff I don’t understand off the bat I can always look up, but it gives me a framework to begin to hang stuff on/explore from. Even if you had written several tome-like textbooks you couldn’t have compensated for my ignorance of the basic principles of computer science/informatics/programming etc.! :)

No offense but I do agree that the text is hard to read and understand and simpler sentences would be nicer.

I have that problem a lot.

This book is (imo) hilariously good and explains thing well for engineering type folks: https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Style-Thinking-Persons-Writing-...

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