My view on bootstrappable effort (Re: Checkpoint)

[Amirouche Boubekki]

On 2018-08-28 19:06, Amirouche Boubekki wrote:
> Hello schemers,
>
> tl;dr. Finally I accept that I am a megalomaniac

aka. I want to change the world for less evil and more good :)

> The name of the project is 'Earth Software System'.

And its contrived civilization bootstrap kit is what I call the π goal
(they are goals 0, 1 and 2 which I described before without naming them)
is still fuzzy and a moving target. You never reach the exact pi number
you only approach it. That's why I choose to call that goal π instead of 
3.

People might not be familiar with the civilization bootstrap problem.

We do not have the knowledge of a sustainable civilization, granted, 
that is
not the point of the π goal.

I will illustrate that π solves several problems:

  a) It has to do with our way of life of today, the things we take for
     granted like weather, food, water, computers doing what we want.
     The simplest example I think is the food chain. To build our 
civilization,
     people we required to create farms, before that they required to 
teach chickens
     to behave, etc.. to build 999 chicken farms it required smaller 
farms before
     that. But imagine everything disappears. What would happen?! The 
farmer of today
     know how to handle mega farms of polite chickens. But what if 
tomorrow he
     has to deal with 3 mutated chickens alone in the desert after a 
global nuclear war?!

     Boom no more civilization, our bare hands and few scrapes and the 
few neurons
     that remains that may not have the skills to survive in that new 
but predictable
     environment. These fictif neurons could have a chance with a 
civkit!

Damn, not even in the movies they only rebuild our civilization two 
thousand years.
Battle Star Galactica Spoiler: You discover that at the very last 30 
seconds of the
last episode!

This is a lot of extreme far-fetched post-apocalyptic paranoia and 
stuff!
But bear with me, the next example is less dramatic.

Our civilization is not bootstrappable, we do not know how we got here,
we can not _reproduce_ our way of life.

  b) Let's now imagine that we have interstellar space travel. Do you 
think
     it's possible for a family of five to create a _living_. We can 
imagine they
     come with a notice something like Wikipedia (!) and say a 3d 
printer... and
     that is a civkit.

That's what I want to build.

Janneke and others working on bootstrappable and reproducible guix are 
not
only important for "near" term security reasons cap based or not. It's 
also
a requirement for many bad situations that hopefully will never happen 
like
nuclear war or hopefully will happen like an interstellar family trip.

Last story:

  c) Imagine you are on a planet several years away from Earth, you hit
  a bug in production. Do you think that you will wait 1 year for a 
software
  update or what? No, like any good space corpocrop it delivers the 
source
  code of their corpocropware wikipedia based civkit because that's the 
only thing
  they could put a hand on for free and gratis. Bad luck, PHP person has 
a flu.
  And die.

    The end.

Maybe you see where I am going. It's not just about the civkit. guix
will be part of the civkit, and prolly so does Wikipedia. Do you 
believe,
in your Scheme mind that would be the best solution?! The most 
sustainable,
the most boostrappable? Do you think a web browser is bootstrappable?
autotools?!

There is many things to think of. Many things to experiment. The future 
is
exciting nowdays in guile universe.

The most exciting stuff, is that the more bootstrappable code we have,
the easier it is  for people to jump into the train. Otherwise said,
bootstrappable projects will do good before we know it.

From r7rs.

  Programming languages should be designed not by piling feature on top 
of feature,
  but by removing the weaknesses and restrictions that make additional 
features
  appear necessary.


> I think a small set of powerful primitives are the way to go. I want
> to prove two things:
>
> a) ordered key-value stores are such a primitive
> b) priority and age-based distributed task queue is another

Any help will be much appreciated.


It's an exciting time to be in guile universe and would like to thank
every people taking part it.

Happy hacking!