The opposite of Literate Programming

Instead of a linear tour through every last detail in just the right order, a frontpage for any app with a quick orientation of the global structure (like a Readme with crappy typography but consistent navigation compared to the usual development environment), after which the reader is free to jump non-linearly anywhere they like.

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

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Firefox will die one day. Then Chrome will "dance down amongst us again, clad in his true shape at last, singing his incomprehensible rhymes as the trees mutter their curses and the black and terrible Barrow-Wights dance and gibber around him."

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Midnight browsing: Lua and text editors

https://repo.or.cz/?a=project_list;o=age;t=lua

https://repo.or.cz/ta-parkour.git

https://github.com/orbitalquark/textadept -- tiniest src/ directory ever

textadept on HN search

a review of textadept (2012)

https://scintilla.org -- never submitted to HN!

https://github.com/howl-editor/howl

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Procrastinating on 2022 talk by rewatching 2020 talk

https://vimeo.com/416363066

My delivery was absolutely terrible. It was probably not obvious to anyone how the talk mapped to the paper http://akkartik.name/akkartik-convivial-20200607.pdf. Watch it more for the great questions starting at 20 minutes.

Now I wonder what questions permacomputing people would have about it.

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I'm rereading an old favorite

"If I look at any small part of it, I can see what is going on -- I don't need to refer to other parts to understand what something is doing.

"If I look at any large part in overview, I can see what is going on -- I don't need to know all the details to get it.

"Every level of detail is as locally coherent and as well thought-out as any other level."

— Richard Gabriel, "The Quality Without A Name" (page 42)

https://github.com/akkartik/mu/blob/main/linux/bootstrap/000organization.cc

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It's been uplifting to read everyone's posts about 2021. We all had a hard year, did the best we could.

I entered 2021 feeling very grateful. There was a pandemic on, but my life wasn't impacted. Just some distractions stripped away. But then my father passed away. His condition wasn't diagnosed in time because of the pandemic. So it _had_ been eating away at my life in 2020. I just hadn't noticed.

I feel old without a father. Teliva is very likely my midlife crisis finding expression.

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Running untrusted apps in Teliva

Programming languages assume you trust all code you run. Browsers assume you trust all network access from websites you visit. With Teliva I'm exploring other approaches in search of a sandboxing model that's both more flexible and easier to understand/trust. Here's a first draft.

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-teliva-2021-12-25 (video; 2 minutes)

Main project page: https://github.com/akkartik/teliva

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Beginnings of a Gemini browser in Teliva, a way to share small, hackable, text-mode Lua apps.

Try it out:

git clone https://github.com/akkartik/teliva
cd teliva
make linux  # or macosx or bsd
src/teliva gemini.tlv

Largely built from within Teliva. Here's a session of me implementing links. (video; 45 minutes)

https://archive.org/details/akkartik-teliva-2021-12-21

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🤯

https://codeberg.org/ngn/k/src/branch/master/a21

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A simple terminal app for composing multiple toots at once

• Paste in a small amount of ASCII text from the clipboard (no scrolling)
• Edit it at will (insert, arrow keys, backspace)
• Always show the character count
• Anywhere the text contains some delimiter, treat it as a chunk boundary, show character count for the previous chunk.

Amazing how difficult this is to get right.

I've built multiple text editors but still can't figure this out. Data structure this time: just a raw string.

---

I figured out the problem! I didn't have tests in Teliva! Now I do.

It turns out my brain only works when embedded in an exo-brain of tests.

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