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by andrewflnr 4601 days ago
Code bubbles looks cool, but I don't see the connection with your point about clay tablets. Any digital data is, by itself, flat and behavior-less, whether it's in the form of traditional files or some specially-designed backing store for something like Code Bubbles. I don't see any point in really trying to hide that base reality.

I am in favor of giving links between data a more prominent place in our storage systems. I envision a system where the data is mostly fine-grained trees, like sexprs, where hard-links between trees are first-class entities. But at the end of the day it's just an abstraction over a bunch of bytes.

1 comments

> Any digital data is, by itself, flat and behavior-less, whether it's in the form of traditional files or some specially-designed backing store for something like Code Bubbles.

I know this is false. You can have a system where everything is an object and carries behavior around with it. We've had those for over 40 years.

> I am in favor of giving links between data a more prominent place in our storage systems.

A "more prominent place?" Isn't this a bit bass-ackwards? Aren't relationships in code where the primary value is?

The behavior carried around by those objects is ultimately in the form of flat digital data, interpreted by other, more general programs, executed on a CPU. Behavior, when it comes down to it, is a property of silicon, not data. This might seem like a useless distinction, but I don't think it is. I like to keep track of what things are underneath the abstractions.