My interests

• Ideas that I haven't encountered before
• Things to make achieving goals more efficient
• Humans
• Other stuff
  

List of things I don't care about

• Trolling
• Firmly held beliefs
• Names
• Sunk costs
• Unobserved events
• Definitions

UX story #1

It was Saturday morning, and Joe Programmer hopped out of his bed and
got onto his computer. It booted up instantly, as usual, greeting him
with a smiley face (as configured) and the latest interesting tidbits.
"What?" Joe exclaimed. "Bill made a trillion dollars off his latest
program? I need to get to work!"

Joe took a sheet from his "list of programs to be reimplemented in
Mathnerd314's programming language", and went to work.

"Hmm", he said, "this uses one of those Java/C# hybrids. I really hate
that crap. Good thing it's guaranteed bug-free. I don't get paid to fix
bugs."

Whistling, he went to work, mostly just typing back in the code, until
he came to a place with a base class and a few derived classes. "This
one's a puzzler," he said. "The derived classes don't override any of
the getters of the original class, but there's an overriden method that
doesn't call its parent! This won't work at all for Mathnerd314's
language, where both the base class method *and* the derived method are
called at once."

He IRC'd Mathnerd314, and explained the problem. "Oh, your universe is
impossible," said Mathnerd314.

Joe, and his problem with Mathnerd314's language, promptly ceased to exist.

The End

Slogans

"the ultimate programming language"
"the superset of your language"
"reverse-engineering compilers so you don't have to"
"replacing syntax with semantics since <date>"
"solving the halting problem, every day before breakfast"
"porting the world to run on thin air"
"more abstract than abstraction itself"

Wiki design

The Structure

• Dict: (Dictionary / Default namespace)

  • code / pseudocode for various important algorithms and data structures

  • working definition of each term

  • snippets of various PL documentation (grammars, semantics, ...)

  • authoritative names for the various PL's

  • relatively difficult to edit - protected to some (small) group

  • new terms (pages) should be easy to make

  • copying of portions wikipedia and lesswrong might be good

  • nothing should ever be deleted here unless "OMG THE SERVER'S RUNNING OUT OF SPACE!!!"

  • large #'s of redirects likely

  • disambiguations should be resolved in DictionaryChange (terms have only 1 meaning)

  • should be a relatively small area, mostly for people who want to know what they're talking about

  • creme da la creme of the site

• DictionaryChange (Talk: ?)

  • RFCT's (request for changes to terms)

  • clarification on whatever some random git posts as a new term

  • garbage-collected once the RFCT has been discussed

• Meta:

  • overview of the site

  • links to related sites

  • IRC channel policies

  • ... other meta stuff ...

• Dect: (Deconstruction)

  • detailed picking apart of PLs

  • analysis of which features work and don't work

  • contain research, summaries/links to research

  • stated opinions of some authorities / random gits

  • performance data / charts

  • cognitive behavioral therapy

  • /really intense/ discussion of the lambda calculus and its relatives

  • trolling for n00bs

  • ... other interesting stuff ...

  • stuff deleted if the author agrees (possibly via protracted silence)

  • goal is to find stuff worthy of a term / page in Dict:

• Perhaps some other namespace(s) for IRC logs, debates, flamewars, images, etc. so we don't have to use Dect: all the time

• User pages limited somehow and garbage-collected based on content

End goal: random user posts some code snippet in Dect:, we say use [[Dict:X]] [[Dict:Y]] and [[Dict:Z]] in [[Dict:AwesomePL]] to make it maintainable. (Maybe make Dict: the main namespace, so it's just [[X]] [[Y]] and [[Z]], and have autolinking enabled - wiki software to shorten it to [x] might be better)