Devine Lu Linvega - An Approach to Computing and Sustainability Inspired from Permaculture

This is really, really interesting. There's a lot here, not just for vintage software buffs. Goes back to Alan Kay (Smalltalk and The cuneiform tablets of 2015 available from https://archive.org/details/tr2015004_cuneiform). "Smalltalk was made portable by having each “bag of bits,” called an “image,” that constituted an entire system also carry the microcode for each machine Smalltalk was to run on El . When an image was brought to a particular machine, the appropriate microcode was extracted and executed to create a Smalltalk virtual machine. All the rest of the “bag of bits” was completely machine independent." Even relatively modern systems like Moscow ML end up shipping compiled bytecode with the source. Kay continues: "This led to the somewhat interesting conclusion that one could store media as a “process” if the system that created it were carried along, and if the “microcode” for the system were also supplied." and "Furthermore, if the “microcode” were thought through a little more carefully, it would be much more compact to describe what it did than to describe how to make a Lisp. The idea then would be to have a Lisp-like system, or in this case Smalltalk, in the rest of the bag, and the real beginning part of each bag should be the simplest description of the simplest machine that would bring the rest of the bag to life. An important motivation back in the 1970s, which carries through to the present essay, was that a good goal would be to entice the programmers of the future into revitalizing a piece of media by showing them that it could be “an afternoon’s hack.” " Hence the connection with Kolmogorov Complexity, which I hadn't made before.

He recommends looking at https://factorcode.org/, https://kittenlang.org/ and https://www.stephan-becher.de/strongforth/.

Also, David May (who worked on the Inmos Transputer) has recently done some work on simple languages, one called X: http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/xarmdoc.pdf. He gives compiled bytecode for the compiler, in principle verifiable by eye. May is also interested in hardware garbage collectors. See http://people.cs.bris.ac.uk/~dave/gcolls.pdf. 

50:50 On telecommunications, you can "go to the wire" if you want: see Visible Speech and Photophone.

See https://wiki.xxiivv.com/site/devine_lu_linvega.html

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