config

• “Who Should Write the Terraform?” – zwischenzugs
  

Contrast with The Pseudo Narrow Waist in Unix – Ilya’s blog
and also with Joe’s Blog — 2016-01-28 A Badass Way to Connect Programs Together (ease of implementation)

• «Thoughts : Automata theory?»
  
  • Finite-state machine (Type 1) (Regular language, Type-3 grammar)
    
  • Pushdown automata (Type 2) (Context-free language, Type-2 grammar)
    
  • Linear-bounded automata (Type 3) (Context-sensitive language, Type-1 grammar)
    
  • Turing machine (Type 4) (Recursively enumerable language, Type-0 grammar)
    

Type 1 / Discrete: You can select discrete verbs and apply them to nouns. Clicking a button. Saving a file. There is no mechanism of composition. Examples:

• GUIs
  
• Hardware control panels
  

In a discrete interface, you combine actions across time, by manually pointing and clicking. In some discrete interfaces, verbs can only apply to specific nouns. The more expressive discrete interfaces have general-purpose verbs that can act on many nouns.
Type 2 / Composable: Composable interfaces might include composable nouns, composable verbs, or both. Discrete interfaces only let you combine actions across time, by manually pointing and clicking. Composable interfaces let you combine actions across space, using notation.
Composable nouns are data that have the same shape, so you can combine them together.

• Lego
  
• Excel and SQL tables
  

Composable verbs are actions you can string together into pipelines that can be run over and over with different nouns.

• Unix pipes
  
• Spreadsheet formulas
  
• Nodes-and-wires programming
  
• Modular synthesizers
  

Type 3 / Recursively composable: Composed verbs and nouns can themselves be used as verbs and nouns in other compositions.

• Functions
  
• Shell scripts
  
• Systems that include scripting languages, like Hypercard or the web.
  

Recursive composition takes the logic of composition to its most extreme endpoint. You can bundle up complex combinations of verbs or nouns so that they can be treated as a single unit. This starts to get you toward something like general-purpose computing.

Recursion is the root of computation since it trades description for time.
Alan Perlis

You can freely trade between time (actions you take) and space (notation) to get the job done. You might even code yourself out of the loop completely.
The original Kardashev scale only goes to 3, because Kardashev figured that harnessing the energy of an entire universe would be impossible. That’s not going to stop me, however.
Type 4 / Self-authoring. The system itself is defined through the nested composition of a small number of primitives, giving you complete access to the very alphabet that was used to construct the system.

• Lisp
  
• SmallTalk
  
• DNA
  
• Physics
  

When an interface is self-authoring, those using the interface can rewrite it completely to meet their needs. A self-authoring interface collapses the distinction between user and programmer.
«It’s now in the article itself but assembly/Turing machines/whatever are also self-authoring»

https://leebriggs.co.uk/blog/2022/05/09/learning-to-love-yaml
YAML: people either “love it” or “hate it”

Of course, I’m biased towards Guix, but I must say that I’m very fond of the level of integration that Guix achieves. When I look at Nix I see a bunch of seemingly separately developed tools that are written in a mix of languages (with Shell code being rather common). In Guix all tools are written in Scheme, use the same API, behave similarly, etc. It just feels much more polished to me.