Tunes Wiki

A wiki for the Tunes project: http://cliki.tunes.org/

What is Tunes? This description from http://www.tunes.org/tunes.html would make a fine corporate mission statement:

: TUNES will be a new computing paradigm, replacing current operating systems, languages, environments, and interfaces, with one system. TUNES will be free, easy to use, powerful, stable, and portable.

This is a better quotation from http://tunes.org/tunes.html#overview:

To sum up the main features in technical terms, TUNES is a project to replace existing Operating Systems, Languages, and User Interfaces by a completely rethought Computing System, based on a fully reflective architecture with standard support for unification of system abstractions, security based on formal proofs from explicit negotiated axioms, higher-order functions, self-extensible syntax, fine-grained composition, distributed networking, orthogonally persistent storage, fault-tolerant computation, version-aware identification, decentralized (no-kernel) communication, dynamic code regeneration, high-level models of encapsulation, hardware-independent exchange of code, migratable actors, yet (eventually) a highly-performant set of dynamic compilation tools (phew).

These are not buzzwords, but technical terms, and you should find precise definitions in the Glossary.

Here's something more substantive from the Tunes FAQ at http://www.tunes.org/Tunes-FAQ.html (with its language cleaned up):

: TUNES is a project for an integrated computing system. We need to implement a new language, because we want a system that can be more expressive than can be achieved with what exists today. We need to implement a new OS infrastructure, because the language must control the whole system so it can reliably enforce its invariants. Moreover, we expect a tight integration of language and OS infrastructure to ultimately yield much enhanced performance, too. Of course, we may achieve a programming language and a low-level OS framework that could be used separately, but we feel that much of the added value of the project resides in the integration of them into one reflective architecture.

So is this like Unix/C which became Unix/C/Perl which became *nix/C/Perl/Python/Ruby? You can't tie a specific language to an OS.

You don't understand the objectives of the project. See for example The TUNES Metatranslator subproject http://tunes.org/HLL/meta/ .

Maybe you can't tie a specific language to an OS, but co-evolution of language and OS certainly has a strong effect on the OS (and possibly on the language as well), Unix/C being the canonical example. (On this note, I think the LispMachine experience might provide some fodder for the argument that you can tie a language to an OS; I think many of the current SocialProblemsOfLisp as well as its technical problems can be traced to an irrational obsession among Lispers with somehow going back to the LispM "Eden".)