<title>Mu</title> With apologies to <a href='http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mu_%28negative%29#In_popular_culture'>Robert Pirsig</a>: <p> <div style='font-style: italic; margin-left:2em'> Is it a language, or an operating system, or a virtual machine? <p> Mu. </div> <b><a href='http://akkartik.name/about'>Problem statement.</a></b> <b><a href='http://github.com/akkartik/mu'>Solution.</a></b> <p>For an earlier prototype, a high-level statement-oriented language with a tree-walking interpreter, see <a href='http://akkartik.github.io/mu1'>mu1</a>. <hr> <p> The zen of Mu: <ul> <li>traces, not interfaces <li>be rewrite-friendly, not backwards-compatible <li>be easy to port rather than portable <li>global structure matters more than local hygiene </ul> <p> Mu's vision of utopia: <ul> <li>Run your devices in 1/1000th the code. <li>1000x more forks for open source projects. <li>Make simple changes to any project in an afternoon, no matter how large it is. <li>Projects don't slow down with age, they continue to evolve just as fast as when they were first started. <li>All software rewards curiosity, allowing anyone to query its design decisions, gradually learn how to tweak it, try out increasingly radical redesign ideas in a sandbox. People learn programming as an imperceptible side effect of tinkering with the projects they care about. <li><a href='http://akkartik.name/post/habitability'>Habitable</a> digital environments. <li>A <em>literate</em> digital society with widespread skills for comprehending large-scale software structure and comparing-and-contrasting similar solutions. (I don't think anybody is literate by this definition today. All we can do easily is read our own programs that we wrote recently.) </ul> <p style='margin-bottom: 2em'/>