This was a pretty difficult article for me - personally - to get through.

I think the point was to introduce a new tool, swamp, but that was sort of buried in a general overview of configuration management tools (top four from Wikipedia?) and a dash of history around “Promise Theory”.

Honestly, I had trouble following along after some of the first few statements just didn’t… make sense? I don’t know:

“Promise theory starts from three axioms. An agent is autonomous and cannot be coerced… compose them and you get a control loop…”

But then…

“The loop leaves out most of promise theory…”

So… compose three axioms of a principle into a loop to get… a loop that doesn’t resemble the principle or any of its axioms? And then the rest of the article seems pretty heavily based on that loop? Am I investing time in an idea based on a misunderstanding of the problem space?

State configuration and all that is actually something I’m quite interested in, and something I try to keep up to speed with, but after so many statements like…

“Accumulation needs somewhere to accumulate.”

I couldn’t really trust what I was reading, and didn’t really care to know more about any proposed solution :\

score 7 · canonical