Vision

Vision

The Timeless Stack is about building tools to build computers that

  • work
  • work reliably,
  • and work predictably and explainably.

This requires a certain degree of minimalism:

  • minimality of dependencies;
  • minimality of surprises;
  • minimality of magic in our tools;
  • and most critically, a minimality of presumption.

Most trickily, it requires building a whole ecosystem which shares these traits, and produces reasonable components which can be composed easily while still honoring these goals.

In the next couple of pages, we’ll explore this in more detail. Several concrete strategies are keystones of how we want to build this ecosystem: For example, “immutable everything” is part of our strategy for minimizing surprises; and for another example, “hermetic computation” is a part of our strategy for making all of our progress verifiable and easy to reproduce.

Finally, from these strategy pages you can expect to find links to a variety of pages throughout the Design and Schema Reference chapters whenever things get concrete. It’s those Design and Schema Reference chapters that will provide nitty-gritty details, exact commands, data format details, etc – most of which should just “make sense” once you grok the strategy. Those Design and Schema Reference chapters correspondingly refer back to this chapter about Vision and strategy for justifications of design choices, so you can freely read in any order.