Contact With Reality

Most modern systems are designed to reduce contact with reality.

Not by removing constraints, which is impossible, but by delaying, diffusing, or obscuring them until consequences appear somewhere else, owned by no one in particular.

This work is oriented in the opposite direction.

Contact with reality means working close to constraints that cannot be negotiated away. It means keeping dependencies visible, making failure legible, and refusing abstractions that claim to eliminate responsibility rather than relocate it.

This stance is not nostalgic and not anti-abstraction. Abstraction is unavoidable. The question is whether it earns its place by remaining accountable to what it hides, and whether the hidden costs remain inspectable when pressure arrives.

In this project, contact with reality shows up as recurring questions:

• Where does state live, and who owns it
• What authority exists, and how is it exercised
• Which effects are permitted, tracked, or forbidden
• How do errors propagate, and where do they terminate
• What costs are real, even when they are easy to ignore

This page exists to make that orientation explicit, so the rest of the work can be read correctly.

Next:

• Abstraction, Indirection, and Accountability
  On when abstraction earns its place and when it becomes insulation.

• Back To Home
  Return to the main page.

Previous:

• Why Another Language
  A discussion of the design space this project explores, and why existing languages do not address it as a whole.