What about the name Synthesis?

mentaloid · March 12, 2024, 5:52pm

The name Synthesis:

is chosen specifically with Logseq in mind
- Don’t bother searching for its technology under that name.
primarily means composition
is pronounced as sEEnthesee(s)
is abbreviated as Syn
- syn is the con- prefix
  - thesis means position
- syn in isolation means plus
is the opposite of analysis
- One way to analyze a concept is by outlining its meaning in various contexts.
  - Logseq’s outliner is ideal for that.
  - Synthesis is a natural complement, as explained below.

When Synthesis is given an arbitrary expression, it:

parses that expression
- Parsing is a form of further analysis.
reads relevant outlines as needed
- The results are cached, until changes are made.
synthesizes them into its model of recognized phrases
- and indirectly of recognized concepts
- This is the special stage that inspired the name.
evaluates the given expression against its model
- This is the fundamental step for all computations.
  - Programming is about combining such steps to execute programs of any complexity.
    - That’s another form of synthesis, common to all programming.

This doesn’t sound much different from other programming languages.

In some sense, all programming languages facilitate the composition of programs.
- And most of them are equivalent in what can be composed with them (i.e. Turing-complete).
The main difference is that:
- most of them are synthetic
  - For them to work, they expect us to translate our natural thoughts into their unnatural constructs.
- Synthesis is natural
  - It is about thinking directly in the language.
    - Thus focusing on composing rather than on translating.
  - How can something named Synthesis not being synthetic itself?
    - synthetic is a product (and may further be used as material)
    - synthesis is the process of producing it