Talk:PROSE modeling language

This page (PROSE modeling language) is very incomplete. I just started editing it. I need to upload some personally created image files (Figures). for insertion into it (dealing with copyright issues). Is there a way to create the article offline and then publish it? Beartham (talk) 16:38, 17 October 2013 (UTC)


 * Yes, you can put it in your user namespace: User:Beartham/PROSE modeling language. Be sure to use the page move option so that the history is kept; if you can't move because you're not yet autoconfirmed, then I can do it for you if you like. Q VVERTYVS (hm?) 09:19, 18 October 2013 (UTC)

This article is pretty much complete now, except for the references, which I intend to start adding now. I would appreciate any criticism (recommendations). Since PROSE was the world's introduction to the MetaCalculus paradigm, which had a long history before and after PROSE, and is being resurrected in the cloud now, I am now going to start another article (MetaCalculus) that will discuss its evolution from the Apollo era to date, including its origination of WISC (writable instruction-set computers) in the 1980s, and its potential future merging with other paradigms to simplify K-12 STEM education and renew growth in R&D markets. Beartham (talk) 17:47, 22 October 2013 (UTC)


 * I've tagged the article with the tag. The article makes quite a few bold claims, and I'd like to see specific references, preferably with page numbers (you can use the rp template for that). Q VVERTYVS  (hm?) 19:35, 22 October 2013 (UTC)

I understand your concern about the bold claims, and I appreciate your assistance in asking for the specific references, as I definitely want people to research them. I added hyperlinks to make this easy. There is an important back-story as to the reason the claims seem bold. What has happened is that the industry mainstream has diverged into intermediate disciplines that never were motivated to escalate DIY modeling as we were.

For example, it has been an embarrassment to the academics of the Autodiff movement that FortranCalculus, the 7th generation MetaCalculus modeling language, was demonstrated at their very first conference in 1991 on a Toshiba laptop. Consequently, in all their many publications, they don't even mention PROSE, which had been a commercial time-sharing language 17 years before, even though its example broke the dam of academic resistance to "non-symbolic" calculus for them to grow their movement. In Kuhn's scenario, PROSE shifted the paradigm, and the autodiff people have been engaged in phase three normal-science puzzle solving and publication ever since. Yet nobody has yet built the escalator to automate modeling, or even seems to know how.

PROSE laid the groundwork for calculus hardware. In the 1980s we designed and built this WISC hardware, and created two key patents, the latter becoming famous in the "patent-troll" infringement case against Intel. The reason we are coming forward in Wikipedia now is that we want to see this "metacomputer host architecture" emerge again as quad-core WISC elements of many-core RISC chips to support nested AD in hardware logic. Both of the patents have expired now, paving the way for open-source software-in-hardware development, automated by Metacybernetics. Beartham (talk) 20:50, 23 October 2013 (UTC)


 * You're saying "we are coming forward in Wikipedia". You are aware of the rules on conflict of interest and original research, right? Q VVERTYVS (hm?) 09:01, 24 October 2013 (UTC)

I am certainly aware that as an originator of these technologies, I have a perceived conflict of interest in seeing them emerge into mainstream awareness. I do have a few colleagues who have been involved in these technologies since the PROSE era. As I do want to comply by your rules, I will ask them to take over the editorial role. Thank you for your valued clarification and support. Beartham (talk) 21:20, 25 October 2013 (UTC)

Advert and Technical tags
The entire article is written in a very technical and jargon-y style, and is probably incomprehensible to almost all Wikipedia readers as written. "Yet AD was applied in nestable iterative holons in PROSE semantics, giving rise to a threefold alphabet of holistic operator templates for very-high-order mathematical modeling" - Heck, I can't tell if this is a real statement or word salad. And if this is a real statement, it's only going to be comprehensible to a very narrow and deep specialty. And the computing related definitions of "holons" and "holarchy" appear to have been added to those articles recently as well.

It also reads very promotionally, and all of the references appear to lead back to a single website (www.metacalculus.com), and I'm concerned that even meets the standards for notability. This appears to have been a minor language/system in the seventies, which is being used to promote a new commercial(?) product along similar lines. Rwessel (talk) 00:09, 14 January 2014 (UTC)
 * This page describes a system that is about 50 years old, and mostly died about 40 years ago. Personally, I would be interested if the code still exists, to try running it on modern hardware, but even that wouldn't make this an advertisement. There might be some descendants that are still being worked on, though. I saw a talk about it 44 years ago, and got to try a few things, but not more than that. Gah4 (talk) 23:52, 26 April 2022 (UTC)
 * This page describes a system that is about 50 years old, and mostly died about 40 years ago. Personally, I would be interested if the code still exists, to try running it on modern hardware, but even that wouldn't make this an advertisement. There might be some descendants that are still being worked on, though. I saw a talk about it 44 years ago, and got to try a few things, but not more than that. Gah4 (talk) 23:52, 26 April 2022 (UTC)

Comments from a user of 39 years
I'm also involved in PROSE & FortranCalculus (FC) education. We have a website, http://fortrancalculus.info, for a textbook of applications that were solved via PROSE or FC. Many of these applications could NOT be solved without these calculus level languages ... especially those that use nested solvers. It is nice to have Joe's history notes as stated here even if they are above most of our heads. Some day these comments may help future developers make great strides in furthering computer software in the future. Just keep future software simple to work with as the goal.

A little history ...

From 1975 to 79, I taught PROSE to Engineers & Scientists that were time-sharing customers in the San Francisco Bay Area. The following cases are results from customers using PROSE: 1. Aertech had a thermistor problem: they build black boxes (for space) that needed a thermistor that fitted 3 data points. Each black box had unique data points. In order to solve the problem, Aertech allowed a technician up to 16 hours to solve for one set of data points using a (Basic or Fortran) program. If not solved, the problem was passed on to an Engineer. The Engineer had up to 2 hours to solve the problem. If still not resolved, the black box with hard to fit data points was dismantled and part of it was switched with another unit awaiting assembly.

A PROSE program was written to find the best solution. 5 thermistor problems were submitted as a remote-job-entry on our time-sharing system. The results took less than one minute to solve all 5 problems and all solutions used the fewest number of thermistors! A huge time-savings for Aertech!!!

2. Watkins-Johnson (WJ) had a similar problem: 2 Engineers were trying to fit a straight line to a curve and getting nowhere. I met these Engineers and couldn't get them to slow down and explain their problem to me. Finally, after a month, one sat down an explained their problem. Within 2 hours we wrote PROSE code to solve their problem. WJ won the government project due to the PROSE solution! (No other competitor was able to solve the problem!)

3. Memorex attended my class and hired me to write a PROSE program to build a Matched Filter for their disc drives. This required solving a generalized transfer function, H(s), that would take an asymmetric input signal and convert it into a symmetric output signal. PROSE coding was done in the first day (8 hours) of work. It was tweaked/modified over the next 2 years. Solutions were always optimal for the given PROSE code.

Here is where I became aware of problems with having the right equations. This was solved in the frequency domain but with time it became apparent that the problem needed to be solved in the time domain. Without PROSE we probably would never have seen this domain problem. PROSE gave instant solutions to each modification thus got our efforts off coding and got us focusing on our math equations. This work was published in an 1981 IEEE journal and a copy is on my web site at http://fortrancalculus.info/example/pulse-slimming.html. The problem was put into an application for all to use ... see http://fortrancalculus.info/apps/match-n-freq.html -

PROSE and soon FortranCalculus are for Engineers & Scientists ... when they have some equations to solve. Write their (10 or 10,000) equations in Fortran code then add a FIND statement (and INTEGATE stmt. for Differential Equ.s) and add some begin & end statements and you have a the basic code for a PROSE program. Can't get much simpler! Perfect for Engineers & Scientists.

I trust this gives a better picture of what Calculus-level compilers can do for us non programmers. OptimalDesigns (talk) 18:03, 17 January 2014 (UTC)

Response to Critiques
I have attempted to revise the cryptic and "jargon-y" style somewhat and remove the promotional content. I removed the link to the MetaCalculus.com website, and all references after 1987 and any reference to Fortran Calculus which was developed beginning in 1988

I am not promoting PROSE. It has been dead for over 30 years. This is an article about the history of an important paradigm that was headed toward critical mass when its platforms were scuttled by the PC cusp--the IBM PC and PC-AT in particular, because 16-bit segmented memory could not practically support automatic differentiation, the arithmetic foundation of PROSE.

The last mainframe sale of PROSE was for a binary paid-up license for a Univac 1110 version to the Hanford Nuclear Facility for $53,000 in 1979. Shortly thereafter, Oak Ridge Labs contracted with PROSE, Inc. to produce a "crippled" version of PROSE (GRESS - gradient enhanced software system) that could be used to recompile FORTRAN programs to automate sensitivity analysis and assess the Three-Mile Island radiation spread using automatic differentiation. The widespread marketing of PROSE and the distribution of GRESS to academia by ORNL had spurred the interest of the academic mathematicians of the Autodiff movement. Yet in their fixation on numerics they have still not adapted to the holon paradigm, which was proven in the marketplace long before they started their publishing campaign.

It would be 10 more years before PC's (with the i386) were powerful enough for this holon paradigm to re-emerge. During that decade and the next, scientific computing in R&D took a nose dive, and has not yet recovered. All the "scientific" computing firms are gone from the marketplace. Meanwhile we have this Babel of "computer science" languages and balkanized operating systems that have created chaos in this industry. Wikipedia is saturated with descriptions of all of these languages and technologies, most of them far more jargon-laden than this article. A key distinction needs to be made about modeling and programming, or rather "application science" and "computer science". They have little in common. Application science is about converting science to equations. It is far and away more difficult than programming, which is largely about converting equations to code (in a scientific sense). Most of the languages extant today are repetitions of the computer-science theme differing mainly in style, not functionality. They are all about the same level of functionality--the same as or even lower than FORTRAN, ironically. That includes C especially, which brought back pointers from assembly language that Backus and his team had purposely avoided because they were a mismatch to the variables of algebraic formulas, and confused scientists and engineers who formulated models.

C++ added a fixation about programs as objects of data flow, derived from a process-oriented discrete-event simulation language, mainly used to model computer architecture and operating systems. It is no wonder then that OOP is all about software implementation structure and not application problem structure. Thus it wants to pull modeling down to the machine image, producing a mind warp between software and the mathematical frameworks of science. It has now obscured the vision of two generations of programmers. This is why software development is so labor intensive. Software technology has not been automated and elevated to even attempt to keep pace with the advance in hardware.

Fortunately there is another technology that has made great strides in teaching people how to model sophisticated applications which are an important subset of MetaCalculus. That is System Dynamics, which is being taught in K-12 following the efforts of Jay Forrester and his colleague, Gordon Brown after 1987 when this was enabled by GUIs. While PROSE made optimization simple, it still required people to know about differential equations, essentially the last calculus course students have to endure in our obsolete mathematics curriculum. But SD hides all of that mental calisthenics in a beautifully simple graphical motif, which teaches 4th graders about feedback processes, while hiding calculus all together. Our ambition is to join these two paradigms into one graphical motif to boost STEM education by about 7 grade levels.

PROSE was a DIY tool used by scientists and engineers. It was marketed for 14 years starting in the last 7 years of the mainframe time-sharing era. In those days the concept of automatic differentiation was unknown. And it was considered unimportant to study any more than ordinary arithmetic, or analogically the methods used to search databases in the semantics of 4GLs like SQL. Modelers didn't care how the problems were solved any more than they cared about the design of computers. Yet now the study of these arcane methods are considered more important than the automation of modeling at a more abstract and simplified level, which is what PROSE provided with great success. It separated modeling from solution methods, dividing the labor naturally in the way science had always been organized.

No one seems to remember that Einstein did not solve his equations, he merely interpreted science to formulate them. That was his genius. Someone else invented the methods of solving them. The problem with computer science today is that it puts the cart before the horse. It exalts the method maker and implementer and forgets the modeler. Why has this happened? Because software technology has been all about recycling old code for the last 40 years, removing the need for specifications in the waterfall, bringing autonomy back to IT as a kind of revenge for the DIY movements of FORTRAN and BASIC which flattened the early IT empires. That's why Unix has been balkanized into hundreds of strains (including Linux and Android) and we have a Babel of redundant computer-science languages. Whereas end-user DIY development is dead, except for spreadheets. Beartham (talk) 21:22, 17 January 2014 (UTC)
 * I suspect it is the rise of interpreted math/science languages, such as Matlab, Mathematica, and later Python, that made it hard to keep something like this going. Also, the small market that it might have. As I noted earlier, I got to try it out in 1978. Gah4 (talk) 20:47, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Note also that, for example, Mathematica allows one to do a symbolic derivative and then output the result in C or Fortran. Not quite as convenient, but good enough much of the time. My TI-92 calculator will do symbolic derivatives, too. In any case, this article is for historical use, and I believe should be kept for that use. It would be fun to run the old code, though. Gah4 (talk) 20:47, 15 December 2022 (UTC)
 * Note also that, for example, Mathematica allows one to do a symbolic derivative and then output the result in C or Fortran. Not quite as convenient, but good enough much of the time. My TI-92 calculator will do symbolic derivatives, too. In any case, this article is for historical use, and I believe should be kept for that use. It would be fun to run the old code, though. Gah4 (talk) 20:47, 15 December 2022 (UTC)

Edits by OptimalDesigns and Beartham
Editor User:Beartham has edited comments made on this talk page by User:OptimalDesigns. This is usually considered WP:Vandalism, or considering the nature of the edits, it might be WP:Sock puppetry. I'd ask both editors to clarify their relationship to each other, and if they are different editors, Beartham should revert his edits and add appropriately signed comments, or if they are the same, the use of one of these accounts should be discontinued. In addition, OptimalDesigns as a user name sounds like it may afoul of WP:ORGNAME. Rwessel (talk) 17:04, 19 January 2014 (UTC)


 * My above comments were started one day and then lengthened the next day. There was no Vandalism just a new user getting his feet wet. As for my username, it has been used for years ... it comes from my company name, Optimal Designs Enterprise. OptimalDesigns (talk) 16:07, 20 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I was not accusing you of vandalism, rather another user changed your comments (which may be vandalism). I was concerned that given the nature of the edits that you and Beartham were, in fact, the same user, which is a different problem.  In any event the account OptimalDesigns has only been used to make four edits on this talk page in the last few days, although it may have existed on Wikipedia for longer.  Be advised that using a company name as a user name is problematic, per WP:CORPNAME, and if you edit here people will raise that as an issue.  Rwessel (talk) 17:27, 21 January 2014 (UTC)


 * My edits of OptimalDesigns entry consisted of correcting a couple of misppelled words (ware to where) and some other I don't remember. Sorry, there was no intent to change the content. Beartham (talk) 16:26, 20 January 2014 (UTC)

Why are the figures not displayed
None of the figures are being displayed. Why? Beartham (talk) 15:28, 21 January 2014 (UTC)

The presentation of this article is severely compromised without these figures being displayed. It is impossible to properly judge this content without these figures. Is this intentional? Beartham (talk) 15:38, 21 January 2014 (UTC)


 * I see seven figures (labeled “Figure 1” through “Figure 7”). Are there supposed to be others?  Try purging your browser cache.  Rwessel (talk)

Thank you Rwessel, that worked fine. Beartham (talk) 16:13, 22 January 2014 (UTC)

Purpose of This Article
The problem being addressed in this article is comprehension of a solution to a major world crisis--the persistence of the so-called "productivity paradox", which has been a detrimental side-effect of computer-industry growth. In spite of all of the analysis that has been done, it clearly cannot be understood without an historical perspective reaching back before the Apollo program, and involving intimate knowledge of software development practice during all phases of this long period.

The issue of DIY versus Intermediated software development has always been "the elephant in the room" in this industry. It is the reason why authors like Robert Solow, Andy Rappaport, and Nicholas Carr were opposed by many of the industry CEOs when they saw and reported on critical flaws nobody wanted to hear about.

Because I had seen all of the messengers being proverbially shot, like this, I knew it was not sufficient to merely be a messenger. One had to also demonstrate a path out of the quagmire. That is what the PROSE language signaled when it was introduced into the marketplace 40 years ago this month. Why was it 40 years ahead of its time? Because that is what Apollo wrought. PROSE was merely one of its major advances. More than 200 man years went into PROSE's development. If it had not been for the PC cusp, which took away its hardware platforms, chances are much programming today would have been in some derivative of PROSE. Beartham (talk) 19:00, 22 January 2014 (UTC)


 * This is not what Wikipedia is for. It's a crowd sourced encyclopedia and an article titled "PROSE modeling language" should describe the PROSE modeling language; not your opinion. Please don't re-add the material that I just removed, again. Q VVERTYVS (hm?) 18:28, 25 February 2014 (UTC)

Sorry Qwertyus, we were apparently editing the article at the same time, and I thought I have made an error that caused all that deletion. Ok, you have a point. Would you have any objection if I inserted what you just deleted into this talk page? The issue of the productivity paradox is extremely important. Nobody, AFAIK has ever taken on the issue that its entire cause is the labor-intensity of programming, the lack of automation, and [Anomie] in the division of labor discussed by Durkheim over 100 years ago. Beartham (talk) 19:03, 25 February 2014 (UTC)


 * Ok, no sweat. But talk pages are a discussion space for improving articles; they are not general discussion spaces. If you want to publish this material somewhere, you should do it on your own website (or find a publisher). Q VVERTYVS (hm?) 19:14, 25 February 2014 (UTC)