The moment I read the text I knew the title was satirical.

You know it is when it starts like this: "...All tabular knowledge can be stored in a single long plain text file. The only syntax characters needed are spaces and newlines."

That's fundamentally the simplest way of storing text. And it's nothing new, yet people have long ignored that simplicity for much more complicated ways of storing text.

I suspect it refers to Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science".

I don't see it as a this-is-all-a-joke thing though, more tongue in cheek.

also I think one-big-text-file has a certain simplicity, like everything-is-a-file on unix (or more properly plan9)

Is there some context you're leaving unsaid?

a plain text file is the oldest idea for storing knowledge. see unix philosophy: "Write programs that do one thing and do it well. Write programs to work together. Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."

Did you read past the title? The main point of the article is a syntax for knowledge bases - plain text is just an implementation detail.

If you take out plain text from this presentation, what's left? The tree structure? The log aspect? In order to claim any of this is remotely novel, you have to first ignore the whole body of work built around information systems.

That doesn't answer my question.

> If you take out plain text from this presentation, what's left? The tree structure? The log aspect? In order to claim any of this is remotely novel, you have to first ignore the whole body of work built around information systems.

Thank you for the feedback. I've updated the paper with some more links.

The language in which the measures are written in (currently called Grammar. I will like rename it to something like Parssers) is quite advanced.

The improvements over Recutils, the closest precursor I am aware of, have now been added.

The PLDB ScrollSet is now about 500,000 cells of information. Each cell is strongly typed and fully auditable by git. There is a high amount of signal in that dataset. It is an intelligent set of weights, and continually getting more intelligent. And it is read at runtime as a single plain text file and compiled to a single CSV (or tsv, json, etc).

All from using the system documented in the paper (and the advanced language for Parsers).

If you can point me to a similar database or similar scale anywhere in the world (plain text base, >10e5 size, git backed, strongly typed, hierarchical and graphical), I would be grateful as I might learn something.

It must be, right?? The whole thing reads like a satire of the exact kind of thing HN would fawn over. Just look at the current comments!

I'm not sure myself. I didn't want this to be the second comment on the submission so I'll say it now: I got TimeCube vibes from this.

I hope so...