On Feeling like THE Donald

There are days in Ooloi’s development when I feel like the Donald. Not that Donald. Donald Knuth. There's something very real to that comparison, even though it can be seen as presumptuous. Why do I compare myself with a computing giant?

Knuth faced typesetting systems that were brittle, ad hoc, and incapable of scaling to real demands. He didn’t patch; he rebuilt the foundations. Out came deterministic algorithms, the box–glue model, and a system that still sets type decades later.

I’m in a similar place. Music notation software has been compromised for forty years: mutable object graphs, procedural hacks, import/export traps. It works until you open Eine Alpensinfonie or Lontano – then it collapses.

So Ooloi is built the way TeX was:

• Foundations first. Ooloi has been in development for a year, part-time. No notes have appeared on screen yet, but that isn’t delay, it’s sequence. The first phase was concurrency, traversal, contracts: all the invisible machinery that must be right before visible music can exist.
• Immutability as discipline. Where TeX used deterministic boxes and glue, Ooloi uses persistent data structures and STM. Both eliminate state leakage as a class of bugs.
• Correctness as architecture. In TeX, line-breaking is provably optimal. In Ooloi, sharing and traversal are mathematically guaranteed by immutability and functional design.

And even a year isn’t slow, considering what's been implemented in that time. In Clojure, as in Lisps generally, progress is faster, not slower, because the language doesn’t get in the way. Architectural changes that would take months in procedural or OO systems collapse into days when immutability is the default. In Lisps I feel unrestricted from the usual … bullshit.

Durability and Time Horizons

Knuth didn’t set out to make a fashionable typesetter. He built TeX so mathematicians could publish without degradation, and so his own books could be set correctly fifty years later. The result is software still alive in 2025.

That perspective matters. Most software is written to meet the next deadline or release cycle, and dies within five years. Architecture shaped by durability instead of expedience looks very different. It avoids local hacks in favour of structural clarity. It makes changes faster, not slower, because the invariants hold.

Ooloi is built on the same horizon. It’s not about matching today’s competitors feature for feature; it’s about whether the system can handle repertoire and practices that will still be with us in fifty years.

​Knuth wasn't out to childishly 'disrupt' anything. Neither am I. And for the same reasons.

Outlasting Fashion

TeX has been called unfriendly, arcane, even ugly. But it outlasted beautiful GUIs because its correctness was deeper than its interface. It solved the right problem once, and has been binding books and journals ever since.

Ooloi certainly won’t look like TeX. It will be graphical, collaborative, and real-time, and it will have a slick, modern GUI. But it follows the same ethic: stop patching, stop pretending, build a system that doesn’t collapse under its own compromises.

That’s the point of the parallel. Knuth showed what software can be when it’s built for durability rather than fashion. That’s the road Ooloi is on.

The only Donald that counts