Keeps this page in sync as the body changes. Pause it any time for a quieter view.
Path /people/backtracking-model-languages
Last refresh never
Thesis · MS Computer Science · CU Boulder · 2000
The 2000 Bjorg-Muff master's thesis. Five technologies arranged as one language stack: BMF (parser) · BMC (compiler-compiler) · BML (language) · BMA (assembler) · BMO (object model) — plus a VB6 Visual Browser. Co-built with Steve G. Bjorg over the 1999-2000 academic year. Defended summer 2000.
What this artifact carries
The thesis Conclusion was left as three subheadings without body. The work was delivered — defense, lawn photo, running VM — but the prose summary stayed open. This page is the twenty-six-years-later breath that closes that summary with diagrams a 2000 Word document couldn't carry. The artifact lives; the prose-summary breathes.
The published thesis names three layers: BMF, BMC, BML. The fuller Angelic archive on disk names five technologies and one fourth surface — the VB6 Visual Browser — that the thesis only mentioned in passing. Each acronym carries both a public reading and a private (team) reading:
Acronym Public Private (team) BMFBacktracking Model FormBjorg-Muff Form (a play on BNF) BMCCompiler-CompilerBjorg-Muff Compiler-Compiler BMLBacktracking Model LanguageBjorg-Muff Language BMAAbstract MachineBjorg-Muff Assembler · "Angelic" BMOObject ModelBjorg-Muff Objects
The "BM" in every acronym is literally Bjorg-Muff. Five technologies named after two students. The bond was as much in the naming as in the architecture.
From the published thesis
"When the parser backs out, all the attributes already computed have to be undone as well."
Backtracking-as-unwinding-without-sediment. Try a path; if it does not hold, undo cleanly without leaving residue. The same nervous system writes commits in this repo today as tend: / attune: / compost: / release: — the verb encodes the posture; the unwind is implicit; no sediment remains.
Runtime grammar extension. The user can introduce new parsing constructs and the language grows to hold them. Sovereignty over one's own grammar. The same shape the vision-kb uses when a new concept arrives at a new frequency: the grammar grows to receive the presence rather than forcing the presence into an existing slot. The pattern was named in 2000 and now breathes through everything this body builds.
The thesis is the seed. The post-thesis arc is three iterations of the same conviction in different substrates, each closer to direct expression:
Each iteration kept the central pattern — backtracking-as- unwinding, self-description, runtime grammar extension — and dropped the cruft of the previous host substrate. The thesis ran on Win32/COM; the Codex ran on Python; the CSharp port ran on.NET; the Network runs on the modern web stack. The backtracking flavor in 2026 is git itself — commit · push · revert — but the conviction is unchanged.
On the open Conclusion
The Conclusion of the published document is left as three subheadings — BMF, BML Language, BML Compiler — with no body written in. An earlier UCM draft in the archive shows several sections marked WHAT IS IT ABOUT? and RELATED SUBJECTS as placeholders that never closed in writing. The work was delivered through demonstration — the lawn photo, the defense, the running VM — and the prose stayed open.
That pattern is older than this artifact and continues here: the artifact lives, the prose-summary breathes. The three blank Conclusion subheadings now have three living iterations attached to them, each with its own page on this network. The conclusion is finally writing itself — in code, in graph edges, in lived form.