Monochrome

Or, why limitations matter.

After we released Štar, my friend Zyni had a rather distressing and inconclusive exchange with someone on reddit. Apart from making me feel even better about walking away from reddit a decade and more ago, I realised an interesting thing when talking to her about her experience.

Limitations

Here are some curious things that people do.

• Why, in 2024, would anyone use a digital camera which can only make monochrome pictures?
• Why, in 2024, would anyone use a film camera?
• Why, in 2024, would anyone record music in a studio which uses tape?
• Why, in 2024, would any guitarist use a collection of flaky old FX pedals connected by noisy and unreliable cables, and a valve amplifier which occasionally catches fire¹?
• Why, in 2024, would anyone shoot a movie on film?

Yet people do all these things: there are at least two manufacturers of dedicated monochrome cameras, and you can pay to have your colour digital camera converted to monochrome by removing the filter array; many people use film; studios which use tape still exist and probably are becoming more common; too many guitarists to count use elderly FX pedals, a nest of cables and a valve amplifier; many very famous recent movies have been made on film.

There is, of course, a lot of myth and lore about the special magic properties of these things: people go on endlessly about how monochrome digital sensors have more effective resolution than Bayer sensors, as if anyone needs more resolution today, or how the effective sensitivity is higher, as if anyone needs more sensitivity today. The same for film (no, it’s not magic, no, it’s not somehow better than digital in any objective way), analogue recording, old FX pedals and amplifiers, and movies made on film. If you really think movies made on film are somehow better or ‘more natural’, watch The Holdovers, which was shot digitally but is a really beautiful simulacrum of what movies looked like in about 1972.

The awful truth is that none of these technologies get you anything objectively better, even if what you want to do is reproduce what people did when those technologies were all there was. You can simulate film so well it is impossible to tell the difference, you can simulate analogue tape just as well. Modern digital FX/amplification systems for guitar are a wonder. You can produce really beautiful monochrome images from colour files.

So why, really, do people do these things?

The clue, for me, is in the first one: why would anyone use a dedicated monochrome digital camera? Why would I use one if I could afford to? The answer, for me and others, is because it restricts what you can do. If your camera will only do monochrome, then that’s all you can do, and somehow that matters. I can’t afford a monochrome-only digital camera, but I do use a digital camera which has a monochrome-only workflow (this is why I bought it, in fact): the camera sets a ‘monochrome’ flag in its files which the raw-conversion tool understands, and unless you work hard you never see a colour version of the photographs you’ve taken. And this matters to me: it needs to be difficult to overcome the limitation, so I can think in monochrome².

And of course I use film as well, and mostly black and white film with some recent excursions into colour reversal (slide) film. Partly I do this because I enjoy working in the darkroom and the tactile quality of film cameras from the 1980s and before, but more important, I think, is how limiting film is. Once you’ve taken a picture, it’s there: you can’t chimp and decide to do it again. You have 36 (or 10, or 1) exposures before you have to change film: every frame matters. Film can’t see in the dark. Mostly it can’t even see in colour (reversal film is now absurdly expensive). 35mm film is always going to have grain. Making photographs using film is a festival of limitations.

It turns out that, for many people, limitations matter. If you take them away, then suddenly you can do anything. So you spend your time fiddling with the parameters of what you can do, and doing nothing as a result, rather than being forced to pull your finger out and do something.

That’s why many people make photographs with monochrome cameras, or on film. That’s why people still make movies on film. That’s why people paint or draw, rather than using some vast digital image-creation system. That’s why people write books on typewriters, or with a pen. That’s why Colin Chapman designed cars the way he did, and why more than 160 companies have made (and still do make) replicas of one of his designs.

Not everyone: not even most people. But some people. Enough people.

And it’s not enough to simply say ‘I won’t use all the features I do not want’: those features need not to be there. Using a camera which can only make monochrome images is not like using a camera which can make colour images but choosing not to. Choosing not to chimp is not like being unable to chimp. Using a film camera is not like using a digital camera and film simulation. Drawing with a pencil on paper is not like using a drawing program but choosing only to use the pencil tool, however good that tool is. Limitations have to be, well, limitations. I don’t know why this is, but they do.

Štar

And that’s why Štar exists: because it’s limited, because it does one thing. Because there is as little syntax as we could make there be. In Štar everything is an iterator³ so any expression like

(for ((<var/s> <iterator>))
  ...)

can be turned into

(multiple-value-bind (v c) <iterator>
  (for ((<var/s> (values v c)))
    ...)

And it will mean exactly the same thing, although often it will be slower⁴. And all clauses are like that. There is only one case: the form on the right-hand side of a clause is a perfectly general expression evaluated, once, in the way you think it will be. There is no magic syntax, at all. And because Štar does only one thing — iterate — it forces you to use other tools to do other things, and to make sure all these tools compose well with each other. There was once a famous operating system whose designers played the same trick.

Richard Gabriel’s famous essay, usually known as Worse is better, is celebrated for describing the difference between right thing systems and worse is better systems⁵. It is less celebrated for another distinction it made amongst the right thing systems. That distinction is between big complex systems and diamond-like jewel systems:

The big complex system scenario goes like this:

First, the right thing needs to be designed. Then its implementation needs to be designed. Finally it is implemented. Because it is the right thing, it has nearly 100% of desired functionality, and implementation simplicity was never a concern so it takes a long time to implement. It is large and complex. It requires complex tools to use properly. The last 20% takes 80% of the effort, and so the right thing takes a long time to get out, and it only runs satisfactorily on the most sophisticated hardware.

The diamond-like jewel scenario goes like this:

The right thing takes forever to design, but it is quite small at every point along the way. To implement it to run fast is either impossible or beyond the capabilities of most implementors.

The two scenarios correspond to Common Lisp and Scheme.

Štar aspires to be the diamond-like jewel of iteration frameworks. Its interface is tiny: org.tfeb.* exports six symbols, four of which could be removed with no loss of functionality⁶. But it aims to be general and to be able to turn this clean, minimal syntax into fast code: apart from the catalogue of built-in iterators, almost all the rest of the interface is to the tools that let you do this for your own iterators.

It may seem odd that Štar is written in Common Lisp, not Scheme, but CL is what we actually use and so producing tools which turn CL into the system we’d like to have is what we care about. In my case, I also remember the movement to reexpress CL as a small core language combined with libraries.

Štar is not for everybody. If you like loop you probably will hate it (but you have no taste, so we don’t care). If you are an adherent of the big complex system school you probably won’t like it either (and we respect your opinion). That’s not who Štar is for: Štar is for the people who appreciate the diamond-like jewel, who believe that limitations matter, in a deep way.

If that’s not for you, that is completely fine: not everybody is the same: not everyone wants a monochrome camera, and not everyone knew, or liked if they did know, that famous operating system⁷. Some people even like loop, apparently. But understand that it is for some people, and try to avoid sneering at them, if you can.