Thank’s for the reference!
Martin Sustrik
Karma: 909
Type-safeness in Shell
Hull: An alternative to shell that I’ll never have time to implement
AFAIU, your argument is that a super-human intelligence can look at the program as a whole, be aware that both hind legs need to be the same length and can modify the code at both places to satisfy the constraint.
While imaginable, in the real world I don’t see this happening except for toy examples (say, an academic exercise of writing a toy sorting algorithm). Actual software projects are big and modified by many actors, each with little understanding of the whole. Natural selection is performed by a, from human point of view, completely mindless entity. Same for genetic algorithms and, possibly, ML.
The point I was trying to make that in such a piecemal, uninformed development, some patters may emerge that are, in a way, independent of the type of the development process (human-driven, evolution, etc.)
On the Nature of Programming Languages
A skin-in-the-game vote multiplier based on age
There are two opposing ways to think about it.
You can either, as you do, say that your skin-in-the-game is proportional to the amount of time you have in front of you. From that perspective it seems fair that children should have biggest say in shaping long-term policies.
Or you can say that your skin-in-the-game factor is proprotional to how much you’ve already invested in the status quo. If you’ve spent 50 years working towards a goal it seems unfair that a 16-year old know-nothing should be able, on a whim, to throw all of that away.
The Politics of Age (the Young vs. the Old)
Muqaata’a by Fahad Himsi (I.)
Programmatic Code Generation: Composability
Lydian song
Tiles: Report on Programmatic Code Generation
Graceful Shutdown
Structured Concurrency Cross-language Forum
Confessions of an Abstraction Hater
Funny that I had exactly the same thought when writing the comment above: Isn’t that just OCD? But if you look at concrete examples, it doesn’t feel like that. Einstein? Incapable of accepting easy solutions? Yes. OCD? Probably not. Even van Gogh, despite the host of psychological problems, probably haven’t had OCD.
Announcement: A talk about structured concurrency at FOSDEM
I think it has to do with intellectual honesty. There’s a lot of highly intelligent people who are willing to accept the status quo, even if they are aware that it’s broken, and just move on with their life. Then there are some people who are just psychologically incapable of such “ignore it and move on” attitude. Interestingly, this applies across broad spectrum of disciplines.
Science: A former kind of person does all the steps from a scientific method textbook and move on with their research. The latter kind of person won’t be able to avoid thinking about why the method is as it is, whether its rationale matches their experiment, whether there are special circumstances that make the method inadequate and so on.
Engineering: The former type of person would just take existing tools and practices, glue them together and get a viable product. The latter kind of person will agonize over corner cases, whether there’s a fundamentally different way of doing the same thing, whether the design is internally consistent and so on.
Arts: The former type of person is a mannerist. They use the existing expressive repertoire of their time and use it to create viable art. The latter kind of person cannot avoid seeing the problems with the current style, trying different ways of addressing them, getting back to basics and so on. Think van Gogh, for example.
Does that matter that much? The life had to originate somewhere and it, presumably, must have faced the same coordination problems along the way.
Yes, I own the book. However, I am not a biologist, so writing about the topic is hard for me. By focusing fully on the original book I have a reliable lead. If I had to compile from multiple sources, it would be much easier for me to go astray.
Anyway, if you’d like to write about the new developments, I would love to link that from this article.
“On the Existence of Powerful Natural Languages”: Have you read Umberto Eco’s “The Search for the Perfect Language”? It’s a pretty good history of the past efforts to create powerful artificial languages, from Raymon Lull to John Wilkins etc.