::scr Touchy Feely?

[Alaric B. Snell]

On Wednesday 23 October 2002 12:13, Simon Wistow wrote:

> 1. Scientists
> Lose touch with reality and don't remember the gritty soily joys of
> getting down and hacking at code. Produce droppings which smell of
> Academic Languages which, whilst technically excellent have little or no
> practical value.

IMHO, this prevalant attitude is part of where computing's gone wrong. It's 
why people use languages like C or Perl or Java or COBOL when they could be 
chucking around abstractions in the lambda calculus, which is a far less 
error prone activity (and for those of you who say that's harder - it's just 
*different*; you're not used to it; once you get the hang it's arguably 
easier)

A lot of compsci is about finding fundamental abstractions. We have 
java.util.Collection classes, arrays, hashes, maps, tuples, lists, SQL 
databases, filesystems, and whatnot when really they all just boil down to 
variants on set theory! If people stepped back from the differences and saw 
that it's all just sets then these things would logically converge more, 
eventually sharing their interfaces so you wouldn't need a different mental 
model for each of these things.

Likewise locating resources on a network; it's nothing more than a 
*reference*, like a pointer in C. URIs are, by chance, happening to bring 
this together more but they're still distinct to your in-memory references to 
objects.

What computer science deliberately ignores, much of the time, is stuff like 
commercial concerns; "if it's not POSIX compliant it'll never work". So you 
do tend to get some concepts which are great but won't fit into what we 
already have so get ignore. But I see that as a failing of the computer 
industry, which has kind of bricked itself into a hole with backwards 
compatability, rather than of the academics :-)

Thus my occasional sporadic work on Argon, deliberately designing computer 
software from the ground up based entirely on academic concerns rather than 
political ones:

http://www.argon.org.uk/

> Simon

ABS

-- 
A city is like a large, complex, rabbit
 - ARP