::scr Touchy Feely?

[Ben]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 12:25:22PM +0100, Alaric B. Snell wrote:
> 
> 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.

I have to say, I fundamentally disagree with this. A network-based 'resource reference'
is fundamentally different from an in-memory reference.

Why?

The example you use, of URIs is exactly why. Networks that have proved to be the
most useful to human communication (Internet, mobile phone, etc.) are 
highly entropic. As such, a resource reference, such as a URI, may not resolve
in a timely fashion, or at all. 

It may well be *possible* to boil everything down to fundamental abstractions,
such as set theory. The question is, to my mind, whether it is *useful* to do so.

We can boil down our abstraction of an ocean down to quantum mechanical models
of huge numbers of water molecules. It won't help us predict the tide.

In the example of resource references, just pretending that the Internet is 
non-entropic doesn't make it so. The network entropy is an important characteristic
at the scale of the model which we want to work at. If we ignore those
characteristics, we'll end up with a model, or a method which ill-fits what
we're trying to do.

Ben