On Thu, Mar 29, 2012 at 9:44 AM, Albert van der Horst <alb...@spenarnc.xs4all.nl> wrote: > In article <mailman.896.1332440814.3037.python-l...@python.org>, > Nathan Rice <nathan.alexander.r...@gmail.com> wrote: >>> >>> http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000018.html >> >>I read that article a long time ago, it was bullshit then, it is >>bullshit now. The only thing he gets right is that the Shannon >>information of a uniquely specified program is proportional to the >>code that would be required to generate it. Never mind that if a > > Thank you for drawing my attention to that article. > It attacks the humbug software architects. > Are you one of them? > I really liked that article.
I read the first paragraph, remembered that I had read it previously and stopped. I accidentally remembered something from another Joel article as being part of that article (read it at http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/12/03.html). I don't really have anything to say on Joel's opinions about why people can or should code, their his and he is entitled to them. I feel they are overly reductionist (this isn't a black/white thing) and have a bit of luddite character to them. I will bet you everything I own the only reason Joel is alive today because of some mathematical abstraction he would be all too happy to discount as meaningless (because, to him, it is). Of course, I will give Joel one point: too many things related to programming are 100% hype, without any real substance; if his article had been about bullshit software hype and he hadn't fired the broadsides at the very notion of abstraction, I wouldn't have anything to say. Anyhow, if you "ugh rock good caveman smash gazelle put in mouth make stomach pain go away" meaning, here it is: Programs are knowledge. The reverse is not true, because programming is an infantile area of human creation, mere feet from the primordial tide pool from whence it spawned. We have a very good example of what a close to optimal outcome is: human beings - programs that write themselves, all knowledge forming programs, strong general artificial intelligence. When all knowledge is also programs, we will have successfully freed ourselves from necessary intellectual drudgery (the unnecessary kind will still exist). We will be able to tell computers what we want on our terms, and they will go and do it, checking in with us from time to time if they aren't sure what we really meant in the given context. If we have developed advanced robotics, we will simultaneously be freed from most manual labor. The only thing left for Joel to do will be to lounge about, being "creative" while eating mangos that were picked, packed, shipped and unloaded by robots, ordered by his computer assistant because it knows that he likes them, then delivered, prepared and served by more robots. The roadblocks in the path include the ability to deal with uncertainty, understand natural languages and the higher order characteristics of information. Baby steps to deal with these roadblocks are to explicitly forbid uncertainty, simplify the language used, and explicitly state higher order properties of information. The natural evolution of the process is to find ways to deal with ambiguity, correctly parse more complex language and automatically deduce higher order characteristics of information. Clearly, human intelligence demonstrates that this is not an impossible pipe dream. You may not be interested in working towards making this a reality, but I can pretty much guarantee on the scale of human achievement, it is near the top. -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
