[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: > Perhaps this is one reason why programmers are so passionate, and even > religious, about their programming tools; because they intuitively > sense that we are dealing with ideas that, however crudely, mirror > eternal realities of immense significance.
While I don't associate any spiritual significance with programming, I do think that the choices we've made in the field of programming reflect deeply upon human cognition. A modern computer is a thoroughly abstract mathematical machine, so programmers can choose almost any abstraction to solve a problem. But it turns out that some abstractions fit our minds better than others, so programmers usually apply a small set of abstractions many times. So if we could categorize and chart the space of all programming abstractions that we have found most useful, we might learn a little about how our minds work. The research could be valuable for AI. Shane -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
