3 ms·
The Houynhnms, from Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels", were a race of intelligent horses, whose entire society was based solely on reason. I imagine the goa
by stepvhen 10y ago
The Houynhnms, from Jonathan Swift's "Gulliver's Travels", were a race of intelligent horses, whose entire society was based solely on reason. I imagine the goal here is to propose coldly reasonable concepts in computing. (And I offer this explanation because the website itself, including the about section, is done in a literary style, making it difficult to quickly scan and summarize for those of us who haven't read or don't remember Gulliver's Travels when the book was assigned in high school)
- stan_rogers 10y ago...or at least to get away from the techniques of the Yahoo.
- spb 10y agoI think the point is not so much to present a purely logical viewpoint as it is to present a culturally removed viewpoint that still comprehends engineering fundamentals, since any hypothetical human on Earth with such a comprehension would have to be already familiar with the status quo. See, for instance, the first example, where the C programming environment is presented as "simple", but then acknowledged to be actually enormously complex, due to the many specific platform assumptions presupposing it (such as the abstraction of files and directories, which every human developer today comprehends as practically a law of nature).