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> "energy must be conserved" I like this analogy! Are you thinking of “energy” as some measurement of the amount of freedom a specification gives implementors
by catnaroek 10y ago
> "energy must be conserved"
I like this analogy! Are you thinking of “energy” as some measurement of the amount of freedom a specification gives implementors to make their own design decisions? (Possibly modulo some set of changes deemed “trivial”, like renaming identifiers, reordering independent statements, etc.)
- Retra 10y agoI'm thinking of energy in the physics sense.
- catnaroek 10y agoOh, my bad. I'm certainly aware of the usefulness of the conservation of energy when you need to relate the initial and final states of a physical system solely under the action of conservative forces. But I thought you were talking about using the conservation of energy as an analogy for a strategy for tackling programming problems.
- Retra 10y agoEnergy is a linguistic construct for solving problems in abstract models of reality. That's not too different from how programming works, it's just a different set of models. Thus energy is just a special case of a more general problem solving technique which can be employed in other domains.