4 ms·

> Programming languages have hardly shown one scintilla of difference from the designs made in the first few years of computing. All significant programming lan

> Programming languages have hardly shown one scintilla of difference from the designs made in the first few years of computing. All significant programming languages are expressively, conceptually, and aesthetically equivalent to Fortran and assembly language. There's been a hidden (or perhaps not so hidden) war between the from first principles approach people and the hackers since we started writing software. The from first principles approach people want to treat software as a mathematical discipline, and prove software correctness. They want to tackle problems from the top down, and rely heavily on abstraction. The family of Lisp and ML languages follow this approach. The hacker approach is to iterate until something works. This is the prevailing method. It treats writing software as a craft or trade over a scientific discipline. Correctness is impossible to reason about, but it's quick, dirty, and gets the job done. In the early days, from first principles lost because it was slow and time consuming. Errors in correctness were less detrimental, the world had yet to become so reliant on software. Quick and dirty meant companies could hire from a broader pool of people than just trained computer scientists. It made software a commodity. Now we're entering into a crossing, where the from first principles approach has narrowed the gap of efficiency, and quick and dirty is starting to cost us fortunes. Bugs are now a matter of national security, or cause companies to betray the privacy of billions of people. Our languages do need to evolve to start looking at problems from a from first principles approach. Correctness is now something we can have alongside speed, and correctness has become more important than ever. This is why I'm bullish on Rust, a language designed from a from first principles perspective, but as efficient as C++. But I think we have stop excepting the lowest common denominator languages. We have to wean ourselves off easy languages that stop us from reasoning about the correctness of our programs. It's not going to be easy, but the weekly breaches of our privacy and the ongoing cyberwarfare between nation states will push us in the right direction eventually.

mpweiher 8y ago
> iterate until something works... craft or trade over a scientific discipline. Huh? Science is the quintessence of iterating "until something works", i.e. until you have a theory that appears to fit the observations, until it doesn't, and then you iterate again to find a new theory. Science is exactly the turning away from a "first principles" approach, and only when we did turn away from that "first principles" approach did first the scientific and then the industrial revolution take off. And of course in Software, the "first principles" approach was what we successfully overcame with agile approaches that stress quick feedback loops, and of course the same thing happened in manufacturing and other disciplines as well.
- ilovecaching 8y ago
  > Huh? Science is the quintessence of iterating "until something works" It is not enough in science to prove that something works, you must also prove that it is correct. That is why in mathematics, even though we believe something to be true through intuition, it is still simply conjecture until we have a rigorous proof. We may even call it a theory if we can observe it with a high degree of certainty. Science is effective because we pay attention to correctness at every level, slowly building understanding in an iterative fashion. The only assumptions we make are at the level of axioms. The current state of programming makes no claims about the overall correctness of a program. We may write tests about various subsystems, and increase our chances that a system will behave as we expect, but a rigorous proof of correctness, or even something close to a proof of correctness, is still a fantasy. > Science is exactly the turning away from a "first principles" approach Science is a from first principles approach. Invention is not necessarily scientific. > And of course in Software, the "first principles" approach was what we successfully overcame with agile approaches that stress quick feedback loops Agile has nothing to do with software correctness. It's a methodology for gathering and executing on requirements and constraints. What I'm talking about is ensuring a program behaves in a way we can reason about mathmatically.
  - mpweiher 8y ago
    Math ≠ Science. In fact, it is questionable whether math even is a science. "There is disagreement,[16][17] however, on whether the formal sciences [these include mathematics] actually constitute a science as they do not rely on empirical evidence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science Science can never, ever "prove" anything correct, all scientific knowledge is provisional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_rationalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_rationalism "Thus we are led to ask: What is a proof? Heuristically, a proof is a rhetorical device for convincing someone else that a mathematical statement is true or valid." https://www.math.wustl.edu/~sk/eolss.pdf https://www.math.wustl.edu/~sk/eolss.pdf
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Not to mention, Lisp family, really, top-down, prove correctness, first principles? This is a family of the most flexible languages, the very best tools for iterative, bottom-up, experimental development.

mpweiher 8y ago

> iterate until something works... craft or trade over a scientific discipline. Huh? Science is the quintessence of iterating "until something works", i.e. until you have a theory that appears to fit the observations, until it doesn't, and then you iterate again to find a new theory. Science is exactly the turning away from a "first principles" approach, and only when we did turn away from that "first principles" approach did first the scientific and then the industrial revolution take off. And of course in Software, the "first principles" approach was what we successfully overcame with agile approaches that stress quick feedback loops, and of course the same thing happened in manufacturing and other disciplines as well.

ilovecaching 8y ago
> Huh? Science is the quintessence of iterating "until something works" It is not enough in science to prove that something works, you must also prove that it is correct. That is why in mathematics, even though we believe something to be true through intuition, it is still simply conjecture until we have a rigorous proof. We may even call it a theory if we can observe it with a high degree of certainty. Science is effective because we pay attention to correctness at every level, slowly building understanding in an iterative fashion. The only assumptions we make are at the level of axioms. The current state of programming makes no claims about the overall correctness of a program. We may write tests about various subsystems, and increase our chances that a system will behave as we expect, but a rigorous proof of correctness, or even something close to a proof of correctness, is still a fantasy. > Science is exactly the turning away from a "first principles" approach Science is a from first principles approach. Invention is not necessarily scientific. > And of course in Software, the "first principles" approach was what we successfully overcame with agile approaches that stress quick feedback loops Agile has nothing to do with software correctness. It's a methodology for gathering and executing on requirements and constraints. What I'm talking about is ensuring a program behaves in a way we can reason about mathmatically.
- mpweiher 8y ago
  Math ≠ Science. In fact, it is questionable whether math even is a science. "There is disagreement,[16][17] however, on whether the formal sciences [these include mathematics] actually constitute a science as they do not rely on empirical evidence." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science Science can never, ever "prove" anything correct, all scientific knowledge is provisional. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_rationalism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_rationalism "Thus we are led to ask: What is a proof? Heuristically, a proof is a rhetorical device for convincing someone else that a mathematical statement is true or valid." https://www.math.wustl.edu/~sk/eolss.pdf https://www.math.wustl.edu/~sk/eolss.pdf
TeMPOraL 8y ago
Not to mention, Lisp family, really, top-down, prove correctness, first principles? This is a family of the most flexible languages, the very best tools for iterative, bottom-up, experimental development.