5 ms·

Any chance you could expand upon this? I'd be interested to read more about this (and other) parallel/s.

• vog 16y ago
  On of the biggest parallels might be: Most software is not written to be understood by anyone except the author.
  • gbog 16y ago
    There is a truth behind this joke. Reading the many excited comments about parallels between philosophy and coding makes me think that another view could be needed to balance this. Western philosophy was bent toward logic, and that may be the reason we see some relations with coding, which is really related to logic. But other philosophies do not focus on logic and thus do not parralel so much with coding, or at least not the same way. I think about Chinese philosophy, which I know a bit more. Its main focus being how to help humans living together, i.e. how to civilize humans (and "is it possible?"), the above parallels vanish away, more or less. Still some parralels can be drawn. A taoist coder would let things happen, let the code find its way spontaneously toward the result, like the knife of the butcher must find its way into the meat. Taoism applied to code would produce independant pieces of software that live by itself and may have no intended usage (e.g. the yes command in coreutils). A confucean coder would always follow the standards (the rites), always consider his production in context of a bigger picture, would produce a software that is very strict for himself and forgiving for others, would write programs tending to improve the life of others. It has been said that wise Chinese of the old time where confucean the day and taoist the night. While this is actually because taoism is related with sex, the parallel could be that a good hacker/coder should be confucean at his day work, and taoist for personal projects. None of them would thing in "ontology", though, because this is something, like the idea of God, that has no deep meaning in Chinese ancient philosophies. They would not debate too much on languages and the meaning of words, they would just use them as fit. They would use OOP as a tool, when it helps writing better code (when one need to glue state and actions together). Do I contradict myself? I said "no parallels" and then "there are some parallels". But the ones I draw just apply to any activity of any human being, not just coding.
    • russellperry 16y ago
      There's some Western philosophical precedents for this tack as well. Heraclitus comes to mind, later Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. William of Occam I suppose would never allow 'classes' at all, only radically individual one-off objects. Two modern philosophers that I think may provide a better conceptual foundation for a less reified/Platonic/Aristotelian/Formalist view would be Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson, both of whom described the ingression or duration of individual substances into other substances. Rather than hard borders (interfaces?) that interact in static and unchangeable ways, substances actually change each other at these borders. Bergson in particular I think would be interesting at many levels of the SDLC -- from emergent design (he advocated an 'emergent' fingertip-feel, intuitive approach to Science) to the nature of objects and hierachies. What about the notion that an interface can change/morph according to the client that consumes it? This would move towards a more Heraclitean/Whiteheadean/Bergsonian paradigm.
• msluyter 16y ago
  I think this is a reference to Plato's Theory of Forms, in which every object we see partakes of some idealized (static, eternal, and real) form (ie, is an instantiation of a class). Except... in Plato's theory, everything is a somewhat corrupted or imperfect image of its form. The theory has a lot of problems (the third man problem, for example). See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms
  • lukev 16y ago
    Well, yes. There's various interpretations of what kind of existence Plato thought the Forms actually had - whether he believed in a literal "realm of the Forms" or not. And while you'd be hard pressed to find someone who actually subscribes to the theory of Forms these days, there are a lot of things in, for example, the philosophy of Mathematics that smell a lot like it. I think the idea of Forms is still quite valuable Aristotle takes kind of the opposite tack - he is also very focused on building ontologies and taxonomies, but he views them as constructions of the intellect imposed upon their subjects, rather than being the most fundamental reality of the subject prior to its actual being. It's pretty much the same distinction ragenwald talks about in the OP. As for the general isomorphism between metaphysics and philosophy, you can find it almost everywhere, depending how hard you want to look (and how far you want to stretch your metaphors...). But metaphysics is largely concerned with the types of things and entities in the world, and how they can possibly interact. If you think of the "software space" as its own universe, it's pretty easy to draw parallels. Forms and Categories are low hanging fruits, obviously, but a few other parallels spring to mind: - Kant's seperation between Phenomena and Noumena relates to the difference between interface and implementation, as well as to the concept of abstractions in general. - How a software component's "epistemology" (how it "knows" about other components in the system) works can be compared to different philosophers - do they operate on a consistently readable shared state (an empirical world?) or do they request information from a central broker service (God brokers sense impressions, ala Berkeley?) - Berkeley's idea of direct impressions only in the mind has some relationship to the concept of laziness. - etc. I'll try to think up some more and post them later. It's less that you can write a paper on the startling isomorphism between theories, and more that it's really easy to use software metaphors to describe philosophy and vice versa (though software tends to be much more concrete, obviously).