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I agree with that and therefore think immutable is not a useful abstraction as it does not approximate how things appear to be in what we perceive as real.
by xchaotic 7y ago
I agree with that and therefore think immutable is not a useful abstraction as it does not approximate how things appear to be in what we perceive as real.
- Barrin92 7y agoThere are many domains where immutability makes intuitive sense. Accounting and bookkeeping for example, which is a huge domain within software development. A Git history is essentially a model of the world as a history of immutable states, and what we care about is the transition from one state to the next and its difference, as well as an accurate representation of each past state. But one name or ID is only ever associated with one state. It would be really horrible practise if accountants or version control systems would mutate state and overwrite history. Another domain where immutability is useful for this reason is concurrency, where it avoids a lot of conflict.
- sk5t 7y agoIsn't that just a function of how you choose to perceive? For example, the water in a river, and our skin cells are constantly replacing themselves, even though it might not seem that way--what I mean is, maybe one's epithelium is more like an immutable structure, each time displacing the one that came before. Or consider atoms, which sort of have immutability as a core concept.