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It's interesting that despite Hofstadter having negative interest in computing himself, he inspired so many people in the field.
by AQuantized 6y ago
It's interesting that despite Hofstadter having negative interest in computing himself, he inspired so many people in the field.
- braythwayt 6y agoI was aware of this many years ago. To this day, I don't actually consider myself that interested in computing for its own sake. Or mathematics, for that matter. To me, the most interesting thing about programming is what it teaches us about our own minds. It's a little like being an archeologist and finding collections of pottery, houses, &c. but no people. You make deductions about how they lived from their tools. In our case, we have only a limited ability to directly examine the workings of our brains, but a wealth of ways to study the things we do with our brains, including the making of tools for our brains to use. Programming is one of those tools, and its study is indirectly the study of us. At the end of the day, it's all just 1s and 0s, but when we argue about whether the Visitor Pattern addresses the Expression problem, and so forth, we're indirectly exploring the (metaphorical) shape of our brains. I have just said in several paragraphs what Michael Fellows said in one sentence: "Computer science is not about machines, in the same way that astronomy is not about telescopes." They may have been thinking about mathematics, but I am thinking about people.