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> The sorts of confusion seen here are quite common in philosophy, which has great difficulty staying grounded to facts of experience, something I think Wittgen

> The sorts of confusion seen here are quite common in philosophy, which has great difficulty staying grounded to facts of experience, something I think Wittgenstein complained of. I have to comment this, being myself a multi-class character (both computer science and philosophy graduate). The confusion seen here is quite common when somebody without a proper philosophy background is trying to hold a discourse on abstract philosophical topics. Obviously it happens often in philosophy, but often due to the outsiders (computer scientists, physicists, sociologists, artists) who believe, they have revolutionary ideas ;) Wittgenstein's (or rather Kripkenstein's, depending on the interpretation) were rather of a different, more profound, nature. In my opinion author has decent ideas but lacks skills in communication to express them properly. > because the facts of problems to be solved and, moreso, of the physical machines we use in solving them provide ground truth. It is a very optimistic view of the programming as a knowledge domain. IMHO in real life "The facts of problems" are often very blurry and prone to similar problems seen in the philosophy. I am not talking about academic toy problems, but real-life problems that have to be solved.

gingerBill 6y ago
Thank you for your comment. I mostly wrote this article as a way to get an idea out of my head rather than present it as a thesis on the topic. I am not a philosopher, but a physicist by profession, so I apologize for my lack of correct terminology to explain the topic correctly. I do enjoy reading philosophy but there is very little in terms of "philosophy of programming" in order to have a common language to talk about. I could either go full mathematical and most people will not know what I am talking about, or go full example based, but then lose the essence of the problem. What I wanted to say is that ownership semantics can only deal with "linear" problems whilst most problems are "non-linear" in nature. And that designing an entire language around this idea to ensure "safety", especially without it being "proven" in a smaller language, is/was very risky and dodgy. I also wanted to explain the mentality that many (not all) people have with regards to ownership semantics and how it regards to a certain concept of "agency", and how it is related (not the same) as the OOP mentality. P.S. The original commenter is confused about my views, and made mistakes about what I stated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999902
- ceceron 6y ago
  It's very difficult, but important thing, to express abstract things in a correct, yet still understandable way, so "kudos" for trying :) You make a good point, however: 1) > And that designing an entire language around this idea to ensure "safety", especially without it being "proven" in a smaller language, is/was very risky and dodgy It's not exactly true that ownership models weren't "proven" in different languages. Objective-C comes from the top of my head; the main memory management technique there was reference counting (with the memory pool/manual management fallback). And yes, the non-linearity of some structures was a pain in the ass, one had to be careful to not create a "strong reference loop", but... in the end it worked quite well :) The difference is that in Obj-C one had to do it manually/in runtime, Rust checks it automatically/during compilation. 2) quoting your article "Ownership semantics [...] cannot be used to express non-linear problems". This is a very strong claim. What does it mean for the problem to be non-linear? I would say, that linearity (in programming) may be ascribed to a model of the problem, not the problem itself, i.e. Traveling Salesman Problem is a problem involving a non-linear structure and still the best known solvers (e.g. Concorde) use linear models to solve it. It is true that ownership semantics has to be bypassed in the non-linear model, but the question stays whether the given problem really requires one.
ncmncm 6y ago
Sure, anything Wittgenstein ever thought could never be expressed in anything so crude as human words. Yet, here we are, muddling along. I have to agree with the author that ownership is a tail that should not be allowed to wag the language dog.

gingerBill 6y ago

Thank you for your comment. I mostly wrote this article as a way to get an idea out of my head rather than present it as a thesis on the topic. I am not a philosopher, but a physicist by profession, so I apologize for my lack of correct terminology to explain the topic correctly. I do enjoy reading philosophy but there is very little in terms of "philosophy of programming" in order to have a common language to talk about. I could either go full mathematical and most people will not know what I am talking about, or go full example based, but then lose the essence of the problem. What I wanted to say is that ownership semantics can only deal with "linear" problems whilst most problems are "non-linear" in nature. And that designing an entire language around this idea to ensure "safety", especially without it being "proven" in a smaller language, is/was very risky and dodgy. I also wanted to explain the mentality that many (not all) people have with regards to ownership semantics and how it regards to a certain concept of "agency", and how it is related (not the same) as the OOP mentality. P.S. The original commenter is confused about my views, and made mistakes about what I stated. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999902 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24999902

ceceron 6y ago
It's very difficult, but important thing, to express abstract things in a correct, yet still understandable way, so "kudos" for trying :) You make a good point, however: 1) > And that designing an entire language around this idea to ensure "safety", especially without it being "proven" in a smaller language, is/was very risky and dodgy It's not exactly true that ownership models weren't "proven" in different languages. Objective-C comes from the top of my head; the main memory management technique there was reference counting (with the memory pool/manual management fallback). And yes, the non-linearity of some structures was a pain in the ass, one had to be careful to not create a "strong reference loop", but... in the end it worked quite well :) The difference is that in Obj-C one had to do it manually/in runtime, Rust checks it automatically/during compilation. 2) quoting your article "Ownership semantics [...] cannot be used to express non-linear problems". This is a very strong claim. What does it mean for the problem to be non-linear? I would say, that linearity (in programming) may be ascribed to a model of the problem, not the problem itself, i.e. Traveling Salesman Problem is a problem involving a non-linear structure and still the best known solvers (e.g. Concorde) use linear models to solve it. It is true that ownership semantics has to be bypassed in the non-linear model, but the question stays whether the given problem really requires one.

ncmncm 6y ago

Sure, anything Wittgenstein ever thought could never be expressed in anything so crude as human words. Yet, here we are, muddling along. I have to agree with the author that ownership is a tail that should not be allowed to wag the language dog.