FTA: > But it is interesting how even extremely practical twenty-first century programming can get drawn into millennia old philosophical controversies, intent

FTA: > But it is interesting how even extremely practical twenty-first century programming can get drawn into millennia old philosophical controversies, intentionally or not. This turns out to happen a lot. I can't find the source right now, but there was a good essay I read ages ago about how questions that are abstract and hand-waveable in day-to-day life become cornerstones of architecture rapidly in computer science and software engineering. The cow in the field epistemological puzzle [http://www.philosophical-investigations.org/2021/09/the-cow-in-field-and-riddle-of-what-do.html http://www.philosophical-investigations.org/2021/09/the-cow-...] maps directly to the nature of proving code is "correct" by testing (and any practicing coder has a story of false-positive or false-negative tests, as well as times they identified one of those by a "gut check" telling them "That result... doesn't feel right; I should investigate further"). Similarly, the philosophical question of "sameness" or "equality" ends up concretized over and over again in language design; there's a reason languages end up with so many ways to say 'equals', and it's because the underlying question of what it means for two things to be the same thing is legitimately philosophically complicated!