> The problem with this line of thinking is that 1) it's all relative anyway, and 2) The notion of "ground" is completely different depending on which perspecti

> The problem with this line of thinking is that 1) it's all relative anyway, and 2) The notion of "ground" is completely different depending on which perspective you have. But if all is relative and depends on your PoV that implies that there isn't actually a problem here, right? :-P I don't think there is anything wrong with "building up the model from first mathematical principles" as you wrote, it just wasn't what i personally had in mind with the "from the ground up" part. And FWIW i'm not that stuck up on the "vim and C" aspect, i used those as an example that i expected most would understand and leave little room for misinterpretation in what you'd have to work with (i.e. very very little) and have to implement yourself (pretty much everything) - personally i'd consider it from "the ground up" even if it was in C#, D, Java, JavaScript or even Python, as long as the implementation was done in a way that didn't rely on 3rd party libraries so that whatever is implemented in, say, Java could also be implementable in C#, D, JavaScript or Python with just whatever is available out of the box in those languages or even C, if one doesn't mind writing the extra bookkeeping functionality themselves.