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The end goal of the web browser in which I'm typing this is not to represent some piece of abstract logic, but to drive the physical hardware: to change the col
by millstone 13y ago
The end goal of the web browser in which I'm typing this is not to represent some piece of abstract logic, but to drive the physical hardware: to change the color of pixels on my screen, to sense and react to my input. Attempt to distill it to some piece of logic or mathematics, and you end up with something useless, an absurdity.
The original task was "apply a seasonal rebate to our products," but none of the programs actually accomplished this feat. They contained some logic which might be useful in such a program, but none of them applied anything. Logic on its own is sterile.
- theaeolist 13y agoI thought the end goal is to display the page. I would say that "to change the color of pixels on my screen, to sense and react to my input" is a means to an end, not "the end goal".
- Tyr42 13y agoThis was a really neat discussion to watch. Devotional vs Observational semantics. When I'm in my algorithms class and we have a code snippet to find a minimum spanning tree, we don't even have some machine to compile it down to, but because we have denoted some meaning to bit of the program, we can even prove that the meaning of the entire program is to output the MST.
- andrewflnr 13y agoChanging pixels on the screen (usually?) only matters because it let's us get at the results of the program. Even if the program is a video decoder + video, I don't care about pixels, I care about the picture. Pixels are just more implementation details.