Positivist Programming

[Steve Klabnik]

http://plover.net/~bonds/positivism.html

[David Nolen]

Nice post though woefully lacking in citations as far as declarative languages go - there's hardly anything about SAT/SMT solvers, Constraint Logic Programming, Constraint Handling Rules, etc. etc.

Even so I mostly agree with the sentiment - all this declarative stuff in the end gets wired together with something less specialized. If anything I'm constantly wishing software development was *more* Post Modern. We're still lumbering out of Java's Victorian age.

David

On Thu, Aug 8, 2013 at 1:48 PM, Steve Klabnik <st...@steveklabnik.com> wrote:

http://plover.net/~bonds/positivism.html

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[Dave Sims]

I do not have the time to fully respond to or thank you enough for this essay Steve. This is a much, much better summation of pretty much everything I think about Positivism, Popper, the analytic foundations of CS. There are sections that made me laugh out loud from recognition.

So, it seems we have a profound tension in CS, as in philosophy itself. The quasi-Aristotelian influence of Alexander and the GOF, which emphasizes wholes, patterns (forms?), and the Positivist influence which emphasizes mathematical correctness, algorithms, reduction of problems to their smallest components. There are clearly problems with both approaches, which is why both philosophically and with regards to coding I've gravitated towards the process-oriented philosophers: Bergson, Whitehead, Husserl. (Husserl not really a process guy, but he has much to say here and has much in common with Bergson.)

I'd say the great 19th Century thinkers, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky and Nietzsche all have indirect implications here as well, but it's a lot harder to map onto CS concerns -- but I think it can be done.

Really, really fascinating stuff, thanks so much Steve! Great find!

Dave

[Nate West]

This is super fascinating... but I just can't get my mind off the picture that is most definitely not Bertrand Russel.

-- Nate West --
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[Edd Dumbill]

Neither are any of the pictures, check out the comments for explanation. It is instead the most wonderful Benedict Cumberbatch, though there is a certain resemblance.

+1 (415) 692 1767 • http://about.me/edd

[Dave Sims]

Note that the picture for Terry Winograd is Eric Braeden, the actor who played the lead computer scientist in Colossus, a movie about a supercomputer that acquires intelligence and takes over the world.

[Vassilis Rizopoulos]

Well, this was enjoyable reading, when not exactly unbiased (not that i disagree, but then I'm biased myself) and free of references. 

Which begs the question, how to actually define unbiased without falling into the positivist trap that led to narrow exploitable absolutes.

That line about procedural programming's prostration to profit is for me positivism's incursion: reducing our multi-faceted, multiple variable, chaotic system of a world into a handful of scalar measures (i.e. profit *increase* percentage - one of the most ridiculous concepts ever to exist) in an effort to quantify in situ of understanding.

V.-