HXA7241

"Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." ~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

It has been a while since I read it, but I had always imagined the "Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus" as a large function in which you input syntactically-correct sentences and it returns the truth-value, which can then be used to determine the clarity of the "picture" (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tractatus_Logico-Philosophicus#The_Picture_Theory). Truly fascinating. I should re-read it sometime. I feel like it has some parallels with the work I am doing in my "Design of Programming Languages" course.

If you have a background in analytic philosophy, you may find this of interest: http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20110219T1113Z.html [Wittgenstein for Programmers]

edit: well I'll be, hxa7241 himself just posted the link. Great minds think alike perhaps? ;)

I'd argue that every programmer interested in language design needs to read Wittgenstein. His later work in ethics and epistemology (that the article recommends, Philosophical Investigations) is hit or miss, but his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, which deals with the nature of language as it relates to our ability to think and formulate ideas, is undeniable. He essentially builds a framework for breaking reality down into logically composable components which can be reasoned over in their own right, regardless of semantics.

See this article which was posted here a few years ago: Wittgenstien for Programmers http://www.hxa.name/notes/note-hxa7241-20110219T1113Z.html

Excellent taste in tinkering, but ... ahem ... aren't those a tad on the infrastructure side ? ("Is this the right room for an argument ?", or are you setting a subtle trap ? ;-)

I don't doubt that most of the (non-idle, non-phone/TV/etc.) CPU cycles in the world are probably being burned by executing code written in C/C++. But the stuff in my shopping bag probably also did better than 90% of its movement by truck/train/ship.

P.S. Mark Dufour's ShedSkin may have you covered for 100x of that 200x speed hit you mentioned in another thread: http://www.hxa.name/minilight/#comparison is instructive (one small case, restricted, etc. Void where prohibited by law).