developer.* Blogs - Post-structuralist programming? - Comments

Piaget

Edward G Nilges — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 16:20:03 -0800

Must confess to unfamiliarity with his work in detail, boss. The post-structuralists were, I think, more pessimistic about "meaning" without being nihilistic, and that's why in the 1980s I was drawn to their work as applicable to data processing.

It seemed to me to be always the case that at some scale, data processing systems would become post-structuralist in that their users would use multiple meanings to confuse the situation.

For example, some guys in business use and when they mean or, as in "the requirements include both owning and renting".

Meaning and Objects

RGeiger — Mon, 07 Mar 2005 05:55:55 -0800

Piaget had some interesting ideas on the development of meaning, and the attachment of meaning to symbols like words "Eiffel Tower." With dictionary in hand, I read some of his work some years ago, and found it quite fascinating.

Based on what I read, your basic programming objects would start out dumb as a stump, and you'd have to keep on presenting them with their meaning and, suddenly, over time, they would grok their interfaces and methods, which were suddenly inherited from other newly understood objects. The richness of object interfaces and their abilities would grow over time as more and more object interfaces and methods defined themselves withing the context of the applications life.

That would make for some interesting QA test plans!

Post-structuralist programming?

Edward G Nilges — Sat, 05 Mar 2005 23:25:23 -0800

In saying that structuralist and post-structuralist developments in French theory might apply to programming, I am not trying to be fashionable.

Structuralism originated in Ferdinand de Sausurre's Course of General Linguistics in 1916, in which he made the case that language isn't a system of objects that magically "mean" other objects: there is no necessary connection between the symbol "Eiffel Tower" and that enormous thing in Paris.

Instead, for de Saussure, we call it a "tower" to make sure our listener doesn't think we're talking about a church, and we add the qualifier "Eiffel" to make sure that the listener doesn't think we're talking about some other tower.