Dangerous ground...

Edward G Nilges — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 21:09:09 -0800

By pointing out that traditional mathematical praxis is just as material (in using AB to mean A * B) I am on dangerous terrain.

Scientists, especially scientific Fundamentalists committed to Carnap's view that "in science there are no depths", who deny knowledge outside of science, can be very savage towards English professors and French *flaneurs* who apply critical theory to science, and one clown (Sokal) went so far as to commit academic fraud, and to submit an article to a critical theory journal which turned out to be a spoof, of a theorist talking about science...of which, a closer reading of Sokal's article showed, the spoofed *auteur* knew jack.

My technical background at best only a leather jerkin on this bloody field and not the armor a true scientist would have were he to express sympathy for the very idea of Knowledge outside of Science, or depths within and without.

Nonetheless I shall fire my arrow in the air as at Agincourt.

What Derrida means by Platonism is actually a shuttling between a veridical Platonic committment, in which pure Ideas are exogenous to social struggle and can be used, as such, to resolve difference, and a necessary acknowledgement that the Ideas can only be spoken of without the very act of speaking making them impure.

Wow, wash my mouth out with soap after that one: but *stare decisis* and let it stand.

For the SAME reason no one computer scientist can invent The Single Ideal Programming Language, the Platonic Idea is no longer an Idea as soon as it falls to earth, and, it falls to earth once spoken of.

In fact, Plato hisself may have known this: recent research (cf. The Columbia History of Western Philosophy) indicates that he may have been out of his skull at times: Symposium apparently means "boy's night out".

Plato would shudder at the idea of computer science, for it was a confusion between the work of the Artisan class and that of the Guardian class.

The word "square" is not the Square, of course. But the most perfect digital image of the Square is not the Square either. This is because it is composed of lines which on simple enough examination (zooming them in a simple bitmap editor) are seen themselves to be squares and to have (violating the Idea of the Line) dimension themselves.

Derrida started with applying his peculiar way of thinking to Husserl and the origins of geometry and I think this was his first discovery that always and everywhere except maybe here in China (for Derrida was always careful, to qualify his observations, as observations of the West), we never cash out our ideas as they shuttle between tokens and types.

Computer science is of interest insofar as it brings matters to a head, as a form of class war: for in computer science, the Guardians have to ask the Artisans to fashion the Idea.

The guy at Sun would with equiprobability reply to my native woodnotes wild with interest or scorn. The scorn would be based on my systematic refusal to treat precomputer mathematical notation as exogenous.

Many users want the computer to return them to a fancied state of ideal transparency that existed BEFORE computers. For example, Excel replaces the Cobol programs I wrote for Baxter Labs in the 1970s with a "sheet of magic paper" in which the user can enter formulae, and, this is a Good Thing.

But reading aesthetics for me brings up a problem. To enjoy a movie we have to put ourselves, says Aristotle (who didn't watch DVDs but did go to the theater), into a willing state of disbelief.

To use Excel without a nervous breakdown, the naive or non "computer literate" (yucky word, but let it pass) user has to likewise accept that a virtual show is being put on for her and that the various puppets and sprites (like that horrible little animated character) have her best intentions at heart...which they DO NOT.

There is a reason why a live play seems more "morally serious" than a movie: there is a reason why the late Arthur Miller didn't like to write for the screen.

For human people, having people on the stage enact a fiction can move them to tears seldom seen in the movie palace.

In other words, there is to me an element of bad faith (which cannot be eliminated, need not be eliminated, but should be acknowledged) in trying to return the mathematician to a fancied ideal state in which he could write in two dimensions, where AB meant A*B, etc.

The bad faith produces terribly useful tools when, and only when, a Real Programmer gets down to work. This in fact is the origin of Mathematica. Mathematica has its moments of real brilliance precisely because Steve Wolfram avoided the procedural nonsense of Big Science, and buried himself in a cornfield, ignoring other work. Furthermore, he could code.

But some code-free effort to merely "design" ideality is a good example of a failure in the making.

I am being terribly hard on Mr. Steele. But my own (limited) experience with supercomputing, for which Guy Steele is developing Fortress, is that REAL supercomputer programmers have always used Fortran and will do so until the end of time. The best of them know all about Fortran's limitations and use workarounds. But in fact, because of Fortran's limitations and because the good not only is the enemy of the best, the good hates the best's guts (especially in programming) many Fortran programs for supercomputers are quite buggy...possibly an explanation of why people in the States don't realize what is common knowledge in Hong Kong and Australia: global warming is a fact and not a theory.

Well, that was another can of worms...

Guy Steele's rethink of programming languages for Sun

Edward G Nilges — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 19:09:10 -0800

http://www.sun.com/presents/minds/2005-0302/

Guy wants programming languages for supercomputers to "look like math". In particular Guy mentions the asterisk which today means multiply and claims that it is an artifact of the limitations of early systems

Well, it is, and that is a Good Thing. The despised and lowly keypunch brought to mathematical attention the fact that we have distinct symbols, from a set of characters ([+-/]) that is DISJOINT from the characters that can start a NAME, for everything but multiplication.

developer.* Blogs - Guy Steele's rethink of programming languages for Sun - Comments

Dangerous ground...

Guy Steele's rethink of programming languages for Sun