vlion - a pursuit of the ineffable

For the past few years, I've had the growing idea that programming software necessarily entails the formation of a philosophy of thinking. A metaphysics of ideas, if you will. This idea particularly began to coalesce after I took two courses in digital design. Digital design is about how to build processors.

The typical processor is what's called a finite state machine. A finite state machine can only deal with a highly limited set of problems (limited in the sense of ability to solve it).

However, on the processor, a universal Turing machine can run, which is exactly the laws of mathematics.

This spawns an interesting disconnect between hardware and software engineering design processes, by the way.

What is a program? It's more than bytes. It's more than an algorithm. It's more than an algorithm + data, I think. I wax mystical about it, and fuzzy-headed. I'm still thinking about the concept.

Coffeeshop closing, gotta run.

and other coffeeshop found (hiding from the heat today!).

Programmers talk about software expecting input (as if it's a person). Or robust software (as if it can have health). It's judged by being hard or easy to change . Different languages produce different kinds of software. It's endemic to the way things work. A statically typed language forces different design, different ways of developing, than a dynamically typed language.

Look, when I play music from a sheet on my bass, it's kind of the same thing. There's an Idea, and there's the Doing of the Idea. But the music Idea can't rewrite itself and I play the rewritten Idea. The playing of the Idea occupies a different space from the creation of the Idea. Maybe it's analogous to a Harvard machine.

The Computation is an Idea that changes itself, by the definition. To execute a program is to rewrite the computer's memory. It so happens that this is hard to think about, so we limit how it can occur into very separated areas of rewrite.

I explained once to someone that programming is forcing a fantasy into existence. To structure the program in a way that works is to create a fantasy that is self-coherent. But that's not what it is, since it's (real?). Let's just run with it for a while.

What happens when you change a computer language? It changes the way you put together an algorithm, the 'howto' of how you're trying to express the situation. The Lisp family of languages is legendary for how it's supposed to help you think different and be a better programmer. If you can fantasize in a way that it contains components of only referents to other fantasies, how does that change the situation? Does it? Shakespeare's writing is full of such things.

I'm not sure of what constitutes a program. It's an expression of a particular agglutination of ideas, in a particular programming language, in a particular paradigm, and the execution of said ideas is the actualization into reality of the program. What is the program? It's not Matter. You can't kick it. It's not a raw Idea, since it is expressing itself (It's Verbing). Is it a communication, like the ideas found in a book? What is the concept of Sheet Music? does that itself occupy the same category of Stuff?

I can't form an opinion on software patents. You can patent a novel way to reformulate an arrangement of matter to create a thing for a purpose (it's an Invention). You can't patent a discovery (or shouldn't), since it was Always There. Otherwise you wind up patenting some new fish in the bowels of the ocean.

I have no idea of what a program really is. But they are pretty fun to write. And they make me money. Back to thesis.