Beauty Is Physics’ Secret Weapon | Hacker News Reader

Beauty Is Physics’ Secret Weapon

nautil.us

63 pointsBIackSwan12 comments

Dirac said something closely related to this: "... it is more important to have beauty in one's equations than to have them fit experiment. ... It seems that if one is working from the point of view of getting beauty in one's equations, and if one has really a sound insight, one is on a sure line of progress."

http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/the-evolution...

...and ugliness is software's!

... and biology's.

Object Oriented software is actually modeled after biology; Alan Kay, the inventor of OO, had molecular biology degree as well as computer science and OO sprung from that inspiration.

Alan Kay intended the emphasis in Smalltalk to be on the messaging, i.e. communication between objects, rather than the objects themselves: "The key in making great and growable systems is much more to design how its modules communicate rather than what their internal properties and behaviors should be."

From http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?AlanKayOnMessaging

Yes he did, but I'm not sure how that relates in any way to anything I said. His message idea were based on how cells communicate via messages in biology. Objects are cells. As I ran a popular Smalltalk blog for a few years, I'm well aware of Kay and the history of Smalltalk and his intentions about messaging.

Alan Kay did not invent object orientation. See Ole-Johan Dahl's paper, "The Birth of Object Orientation: the Simula Languages", from 2001 in which he relates the history of Simula: http://www.olejohandahl.info/old/birth-of-oo.pdf.

No, that's the birth of objects, objects and object orientation are entirely different things. Objects are an abstraction, Smalltalk did not invent them; Object orientation is a description of a programming style; Smalltalk invented that. Alan Kay absolutely invented object orientation as he coined the term which means taking objects and basing the entire language and programming style on them, i.e. the language is oriented towards them to support the object as primary abstraction style.

Simula had objects, but it was not object oriented, it was still a procedural language; objects were bolted onto procedures. Smalltalk was the first object oriented language, objects are the means of abstraction from which the entire language is built; that's what object orientation is. The term object oriented and thus OO was never uttered before Smalltalk and thus Kay made up the term and is the inventor of the OO style of programming.

That's a different definition of OO from the one that most people seem to use. By your definition hardly any language is OO, probably just Smalltalk and Ruby, certainly not C# or VB.net.

Not necessarily.

Alan Kay: Yes, that was the big revelation to me when I was in graduate school—when I finally understood that the half page of code on the bottom of page 13 of the Lisp 1.5 manual was Lisp in itself. These were “Maxwell’s Equations of Software!” This is the whole world of programming in a few lines that I can put my hand over.

Lisp, and a few other languages including Smalltalk, were not so much designed as discovered.

Maxwell's equations of side-effect-free software, yes, which doesn't actually pay very well.

So is math and engineering.

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