Programmers should feel especially at home reading Wittgenstein because his works are a kind of guide to the compiler in the brain that interprets language. The work described in the article is only really relevant to scientific statements about things that do or do not exist in the world. “The cat is on the mat”, “benzene molecules are composed of a ring of atoms”, “harry is taller than Sally”, etc.

His later works are about how we interpret statements outside these scientific statements, such as “I am hungry”, “get me a pail of water”, “Asia is more beautiful than Australia”, or “ouch!”

In both cases, he realizes that the compiler we have gen given through natural and cultural evolution has an incredible amount of undefined behavior, and he tries to explore the space of that undefined behavior and see what limits he hits.

A famous example is his decomposition of “what time is it on the sun?”. His idea is that just because we can ask the question doesn’t mean it has an answer. In London “what time is it” has to do with GMT and cultural norms of Earth living, but our concept of time is heavily influenced by the relation of the sun to the earth, so when we ask what time it is on the sun we are outside of the frame of reference where that question makes sense.

In just the same way, asking “what is the essence of beauty” is an unanswerable question because beauty is tied to a context, whether that be a painting, a sports maneuver, a story, or a program.

I think of Wittgenstein as a 20th century Socrates, who also seemed through his endless questioning to show that our basic concepts float above an endless void of uncertainty and interpretation, just as “x := y +z” has no predetermined meaning outside of the program running it.