"The incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration" | Hacker News Reader

"The incomprehensible should cause suspicion rather than admiration"

computerhistory.org

61 pointsrbanffy21 comments

A lot of people really hate math and logic and conversely seem to feel a sense of liberation in disorganized and unclear situations.

For a lot of people math was that thing people forced you to do without managing to convince you of its connection to your life.

I still do things with math despite my math teachers not because of them.

That's sounds insightful, but do you have a concrete example of something you've experienced? I just can't picture people feeling liberated by disorganization.

It's the difference between people who read papers and people who read popular science magazines.

A lot of people offload responsibility or their preconceptions onto math and logic without being consciously aware they've done so.

There was a discussion here a week ago that essentially distilled the entire existence of the Sentinelese people into measurable metrics. The argument assumed that what's measurable is worth measuring.

It's this kind of intelligence absent from wisdom that makes talking with logicmaxxed folks so frustrating.

Maybe you assume their sophistication is incomprehensible?

I thought there would be an actual article, not just a quote and profile.

Fortunately there is an excellent bibliography behind the profile.

I think it's that he passed recently

> 1 January 2024(2024-01-01) (aged 89) [0]

Quite a life. Sowed the seeds of what we consider common sense today

"Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster"

Stepwise Refinement of programs (keeping all but one variable fixed - scientific method for programming)

the top-down method for designing programs

Lots of formalisms for programming (quite rigorous)

Designed about 8 programming languages

Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs

Quite a giant!

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth

No news here.

For more on Niklaus Wirth (RIP):

Lots more discussion and anecdotes at the start of the year when the news broke: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38858012

And two late obits recently:

https://www.wsj.com/tech/personal-tech/niklaus-wirth-compute...

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/22/technology/niklaus-wirth-...

This is exactly what I think whenever some company says "it's magic!"

They muddy the water, to make it seem deep

In software "magic" is a derogatory term that people often use in self-deprecation.

But just because somebody included a light joke on their documentation, it's not enough reason to distrust them.

I like to compare something that's really elegant and simple, but that hides the implementation behind an even simpler metaphor, to magic.

Could also be "magic" in the Arthur C. Clarke's sense.

I'm suspicious of the space shuttle and multi variable calculus

Given that multi-variable calculus is accessible to college freshmen, and millions learn it every year, it's hardly incomprehensible.

You'd be right to be suspicious of the Space Shuttle though.

You may have noticed that it's not going to space anymore. The excessive complexity of that system (and the resulting disasters) is the reason for that.

Simpler (and far less capable) Russian spaceships, meanwhile, kept operating.

Complexity may be unavoidable, but it better yield more value than it takes away. It's a trade-off. There's nothing good about complexity in itself.

> and millions learn it every year, it's hardly incomprehensible.

Do they grok it or just they learn enough to pass a test?

As someone who taught college Calculus: enough of them grok it that incomprehensible label is absolutely unwarranted.

It's really a very hands-on part of mathematics.

As a counterpoint, Wirth-style languages have basically remained the same for decades whereas work on type theory has repeatedly moved the boundaries of comprehensibility.

I don't see a counterpoint in your statement.

> work on type theory has repeatedly moved the boundaries of comprehensibility.

Please elaborate. I see more expressivity, but I see no clear trend regarding comprehensibility.

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