Objectivist C
fdiv.net
fdiv.net
For instance, there will be no virtual memory since that would be akin to fiat money. Ever wonder why the memory footprint of your programs gets larger every year? It's because we abandoned the freedom of direct memory access in favor of fiat systems of paging and garbage collection.
Programs would be much faster and more capable if they weren't constantly being oppressed by centrally imposed costs associated with asking the kernel to do everything for you. Who decided that ivory tower fatcats like Linus Torvalds should make all my decision for me?
The CI system will also require that everyone read all the source code before they can make any commits. That way new code will introduce fewer unintended consequences.
Yeah, it's hard to sustain these metaphors for too long...
But in the operating system everything acts according to a command of a designer. Programs run because user has launched them, memory is paged because the designer wanted so and the user freely agrees to trust his judgement.
There is no ground whatsoever to compare virtual memory to fiat money. In some systems virtual memory makes a lot of sense even with non-desirable side effects. In some others, it makes sense to have a direct access to the memory. But in both cases the solution is completely determined by the somebody's choice. There are absolutely no "free actors".
Even if you design the OS with a policy of "no policy", it's still your particular choice, not a laissez-faire for the "actors". And, of course, Linus Torvalds has nothing to do with your decision to use a particular kernel for your particular use. If the computer belongs to your employer or customer, it's not the Torvalds, but you and your counterpart who decide whether to use the system or not (and how).
EDIT: What a fool I am :-) I didn't see the irony in the above comment.
Printer *printer = [[Printer alloc] init];
if (printer)
{
[printer print:hello inExchangeForUSDollars:2.00];
[printer release];
}
PrinterMonopoly *printer = [[PrinterMonopoly alloc] init];
if (printer)
{
[printer print:hello inExchangeForUSDollars:99.00];
[printer release];
}
Through centuries of scourges and disasters, brought about by your code, you have cried that your code had been broken, that the scourges were punishment for breaking it, that men were too weak and too selfish to spill all the blood it required. You damned men, you damned existence, you damned this earth, but never dared to question your code. Your victims took the blame and struggled on, with your curses as reward for their martyrdom - while you went on crying that your code was noble, but human nature was not good enough to practice it. And no one rose to ask the question: Good? - by what standard?
Nice.
OP could not have written that paragraph.
Imagine you're a russian and you're taught that the "code of morality" is to sacrifice for the proletariat (which really amounts to the politburo's whims) and that when the wheat harvest fails to be sufficient, it is not caused by the inefficiencies of central planning, but by the greed of individuals who didn't sufficiently sacrifice themselves for the good of all.
Is she really talking about communism here, or something else?
No, not at all. The best--in fact, the only--way to understand what's being said here is to read the fucking book (Atlas Shrugged).
The Objectivist C API is also copywritten.
Oh, so it's just like Cocoa Touch!
"No!" says the man in San Francisco, "it belongs to the community."
"No!" says the man in Hollywood, "it belongs to the Creator."
"No!" says the man in Sweden, "it belongs to everyone and no one."
I rejected those answers. Instead, I chose something different...
[1] A factor normalized as a real number between 0 and 1, which determines how applicable Poe's Law (http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Poes_Law) and its corollaries are to the post - e.g. in this case it is both hilarious and frightening when assumed facetious or serious (respectively).
> Evolution designed them to accept cultural assumptions
It's a bit presumptuous to squarely pin something like that on evolution. Evolution is likely to favor many things, including individualism and rationality. Yes, Aritstotle said that man is a political animal. Yet Aristotle didn't spend time observing baboons on the plains of Ethiopia.
I'm not sure where Ayn Rand stands as a writer because her writing is hard to separate from her philosophy as she chose writing as a tool to transmit her philosophical beliefs. I also loved Roark in the Fountainhead (yet I tend to identify more with her imperfect characters like Gail Wynand), and as I'm currently somewhere around p.300 in Atlas Shrugged (warning: as it is a very long book, my judgement of it may easily be a wrong one), I feel that she wrote Atlas Shrugged when her mind dogmatised her beliefs (the Fountainhead, I think, was written when she was still questioning herself and reading it feels like reading a bit more honest piece to me). Despite her later dogmatism, I respect her as a philosopher because she (a) opened my eyes to how absurd Hegel-derived philosophies are, and (b) made me understand the cult of Athena in the ancient Greece and the impact it likely to have had on Western civilization. Since Ayn Rand was so much courageous philosophically than Marx, I think it would be completely unfair to everyone involved to call Marx but not Rand a philosopher.
> an isolated human is weak and vulnerable
Not really, unless you immerse him/her into an unfamiliar society. Although I'm not a follower of Thoreau, I think he made a fair argument that it is not at all unhealthy to live outside of society. Now I'm not an advocate of moving into a cabin in the woods, I just wanted to point out that there exists a different perspective.
> leaving society amounts to suicide
No, leaving a society is much more like quitting cocaine than committing suicide. Society is a lot like a drug. It takes some time to become hooked, but once you do, it seems nigh impossible to leave. Hence the recent success of Facebook.
To a certain extent we will see individualism and rationality favored by evolution as is evident by the fact that these things exist. Note however that even the most individualistic person still accepts the vast majority of the cultural assumptions with which they are brought up. Too much crititcal thought would interfere with the transmission of culture and without culture (i.e. those things which we've learned without having to figure out for ourselves) humans are a fairly weak animal.
> Although I'm not a follower of Thoreau, I think he made a fair argument that it is not at all unhealthy to live outside of society.
Yet Thoreau still had social contact. He spent a lot of time by himself (as most thinkers seem to) but he was still part of society as is evidenced by the fact that we know him. Imagine yourself existing in a jungle with no clothes, tools or language as a naked animal. That's leaving society and that's what accepting cultural assumptions helps to prevent. Challenging cultural assumptions leads to debate and most people can't handle that in my experience.
At this point I had to stop reading because the laughter was noticeable outside of my cube.
"Another principle that Objectivist-C software engineers have little use for is Don’t Repeat Yourself."
But is printHelloWorld a proper function? It neither accepts something, and it returns "void". As the proper means of interaction with others is trade, this function seems rather aberrant. Functions like this probably listen to Beethoven, too.
Can a function that produces output, yet doesn't accept any parameters in return pass the compiler?
a -> a
Rational randian functions never obey imperatives or procedures, and certainly never return void to their investors, they obey only the Rearden calculus as defined in the Rearden-Taggart theory of universal exchangability.
Definitely not very Ayn Rand.
(shrug)
Trying to use "this" results in: "Syntax error: Insufficient property assertion"
Also be advised that the "?" modifier for regular expression quantifiers isn't implemented.
Bravo, a poignant demonstration of the value of collectivism through code. As coders, it is easy to overlook how much we depend on the generosity of others to do our work, to feel entitled to all this infrastructure we can leverage at little or no cost, and especially to not see how this empowering system should be used in other aspects of our society.
Maybe KickStarter for open-source medical technology or textbooks.
Open source software is not "collectivism", which is a moral/political doctrine.
I can easily imagine collectivist code development, but I can't imagine a collectivist software effort that would allow both Ruby and Python, both Java and C# to exist. I mean, if you're making these decisions collectively how could you justify the division of effort?
You can have collectivist things under capitalism (for example, a hippie commune), but you cannot have a dictatorship.
You're going to have to explain it if you want me to tell you why you're wrong in thinking that they're "totally different."
The free market is the economic aspect of capitalism, which is an economic and political system.
Capitalism is entirely compatible with free markets and since it seems to be the best way to produce rivalrous, excludable goods I'd expect to see it in any free market unless humans someday invent something better. On the other hand you can easily imagine a non-free market capitalist system, say where the state grants a monopoly on every good to some company or other, or maybe just auctions the monopolies off. I'm not sure how you can call capitalism a political system, since it's existed under a wide variety of political systems ever since it's time coexisting with feudalism.
By the way, there is no virtue of "individualism" in Objectivism, it's independence. Which isn't the most important virtue.
However, I do happen to agree with it.
In Objectivism, one virtue is more fundamental/"above" the others. Want to take a guess at what it might be? It actually makes sense, so you might be able to guess it.
http://nathan.ca/2012/04/introducing-sdfry-the-modern-progra...
> (Another principle that Objectivist-C software engineers have little use for is Don’t Repeat Yourself.)
(or perhaps you were merely adhering to the DDRY principle yourself?).
- An individual, because it is a conglomeration of mostly independent entities working both alone and together in a mostly deterministic fashion. The entire collective is viewed as a cohesive "system" with a purpose by those outside of it, even IF that singular identity is actually an illusion produced by nothing more than the emergent properties of a bunch of individual parts working together according to predefined rules. (Example: an individual computer program)
- A community, because as we build systems on top of systems, each of which is semi- or fully-autonomous, and each interacting with other systems in a sense of rational self-interest (even if that self-interest is itself nothing but an emergent illusion), the whole collection of these systems begins to exhibit the properties usually reserved for human communities. (Examples: a smartphone with its OS and all apps working together; an enterprise-wide IT infrastructure; the internet)
- Neither, because (as some might argue), no computer system at any level (from CPU microcode to applications to the entire internet) actually exhibits the true self-directed nature of complex biological entities.*
* I don't actually believe this, if only because humans usually provide that "random self-direction" by proxy.
It is analogous to a community because you often have several different parts of the program working together to achieve a common goal (although I would consider it closer to a tribe than a community), it is an individual because it works with one mind and it is neither because it is a computer program, not human.
1. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/plato-ethics-politics/#1.3
I would dare to guess that this is a US-specific cultural reference, very much like a parody of a local tv host would be.
Rand is mocked and attacked by some (who know very little about her actual ideas^), but increasingly appreciated others. It won't be that long before our culture starts to shift into the fourth phase, wherein it finally gives her ideas the credit they deserve.
^If you skipped Galt's speech in Atlas Shrugged and haven't read her non-fiction works, you don't know much about her actual ideas.
tl;dr: This is evidence that Objectivism is making its mark.