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If Philosophers Were Programmers

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30 pointsymn_ayk22 comments

> Java was the first strongly-typed language

Is that supposed to be a joke? Java isn't remotely close to being the first strongly-typed or even the first statically-typed language.

Do you know which one is?

Probably Fortran.

Pascal maybe, or Algol

I was confused about that as well

This is especially funny considering that before generics where introduced into the language, the granularity of Java's type system when it comes to containers was essentially, "Well, everything is an Object...". Thus not only was it not the first statically typed language, but for some very basic stuff the type system had to be effectively circumvented, whereby one lost all the advantages of static typing.

(Of course, C has its void pointers for the same purpose...)

Creator of the first Turing-complete computer, Charles Babbage did a little philosophy:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Other_accomplis...

"Babbage was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1832.[35] In 1837, responding to the Bridgewater Treatises, of which there were eight, he published his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation, putting forward the thesis that God had the omnipotence and foresight to create as a divine legislator, making laws (or programs) which then produced species at the appropriate times, rather than continually interfering with ad hoc miracles each time a new species was required. The book is a work of natural theology, and incorporates extracts from correspondence he had been having with John Herschel on the subject."

On that note, Alan Turing's SEP entry is also worth a mention: it's a nice intro to his profoundly influential (CS + cognitive sciences + philosophy of mind) ideas as well as a (very interesting) short bio on him.

http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/turing/

This is a nice piece of nonsense, but the Haskell part is the best.) Haskell is not meant to be accesible by anyone. yeah, sure.

I have a related story. When I was younger I thought that in order to properly understand Buddhism I must learn Tibetan language and then read "original" books. Later I have discovered that the right books are written in Sanskrit.) Thank goodness I've abandoned the idea.

If you take a modern translation of a Tibetan Buddhist text you will find tons of metaphors, language ornaments, stories upon stories, comments upon comments, and comments about comments about stories. This absolutely is not meant to be accessible by anyone.)) Lots of people are convinced that this is Buddhism.

There are thousands of people who spend their lives arguing why such and such ornamentation in Tibetan iconography has such and such color, why this or that deity must be depicted this or that way, and which arrangement of symbols in what order must represent this or that realm.

All this has absolutely nothing to do with teaching of the Buddha and the best way to learn it is by reading a few (definitely more than one) profound teachers.

I always that thought that the only language that made logical sense for philosophers to use was prolog.

I was expecting someone saying lisp instead of prolog.

Lisp and prolog are old languages that have had their day and largely been marginalized by more practical ones. Prolog was intended for AI and NLP but overtime the rigid grammar approaches have been obsoleted by statistical ones with far greater success. These days AI and NLP are more commonly found in java or python. Watson, for example, is written in java. Lisp is great for things like genetic algorithms because there's no distinction between code and data, it's a homoiconic language.

Or SQL. After teaching a couple of classes in logic, it's quite easy to get the gist of. In fact, as I was wrapping up grad school (in philosophy, as it happens), I suggested that if people weren't going to go on and teach philosophy, they should become DBAs (rather than law school, for instance).

I'm mildly disappointed that this article has ignored both Diogenes and Lisp.

All these connections seem tenuous to me, so what's one more? Why not say Diogenes was the first Lisp-programmer philosopher? After all, he had it right, but was ignored for years.

the programming languages as the different philosophies of a virtual world

I would rather consider programming paradigms to be better equivalents for "different philosophies".

Very well said, exactly my thoughts too. Although a language's syntax is somehow expressive of its problem-solving philosophy, the design patterns and best practices that grow around the language itself communicate that philosophy better.

(If anyone's curious to take a glance at (a nicely formatted version of) Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a "side-by-side edition" (three columns: original German and two English translations), here's a very nice source for PDFs of various sizes (including latex source): http://people.umass.edu/klement/tlp/ (p.s. I'd go so far as to entirely skip Russell's intro, maybe..))

I remember watching Google tech talk by Alex Martelli, where he mentions Wittgenstein as his favorite philosopher. Always wanted to learn more about Wittgenstein since than, but I guess I will have to find something more beginner friendly than Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus :)

I do actually think there's some merit to the idea of just "plunging in" - going ahead and attempting to read it! Sure, it will be a wtf experience in the beginning, but if you persist for a few hours, you'll start to build up a conceptual vocabulary used/established by W. of sorts (that's what happened to me anyway). But for many matters philosophy/intro-to-philosophy-X-related, I often find SEP to be an invaluable resource: http://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=wittgenst... - the articles there are quality stuff. Good luck with your rabbit hole :)

edit oh, and I had the pleasure of reading (only bits) from Ray Monk's bio of W. (http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Ludwig_Wittgenstein.ht...), which is frequently referred to in SEP's article on W. (http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/wittgenstein/) - it might make for a very nice introductory exposition, if you're up for actually reading a (not-too-thin) book about him.

Thanks for pointing out Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, great resource.

Fun fact: John MacFarlane, the developer of Haskell's fantastic PanDoc package is a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley!

http://johnmacfarlane.net/

Flagged for being shallow linkbait garbage.

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