Ask HN: Isomorphic Hardware, what would apply?

2 pointsposeid4 comments

I like the idea of isomorphic web apps: code that runs on both client and server. What do you think about the concept of isomorphic hardware? Code that runs on different processors? Or, code in simulated environments vs. physical environments?

How would the isomorphic principle apply?

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Isomorphic does not mean code that runs on client and server. It has a very precise meaning in programming and a few ignorant folks didn't realize that.

"does not mean... " -> what does "isomorphic" mean to you? that would help me. thanks!

Isomorphic means there exists an 'isomorphism' or an invertible function between two things that aren't the same.

So an Array and a List could be Isomorphic, but a Set and a List could not be.

You could have (I think?) an isomorphism between XML and Javascript (minus CDATA), so it's not relegated to lightly structured types.

I agree with you that it's a misuse of the word, but for some reason a bunch of javascript developers have adopted it in the sense of having a webapp suite that spans both a node.js server-side environment and a browser client-side environment, and being able to migrate code between the two parts of the app. Go figure.

http://www.oreilly.com/pub/e/3009

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