

If Philosophers Were Programmers - ymn_ayk
http://developeronline.blogspot.com/2009/04/if-philosophers-were-programmers.html

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TheCoelacanth
> 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.

~~~
ymn_ayk
Do you know which one is?

~~~
hnriot
Pascal maybe, or Algol

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

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Other_accomplis...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Other_accomplishments)

"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."

~~~
wfn
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/>

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dschiptsov
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.

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

~~~
ymn_ayk
I was expecting someone saying lisp instead of prolog.

~~~
hnriot
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.

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wging
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.

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userulluipeste
_the programming languages as the different philosophies of a virtual world_

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

~~~
mattquiros
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.

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wfn
(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..))

~~~
MichailP
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 :)

~~~
wfn
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...](http://plato.stanford.edu/search/searcher.py?query=wittgenstein)
\- 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...](http://books.google.co.uk/books/about/Ludwig_Wittgenstein.html?id=NCfy6E4s6DsC)),
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.

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

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phren0logy
Fun fact: John MacFarlane, the developer of Haskell's fantastic PanDoc package
is a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley!

<http://johnmacfarlane.net/>

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sbierwagen
Flagged for being shallow linkbait garbage.

