0. Preamble

Let us go then, you and I,
When the code is spread against the sky
Like a patient etherised upon a table;

Code Read #11 from Scott Rosenberg deals with James Noble’s and Robert Biddle’s “Notes on Postmodern Programming”.

1. A Sentimentalist’s Apology

Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats,
Of all-night coding, of cheap cube walls,
Of pizza boxes in the halls:

I have a confession to make: I love arithmetic. Not the addition and multiplication of engineering, but the study of numbers themselves. From Euclid’s Algorithm to RSA Encryption, no other subject mixes such simplicity and such depth. Even more beautifully, there is still so much unknown. For example, from Richard Guy’s book “Unsolved Problems in Number Theory“: Is every even number greater than 4 the sum of two primes? Are there infinitely many primes which are one more than a square? Is there an odd number that is the sum of its own divisors? Nobody knows.

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A recurring theme has emerged in what I’ve been reading the last few days. It boils down to the differences between software based on a clean, logical algorithm, and software based on arbitrary rules.

The topic first arose in a conversation I was having with Chris Conway over at Code Reads, exploring the pros and cons of functional programming. Chris said that he used FP every day, programming in OCaml, and loved it. It wondered if the reason he loved FP so much and I found it so unappealing was that he spent a lot of time working on problems that had elegant algorithmic solutions, whereas I spent so much time working on code that was (comparatively) a hodge-podge of arbitrary rules. This difference seemed to me to be a key distinction between “academic” and “business” software. Chris did not agree with me, or perhaps simply thought other factors (performance and library availability), were more important. We left it at that.

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For a student of software design (like myself), a recent post by Peter Van Roy (perhaps this Peter Van Roy) at Lambda the Ultimate was quite interesting. He posited that there was a Golden Age of computer science from 1964 to 1974, gave a list of a 11 major developments from that era which seem to have set our direction and haven’t been replaced by anything better, and then he asked what people thought. Although I waded in to question myself, what I think is much more interesting are things that everyone else suggested he missed. When I run out of meaningful things to say, probably fairly soon, this post will be quite helpful for my further studies.