How to Proceed at Generic Programming

By -
I am currently reading From Mathematics to Generic Programming by Stepanov and Rose. It is a very good book that has me thinking hard about how to render my agent system more generic.

In mathematics, there was a process of generalization that moved through things such as:
  • Common measures
  • Natural numbers
  • Integers
  • Rational numbers
  • Polynomials
  • Real numbers
  • Complex numbers
  • Groups
  • Rings
  • Fields
I think it important to note how this happened: no one sat down and devised an abstract algebra of rings and fields, and then said, "So farmers: I think you can derive something from this to measure your fields." No, people started out measuring fields and buildings and so on, and gradually, over a period of thousands of years, abstracted higher-level constructs from these concrete applications.

Similarly in programming, it seems to me that it is rarely a successful strategy to try to start by defining some grand abstraction, and then building one's system around it. Rather, successful generic programming comes from building concrete applications, and then painstakingly seeking out commonalities found in different applications and abstracting them.

Comments

  1. Ken B3:58 AM

    A book that interests me. I used the STL extensively when I did C++. I'm curious to see how you find it.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. gcallah9:41 PM

      Good, but like a mathematician's book: post to come.

      Delete
  2. Unknown4:03 PM

    Gene, do you study abstract mathematics? Specifically, abstract algebra? I don't really have any reason for asking other than pure curiosity. Some programmers, at least here at Texas Tech, absolutely hate pure mathematics.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Ken B5:34 PM

    A thin book you want, trust me on this, is The Skeleton Key to Mathematics. It's in a Dover edition. It provides some of the intuitive motivation for why algebra is the way it is you won't get from a standard text.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Libertarians, My Libertarians!

By -
Cruel to be kind means that I love you . Because, while I think you are mistaken, your hearts are in the right place -- yes, even you, Silas --  unlike some people . This Breitbart fellow (discussed in the link above), by all appearances, deliberately doctored a video of Shirley Sherrod to make her remarks appear virulently racist, when they had, in fact, the opposite import. I heard that at a recent Austrian conference, some folks were talking about "Callahan's conservative turn." While that description is not entirely inaccurate, I must say that a lot of these people who today call themselves conservative give me the heebie-jeebies.
Read more

"Pre-Galilean" Foolishness

By -
 I am currently reading The Master and His Emissary , which appears to be an excellent book. ("Appears" because I don't know the neuroscience literature well enough to say for sure, yet.) But then on page 186 I find: "Asking cognition, however, to give a perspective on the relationship between cognition and affect is like asking astronomer in the pre-Galilean geocentric world, whether, in his opinion, the sun moves round the earth of the earth around the sun. To ask a question alone would be enough to label one as mad." OK, this is garbage. First of all, it should be pre-Copernican, not pre-Galilean. But much worse is that people have seriously been considering heliocentrism for many centuries before Copernicus. Aristarchus had proposed a heliocentric model in the 4th-century BC. It had generally been considered wrong, but not "mad." (And wrong for scientific reasons: Why, for instance, did we not observe stellar parallax?) And when Copernicus propose
Read more