Re: Unix Nightmare

Posted by Steve Smith on Oct 22, 2016; 5:22pm
URL: http://friam.383.s1.nabble.com/Unix-Nightmare-tp7587974p7587984.html

Marcus -

Using a logic programming language (like Prolog) sometimes feels to me like a dream state, sort of like Frank describes.   I use logic programming as a cognitive aide as well as a computational aide.   Asking, “How do the pieces fit together in a problem?  What is independent and what is interdependent?”

This is very well articulated and familiar.  I came of age during the "golden age" of programming languages when it seemed like there was a new darling language every year, and sure enough many of them WERE quite useful for the different modes of thought they represented/supported/mediated.    Snobol, APL, and Prolog were my go-to's back in that era for different modes of thinking about a problem.  

I like your analogy between declarative languages and nightmares.  I think there may be more than superficial relevance.   I suspect that our dreaming minds *are* busy churning away on a "declared" problem that we failed to resolve proceduraly (rationally?) in our waking state.

I have very few *scary* nightmares, but I do have a lot of very tedious semi-lucid dreams where I keep doing the same stuff over and over (and over) on one theme or another with everywhere from painfully negative results to at best marginally effective results... lots of 2 steps forward, 3 steps back-and-to-one side kinds of situations.

Maybe there is a career for aging software developers as shrinks.  They could help rationalize and treat their peers’ unique (?) pathologies?

And I think tag-team shrinking might work as well as tag-team programming.  Toss the patient back and forth between two programmer-cum-therapists with very different styles.   Maybe you and Glen could go into partnership.

- Steve


============================================================
FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv
Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College
to unsubscribe http://redfish.com/mailman/listinfo/friam_redfish.com