There are two concepts which are routinely confounded in beginning and procedural programming - the decomposition of the problem into simpler subproblems and the call stack ( Read more... )

I'm interested in finding out in what sense Plato's or Decartes's dualism is true, or rather, useful. Box says "All models are wrong but some are useful." Why is dualism useful ( Read more... )

A lathe is an instrument for creating things with a particular, cylindrical symmetry. A spaghetti maker is an instrument for creating things with a particular, linear symmetry. Symmetries (according to mathematicians) are related to transforms. For example, a cylindrically-symmetrical object looks the same even if you rotate it; a linear object ( Read more... )

Following Parnas's "Rational Design Process: How and Why to Fake it", here is a possibly-rational design process for classes ( Read more... )

Okay, I had this idea (styling architecture), which is basically a particular, visitor-ish implementation of aspect-oriented programming ( Read more... )

Okay, I've been reading Graeber's Debt, and I think he's muddleheaded and annoying some of the time, but very smart and insightful some other times, and perhaps his "obvious" muddleheadedness is necessary for his insights ( Read more... )

Suppose you have two entities, call them Alice and Bob. Within Alice's mind is Alice's idea of Bob, and within Bob's mind is Bob's idea of Alice. What makes an idea "of" something? Well, it needs to track that thing. For concreteness, imagine a sprite that hovers below your mouse, that follows it around. Now, the nonobvious question (that ( Read more... )

I am incompetent, so don't take my advice as good advice; this is a tentative structuring of my own ideas for my own purposes ( Read more... )

What stitches people together into an organization ( Read more... )

Jim Weirich uses a word, Connascence, for the connection between two pieces of source code ( Read more... )