[HN Gopher] Meringue Philosophy
___________________________________________________________________
Meringue Philosophy
Author : Vadim_samokhin
Score : 16 points
Date : 2024-05-19 19:49 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (meringue.readthedocs.io)
(TXT) w3m dump (meringue.readthedocs.io)
| uoaei wrote:
| I appreciate linked data / the semantic web and its domain model-
| forward approach, labeled "ontologies". Organizing relationships
| between objects and actors contextualizes them and forces you to
| pursue parsimony. It's nice to see this philosophy appreciated
| elsewhere.
|
| My projects usually start with a "goblin mode repo" to explore
| the domain, its possible representation in code, and settling on
| a suitable domain model for the problem in question. It's
| explicitly a place for prototyping, experimentation, and breaking
| changes galore. Naturally this technique doesn't extend much
| further than a small, tight-knit team, but once you find
| something that works you can formalize it in a new repo and share
| access with a wider group. If you did it right, those others will
| have no trouble comprehending the domain from the organization of
| code structures you've provided and extending that code in
| ergonomic ways to add features.
| eynsham wrote:
| 1. Some philosophers think many metaphysical debates meaningless.
| Consider the debate about ordinary objects such as chairs. These
| typically are the result of composing more fundamental entities
| (such as those of the Standard Model). Mereological nihilists
| say: there are no ordinary objects (such as chairs). Others
| disagree. /Relativists/ about metaphysics say that these disputes
| are merely verbal. There is no fact of the matter to discover and
| expound. Whether or not there is such a thing as a chair is
| simply a matter of convention.
|
| 2. I disagree. But I think one point is right. Relativists point
| out that it is often (or maybe even always) possible to translate
| statements between the languages promoted by different
| metaphysical schools. For example, nihilists translate 'the chair
| is on the ground' to 'some particles arranged chairwise are such
| that the particles at the bottom touch the ground' (or something
| similar). For this reason, they claim not much hinges on whether
| nihilists are actually right.
|
| 3. Despite my antirelativist metaphysical inclinations, I think
| it is possible to translate statements in the language given by
| the 'same ontology that constitutes reality' systematically into
| languages that reflect different metaphysical views.
|
| 4. Some of those erroneous metaphysical views may correspond to
| how we naturally tend to think about certain areas, or the needs
| of computation (e.g. in being better complexity-wise). For this
| reason I am sceptical about the (admittedly very interesting)
| technique advanced in this essay, since it seems to assume that
| no conflict between these demands will arise.
|
| 5. A final worry is that metaphysics does not really speak with
| one voice. Many philosophers are quite sympathetic to the sort of
| picture outlined at the start of the essay, but e.g. mereological
| nihilism is surprisingly popular! If resolving these questions
| definitively is too much even for philosophers, those applying
| their conclusions will have some trouble too.
| ben_w wrote:
| > Meringue is an object-oriented implementation of datetime
| functionality in php. It's built atop the few fundamental
| universal abstractions, so it's minimalistic, intuitive and
| extendable. At the same time, it allows carrying out complex
| datetime calculations due to its inherent declarative nature.
|
| And there I was, expecting this to be a novel food-based metaphor
| about how certain kinds of philosophy are sweet and delicious,
| yet crumble easily under the slightest pressure.
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2024-05-19 23:00 UTC)