I have kinda lost track of this thread so forgive me if I wander off in a perpendicular direction.
I believe that things do not have to continually get more and more complex. The way out for me is to go back to the beginning and start over (which is what this mailing list is all about). I constantly go back to the beginnings in math and/or physics and try to re-understand from first principles. Of course every time I do this I get less and less further along the material continuum because the beginnings are so darn interesting. Let me give an example from arithmetic which I learned from Ken Iverson's writings years ago. As children we spend a lot of time practicing adding up numbers. Humans are very bad at this if you measure making a silly error as bad. Take for example: 365 + 366 ------ this requires you to add 5 & 6, write down 1 and carry 1 to the next column then add 6, 6, and that carried 1 and write down 2 and carry a 1 to the next column finally add 3, 3 and the carried 1 and write down 7 this gives you 721, oops, the wrong answer. In step 2 I made a totally dyslexic mistake and should have written down a 3. Ken proposed learning to see things a bit differently and remember the digits are a vector times another vector of powers. Ken would have you see this as a two step problem with the digits spread out. 3 6 5 + 3 6 6 ------------ Then you just add the digits. Don't think about the carries. 3 6 5 + 3 6 6 ------------ 6 12 11 Now we normalize the by dealing with the carry part moving from right to left in fine APL style. You can almost see the implied loop using residue and n-residue. 6 12 11 6 13 0 7 3 0 Ken believed that this two stage technique was much easier for people to get right. I adopted it for when I do addition by had and it works very well for me. What would it be like if we changed the education establishment and used this technique? One could argue that this sort of hand adding of columns of numbers is also dated. Let's don't go there I am just using this as an example of going back and looking at a beginning that is hard to see because it is "just too darn fundamental". We need to reduce complexity at all levels and that includes the culture we swim in. cheers, -David Leibs On Jun 15, 2012, at 10:58 AM, BGB wrote: > On 6/15/2012 12:27 PM, Paul Homer wrote: >> >> I wouldn't describe complexity as a problem, but rather an attribute of the >> universe we exist in, effecting everything from how we organize our >> societies to how the various solar systems interact with each other. >> >> Each time you conquer the current complexity, your approach adds to it. >> Eventually all that conquering needs to be conquered itself ... >> > > yep. > > the world of software is layers upon layers of stuff. > one thing is made, and made easier, at the cost of adding a fair amount of > complexity somewhere else. > > this is generally considered a good tradeoff, because the reduction of > complexity in things that are seen is perceptually more important than the > increase in internal complexity in the things not seen. > > although it may be possible to reduce complexity, say by finding ways to do > the same things with less total complexity, this will not actually change the > underlying issue (or in other cases may come with costs worse than internal > complexity, such as poor performance or drastically higher memory use, ...). > > >> Paul. >> >> From: Loup Vaillant <l...@loup-vaillant.fr> >> To: fonc@vpri.org >> Sent: Friday, June 15, 2012 1:54:04 PM >> Subject: Re: [fonc] The Web Will Die When OOP Dies >> >> Paul Homer wrote: >> > It is far more than obvious that OO opened the door to allow massive >> > systems. Theoretically they were possible before, but it gave us a way >> > to manage the complexity of these beasts. Still, like all technologies, >> > it comes with a built-in 'threshold' that imposes a limit on what we can >> > build. If we are too exceed that, then I think we are in the hunt for >> > the next philosophy and as Zed points out the ramification of finding it >> > will cause yet another technological wave to overtake the last one. >> >> I find that a bit depressing: if each tool that tackle complexity >> better than the previous ones lead us to increase complexity (just >> because we can), we're kinda doomed. >> >> Can't we recognized complexity as a problem, instead of an unavoidable >> law of nature? Thank goodness we have STEPS project to shed some light. >> >> Loup. >> _______________________________________________ >> fonc mailing list >> fonc@vpri.org >> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc >> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> fonc mailing list >> fonc@vpri.org >> http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc > > _______________________________________________ > fonc mailing list > fonc@vpri.org > http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
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