I think many non-trivial computational codes assume significant knowledge of the subject matter in order to use the tools. I’ve recently been using an optimization code that has 2445 tunable parameters, and only a small percentage of them have any obvious, intuitive meaning. Should it just do the Right Thing? Maybe, if that was agreed upon, or if there was agreement by experts on how to do it. The true value of a tool is sometimes less that it does one thing well, but rather that it represents well-known nodes and edges in a network of concepts, and that it helps one to navigate (once one realizes that exploration is necessary).
The drive toward compartmentalization in computer science is kind of at odds at how the other sciences operate. In the other sciences, a specialist aims to know everything she can about her specialty. But we take pride in creating systems where interface and implementation are not coupled, and we can say that you shouldn’t need or want to know how an interface is implemented. Sometimes I think that makes us (appear?) incurious. My view is that the world is big and being a specialist is kind of a depressing thought anyway. Marcus -- “The psychological profiling [of a programmer] is mostly the ability to shift levels of abstraction, from low level to high level. To see something in the small and to see something in the large.“ - Donald Knuth From: Friam <friam-boun...@redfish.com> on behalf of Nick Thompson <nickthomp...@earthlink.net> Reply-To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group <Friam@redfish.com> Date: Tuesday, July 17, 2018 at 8:07 PM To: Friam <Friam@redfish.com> Subject: [FRIAM] What is an object? Dave, and anybody else who wants to play. I have always been puzzled by the question of how one distinguishes an object in object programming from a utility in DOS or a tool in Matlab. Or any mathematical function, for that matter. You give it what it needs, and it gives you what it’s supposed to, and you don’t give a damn how it works. Please don’t yell at me. Nick Nicholas S. Thompson Emeritus Professor of Psychology and Biology Clark University http://home.earthlink.net/~nickthompson/naturaldesigns/
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