Martin Baker wrote:
On Friday 20 November 2009 23:17:25 Tim Daly wrote:
There is an excellent talk by Rich Hickey about modelling time,
identity, values,
perception, state, memory, etc.
Tim,
While I was watching this talk I was wondering about the difference between
the mainstream computing issues verses mathematical computing issues.
I get the impression that the mainstream issue, from this talk, is about how
to run multiple algorithms in parallel?
If we are trying to solve a set of equations, is there a natural parallelism ?
For the reasons discussed in the talk, should a rule based method be preferred
wherever possible and explicit coding of algorithms be discouraged?
Martin Baker
Reifying time...
All of that being said, I think that there is a lot to learn from
Hickey. There is certainly
a lot to be gained by writing in a functional programming style (which
Axiom is not
using internally now).
I found his idea of reifying time interesting. Time, according to
Hickey, is not a flow
but an ordering on a set so you cannot measure A-B but you can decide A<B.
I would use this "reify time" idea and combine it with locking
primitives. The lock
variable could be a timestamp. That would be unique and it would enable
me to
know if A was changed before B. Access to the system clock could be made
unique so that no two timestamps can be equal unless they were performed by
the same process.
I really love his immutable data structures work. I am sorely tempted to
rewrite some
of the internals to use these.
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