Philosophies and Programming Languages 239
evariste.galois writes "Wikipedia has a special section called, 'Language Philosophy,' in every article for a programming language. This section looks at the motivation and the basic principles of the language design. What if we investigate further than that? What deeper connections between philosophies and programming languages exist? By considering the most influential thinkers of all time (e.g. Plato, Descartes, Kant) we can figure out which programming language fits best with aspects of their philosophy (Did you know that Kant was the first Python programmer)? The list is not exhaustive, but this is a funny and educative start."
What's the Point? (Score:5, Informative)
This read more like a 'If programming language X was a car then it would be a Y' type lists.
Good for a brief chuckle, but not particularly enlightening.
Philosophy of computer science (Score:4, Informative)
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, http://plato.stanford.edu/ [stanford.edu], has an introduction on philosophy of computer science [stanford.edu] which is far more interesting than this worthless drivel.
Re:Irrelevant, does not include business languages (Score:1, Informative)
CS and AI are grounded in philosophy (Score:4, Informative)
Computer Science is already grounded in Philosophy, especially in Artificial Intelligence. Have a look at Defeasible Logic (based on defeasible reasoning) for some recent developments. If you want specific programming languages, have a look at Prolog. Search for theorem solvers online. Or check wikipedia for Logic programming http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Logic_programming [wikipedia.org]. For that matter, have a look at the Turing machine http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turing_machine [wikipedia.org]. Bottom line, the field of Computer Science is based on logic.
Re:educative? (Score:3, Informative)
It is a word: educative. [merriam-webster.com]
I'd quote the OED as well, but I'm too lazy to start up my VPN and interrupt the torrents.
Besides, pedagogical would have more to do with the method of teaching. "Educational" would probably have been the best choice.
Re:he would have no language at all (Score:3, Informative)
nihilism is purposeless and random. coding therefore cannot have anything to do with nietzsche, since it is all structure
That's all well and good. But, Nietzsche wasn't a nihilist. In fact, he wrote extensively in opposition to it. While both Nietzsche and the nihilists agreed on the illegitimacy of the existing moral order, Nietzsche wanted to replace it with something new, while nihilists insist that no such thing is possible.
Pascal was strongly typed long before Java (Score:4, Informative)
From TFA:
"Java was the first strongly-typed language, in which everything must have a type (or share a Form) before it is being used"
The author obviously doesn't know Pascal. Not only does everything in Pascal have a type, and must be declared as such, Pascal doesn't even have the concept of a typecast. And much less implicit conversions than Java (the only way to get from a real to an integer is through a function like round or trunc). In Pascal, an array of 5 integers is a different type than an array of 6 integers (actually, you don't give a number, but a type for indexing, which may be an integer subrange type like 0..4, but might as well be e.g. an enumeration type).
Re:What's the Point? (Score:5, Informative)
In the same sense that Galileo is irrelevant in modern physics. Irrelevant yet fundamentally important in the creation of the modern system of knowledge.
Is it even possible to make a less significant statement?
You just did. Any computer language that wasn't designed randomly has a philosophy behind it; there was some kind of principles behind the design. Flawed or elegant, there were choices about how to arrange abstract concepts.
Alternative list (Score:4, Informative)
Plato - Java. (He believed in abstract objects but only had single inheritance)
Aristotle - SQL (he tried to systematise and arrange everything)
Aquinas -
Hegel - C++. (Hegel surely wrote the first write-only philosophical language)
Descartes - Visual Basic (if you can make a picture of it, it must be right)
Pascal - Prolog.
Ada, Lady Lovelace - Lisp.
Bertrand Russell - Erlang or Haskell
Ludwig Wittgenstein - PL/1
Re:Arrgh!!! LISP!!! (Score:3, Informative)
Oddly enough, what you write has no relationship, linguistic or otherwise, to Lisp where, even if there were bindings of the symbols true and false in some context, they still would not equate to the constants T and NIL, whose values cannot be changed.
Now setting the value of nil in Smalltalk to something else - that's good times.
Re:Philosophy and language (Score:2, Informative)
Oh boy, no. I know you are joking, but Wittgenstein was crazy enough that the truth is funnier than the joke.
Wittgenstein believed that his first book, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, solved all of the problems of philosophy. Therefore, since there were no more problems left to solve, Wittgenstein quit philosophy and became a grade school teacher in rural Austria.
After he lost that job (because of beating up a student), he temporarily became a gardener in a monastery he wanted to join, until the monks supposedly convinced him that he wasn't really cut out for the monastic life. (Gee, you have to wonder why they told him that.) So he then became an amateur architect to help his sister build a house she liked [guardian.co.uk] (which is now a historical building).
Then he started chatting with some philosophers and mathematicians once in a while and changed his mind about his book: he concluded that, after all, he had not solved all of the problems in philosophy. So he moved to Cambridge to go back to doing philosophy, and after a couple of years, he discovered that he had not solved all of the problems in philosophy because there are none. After that, he spent the next 18 years or so, nearly the rest of his life, writing and rewriting the Logical Investigations, a book that nobody has ever understood, and whose publication he only allowed to happen after his death, because his writing sucked so much he couldn't bear to subject the general public to it while he was still alive.
Oh, and his father was the richest man in Austria, but he surrendered his portion of the inheritance because he didn't believe in money...
Re:Codito (Score:2, Informative)