I wonder how many imperfect, inelegant, sprawling, large _systems_ I will have to learn well in my lifetime.
(Parts of human biology would be one if I were a medical student, for instance, but I'm not.)
Will that include any programming languages that fit that mould (say C++)?
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Honestly, the only thing that I've seen to at least approach perfection, elegance, and brevity is mathematics. As a rule of thumb, human-made things are generally bad.
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Even mathematics (as a human construct) is full of legacy cruft and hard to change conceptual edifices. That said, it's hard to prevent the aching beauty of the foundations the universe from shining through it's flawed construction. Just need to take the time to look.
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But perhaps as we delve deeper we'll discover we're actually living in the abandoned legacy simulation project, with a terrible train-wreck of logical foundations that we can never reconcile to arrive at any coherent model of anything… 😱🤖
The amount of "hackiness" is different per-field; does analysis have more than algebra?
But mathematical hackery, when it permeates disciplines, tends to have a quality closer to people taking care to write cache-aware code than "that function throws errors on string inputs"
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You can black-box a lot of things in a way that leaves the exterior ripe for being fitted into a hole in a large, sensical structure. Maths feels like it leaks less implementation details than most things.
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