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Computer science has three lineages: engineering, math, and bicycles (of the mind). Engineering: C, Unix, buffers, bits Math: lisp, comparability, Haskell 🚲: engelbart, , etc
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All great info tech requires all 3: the math to figure out what can be done, the engineering to build it, and the 🚲 for how it fits and amplifies our minds. The math and engineering often forget about the 3rd leg of the stool, the bicycle design. This is what Apple got right.
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A theory is not useful if not predictive: great new waves of computation are built on math and engineering, with a blind spot for the bikes part. Find a great new tech platform that’s messy and cutting edge? The math and engineering comes first. The impact comes with the bikes.
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Let’s take the web: math and engineering built it out in the 90s. But it wasn’t until we discovered that what humanity wanted to do with it was not share academic papers but to ~gossip (social media). Exercise for the reader: where is ML today?
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Your engineering layer is one abstraction level too high. Hardware is the primary engineering driver. The software later is a mathematical abstraction/fiction on top of hardware and can be combined with the math part.
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The biggest advances come from realizing the hardware envelope has expanded in an interesting way, and learning to exploit it by wasting/conserving hardware resources differently. I mean, you basically innovate against Moore’s law, programming is a derivative layer
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Mathematical aesthetics perhaps? Language design is underdetermined by all 3 elements (math, engineering, bicycle), that’s why there’s so much diversity there. Bicycle is a good observation. In future it might just be applied neuroscience/biology.
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The bicycle part tends to be underrated because it’s had such limited scope until recently. I think of bicycle=UX as a placeholder art-science, kinda like alchemy or astrology before chemistry/astronomy. But with VR/AR, voice etc, it’s coming into its own as applied neuroscience
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Language design doesnt feel underdetermined to me. You are right that there’s further variety, eg syntax. these lineages all interbreed. Eg lisp *is* a bicycle for the programmer that uses it. But some breeds are clearly of a kind. Chihuahua vs Great Dane.
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Individual languages may not be within their paradigm, but across languages with overlapping capability? That’s clearly undeterdetermined. You can pick a 1000 ways to output ‘hello world’ and there’s no “right answer”
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