- Author: [[Conor White-Sullivan]] via [[ThreadReaderApp]] - Full Title: Thread by @Conaw: "100 Opinions on This -- Prompted by @Vgr Will Have to Break for a Call Any Minute, but Will Do Best to Free Associate in Meantime. @Vgr 1. J […]" - Tags:: [[Artificial Intelligence]] [[Coding and writing are converging]] - URL: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1206036267185500161.html - ### Highlights first synced by [[Readwise]] [[2020-09-16]] - > Code is crystallized thought. - [[Conor White-Sullivan]] - > Object Oriented Programming (as practiced today) is bullshit. Hedgehog paradigm. Requires you to have taxonomic overview of the program you're writing before you start writing it. Inevitable that will end up as spaghetti of incidental complexity. - [[Bottom-up approach]] > The purpose of a programming language (and the programs you write) is to build up useful abstractions that extend the realm of thinkable thought and hold otherwise intractable problems in your head. ^90da17 > The measure of good code is whether you and the people you work with are able to reuse it for problems you weren't anticipating when you wrote it initially. > Polish notation is way better for reading and writing code than things that try to look like english > [[Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis]] is true -- but the effects are far more pronounced for programming languages than for spoken languages. > > The language you write code in ends up shaping huge parts of you worldview even when you're not programming ^dfe552 > The best purpose of language in general, and programming languages in particular is to expand the domain of thinkable thoughts ^4b47ee - Excel is a purely functional reactive programming language and environment with a built in database. It is far better than most languages and IDEs - 10.7 Million Javascript developers (most popular " programming language") 500-750 Million people use Excel (actual most popular programming language + env) Why? Excel lets you treat you thoughts as data. Easy to get started, can ALWAYS upskill to solve harder problems - The power of programming languages (and why you may want to learn them, even if not intent on building software) is that they let you get you hands dirty with building and using ur own abstractions. > There are two problems for programming languages to solve > 1) Performance on machines > 2) Usefulness as a tool for thought ^bf7beb > **Technical people** are just people who "try to understand" > ==Killing conversations with "I'm not technical" is a dangerous practice== that will hurt you (and those around you) in the long run. - [[AirTable]] is on track to be the Wordpress of relational databases. - [[VScode]] is a typescript IDE, is probably pretty magical, and I am likely missing some cool sources of tools for thought inspiration by not playing in that ecosystem. > One reason to know history is so you can see what elements of your language were put in place to deal with constraints in your environment that no longer exist > We don't use punch-cards, we don't need a distinction between expressions and statements ^9af712 paulgraham.com/diff.html - 59. The main limitation of the EAV tuples (popular in Semantic Web land) is that you can't easily describe the relationships. You get the FACTS, but it is a bit tricky to add information to those facts like "where did this info come from", or make statements like If A then B 60. To model human thought in a computable way you need to solve the problem in 59, you move closer to this goal if you give each "fact" or "edge" in the graph a unique identifier. - Programmers have accents