[chapliboy]

I thought it was very interesting about how Alan Kay and Bjarne Stroustrup may have been applying wisdom from their old fields of expertise and how that affected their philosophy.

There is an appeal to building complexity through Emergence, where you design several small self-contained pieces that have rich interactions with each other and through those rich interactions you can accomplish more complex things. Its how the universe seems to work. But I also think that the kinds of tools that we have make designing things like this largely impossible. Emergence tends to result in things that we dont expect, and for precise computation and engineering, it feels like we are not close to accomplishing this.

So the idea that we need a sense of 'omniscience' for designing programs on individual systems feels like it is the right way to go.

[sebastos]

Another angle I was thinking about, re the need for omniscience: Physical systems seem compelled to play by these object oriented rules, where encapsulation is the norm, and information must be transmitted, and locality dominates. But if we are to try to emulate that ethos in our computer programs, one thing the OOP paradigm seems to glaze over is that you aren’t allowed to _only_ write the ‘atoms’ of that universe - we also have to write the ‘laws of physics’ themselves (if you follow the analogy). And what is more global and all-touching than the laws of physics?

So if you look at it through that lens, the need for a little omniscience seems natural. The mistake was in thinking that the program was identified with the objects that the laws govern, when really you have to cover those AND the laws themselves.

[Fellshard]

The universe may work this way, but we're not God, and modes of computation that work like this still inevitably be impossible for us to predict or comprehend. This may be interesting if you're trying to run simulations (remember the point about SIMULA?) but it's not something you could use to accomplish specific ends, I expect.