On Getting Machines to do Stuff
We have all these machines, but they aren't doing the right stuff because of the hidden agenda : they were never meant to do stuff we needed them to do, they were meant to be ways for other people to use to get us to do stuff. See FUTO FUBS and the Everything App . I was prompted to write this by Girard's question "What is a question?" and his remarks about a DVD player at 17:42 in Jean-Yves Girard - Lectures at IHP thematic trimester : Semantics of proofs and certified mathematics . The example question he gives is how do you know that it is a DVD player? And the answer is that you put in a DVD and it asks you a question! It struck me the other day that the way most people think of programming is quite different to how I think of it. I think of it as composition of ideas in a bottom-up sense: I have some ideas and they're like Legos, so I have a box of all sorts of ideas and each time I learn a new one it goes in the box. Then when I am feeling creative I im...