Will O'Hanley

information, thinking, expression, text, rules, crises of faith

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

@dawranliou really fun! although I think I didn't actually understand the mechanics until level 4 or so :)

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

@RoundTableLaw then again, it's only writing Prolog that lets me regard Clojure as a popular, widely-adopted language :)

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

@RoundTableLaw funny you mention Lisp, though - imo Lisp via Emacs is terrible and Lisp via Clojure rocks. maybe a niche somewhere for the Clojure of Prolog, some more modern, adoptable incarnation. Ciao, Logtalk, Mercury, Picat, Curry all come to mind

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

anyway, would love to read a book or two about this project. gives kind of Cybersyn, Minitel, utopian computing vibes

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

today's lunchtime reading: Colin Garvey's history of the Fifth Generation Computing Project, in which Japanese researchers tried to build a national computing infrastructure based on logic programming, and of the Western responses to it

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

the American project, of course, has to be competitive and militaristic. there's a lot more good stuff in there about the different forces shaping R&D in postwar USA and Japan

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

@mengwong @craigaatkinson and not out of any technical necessity, just people don't seem to prioritize it most of the time. therefore optimistic that things can improve a lot here, many 20/80 effort/return things not yet done

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

@mengwong @craigaatkinson this is an important avenue, I think - I would love to work with visual representations on equal footing with textual, but it's rare to find toolsets that encourage that. usually round-tripping between diagram and code loses some info (e.g. positioning)

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

@RoundTableLaw this is what I was talking about the other day - the chart as a reification of more knowledge than a person can actually "think" about

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

reading Cognition in the Wild

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

i think next up in this vein will be The Sciences of the Artificial, which is quoted: "solving a problem simply means representing it so as to make the solution transparent". coooool

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

and re expert systems, and what calculators aren't good for:

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

@mengwong oh, cool! i've never seen cpntools before... maybe i'll find some time to poke at it

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

saw @mengwong refer to @orgoodenough and Flood's contract DFA paper in a presentation about the (very cool) work happening on L4, and I ended up re-encoding that DFA as a Harel chart

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

of course, state explosion is not the only problem with DFAs for this purpose, but statecharts have some cool visual ideas that I'm going to try to remember

[Will O'Hanley @wohanley]

statecharts (or Harel charts) promise to solve this kind of problem, and I had never tried to make one before, so I made this one. the contract that takes 45 transitions to express as a DFA takes only 28 as a statechart. neat tool