This is me:
Seriously, I am not kidding, and I am probably even worse than that.
I used to be younger, but ok, I think that we can all say that. Fortunately, I like my older self better, which is probably normal for men, but not always the case for women.
My day job is programming, you know: researching, composing, and then debugging, until I am sick and tired of that last part, and then just let the users do the debugging instead.
When I give up on myself, I will give you the code.
Since code is never ready, I expect you to tell me what is wrong with it, because really, don't expect me to figure out how wrong I am.
Seriously, doing that by myself, is too depressing. So, I expect you to do it.
Furthermore, if you cannot find the bugs, fine, it probably means that they do not exist in this world, but rather in another one.
Watch out for different worlds merging. I am very much against that. It usually causes a black-swan event.
That brings me to one of my favourite authors: Nassim Taleb:
"black swan", "antifragile", "mediocristan", "extremistan"
Nassim comes with an entire, new vocabulary. He is a Greek orthodox from the village of Amioun in Lebanon.
Nassim is great. He is so much greater than me.
Still, is being great the purpose of our otherwise short stay on this earth? If I ever have to debate Nassim, that will be my ultimate line of defense: There is probably no point in being great!
The greatest is not Aristotle.
Aristotle is great. Seriously, don't underestimate him. He is the one who trained Alexander the Great. That one managed to make quite a splash.
Still, in my humble opinion, the assault from Königsberg on Aristotle at the end of the 18th century must be considered a success. I think that Immanuel Kant is truly the greatest.
So, what does philosophy have to do with programming?
At first glance, not much.
In fact, modern philosophy has mostly lost its core fields of logic and epistemology ("the knowledge about knowledge") to mathematics.
What is left of philosophy nowadays, is rather empty and possibly even meaningless.
Immanuel Kant saw that coming. That is undoubtedly why he hated math. He saw it as unfair competition.
In his seminal work, Critique of Pure Reason, he ominously concludes: "Hence I will not count among my principles those of mathematics."
You can easily see why programming easily degenerates in philosophy.
The Don't repeat yourself principle forces you to look for the common idea in what you have been repeating a few times too often.
So, you start hunting for a Platonic ideal, and try to make it emerge from your code. You want to make the meta-level explicit. You want to express it, say it, write it, and pronounce it. It therefore becomes philosophy: statements about other statements.
Well, I am tired now. Maybe you are too? Talk to you later.
Lived in Vietnam for 5 years. And saw the movie. Yeah, debugging can be a pretty robotic job.
I currently live in Cambodia. I guess that nobody extols: "Good morning, Cambodia!". So, it became: "Good morning, Vietnam!". For all practical purposes, we may even consider that to be the same. If not, I will fix it in my next post! ;-)
Was in Cambodia two times. Interesting.