If Philosophers Were Programmers

&#62; Java was the first strongly-typed language<p>Is that supposed to be a joke? Java isn't remotely close to being the first strongly-typed or even the first statically-typed language.

Creator of the first Turing-complete computer, Charles Babbage did a little philosophy:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Other_accomplishments" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Babbage#Other_accomplis...</a><p>"Babbage was elected a Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1832.[35] In 1837, responding to the Bridgewater Treatises, of which there were eight, he published his Ninth Bridgewater Treatise, On the Power, Wisdom and Goodness of God, as manifested in the Creation, putting forward the thesis that God had the omnipotence and foresight to create as a divine legislator, making laws (or programs) which then produced species at the appropriate times, rather than continually interfering with ad hoc miracles each time a new species was required. The book is a work of natural theology, and incorporates extracts from correspondence he had been having with John Herschel on the subject."

This is a nice piece of nonsense, but the Haskell part is the best.) <i>Haskell is not meant to be accesible by anyone</i>. yeah, sure.<p>I have a related story. When I was younger I thought that in order to properly understand Buddhism I must learn Tibetan language and then read "original" books. Later I have discovered that the right books are written in Sanskrit.) Thank goodness I've abandoned the idea.<p>If you take a modern translation of a Tibetan Buddhist text you will find tons of metaphors, language ornaments, stories upon stories, comments upon comments, and comments about comments about stories. This absolutely is not meant to be accessible by anyone.)) Lots of people are convinced that <i>this</i> is Buddhism.<p>There are thousands of people who spend their lives arguing why such and such ornamentation in Tibetan iconography has such and such color, why this or that deity must be depicted this or that way, and which arrangement of symbols in what order must represent this or that realm.<p>All this has absolutely nothing to do with teaching of the Buddha and the best way to learn it is by reading a few (definitely more than one) profound teachers.

I always that thought that the only language that made logical sense for philosophers to use was prolog.

I'm mildly disappointed that this article has ignored both Diogenes and Lisp.<p>All these connections seem tenuous to me, so what's one more? Why not say Diogenes was the first Lisp-programmer philosopher? After all, he had it right, but was ignored for years.

<i>the programming languages as the different philosophies of a virtual world</i><p>I would rather consider programming paradigms to be better equivalents for "different philosophies".

(If anyone's curious to take a glance at (a nicely formatted version of) Wittgenstein's Tractatus, a "side-by-side edition" (three columns: original German and two English translations), here's a very nice source for PDFs of various sizes (including latex source): <a href="http://people.umass.edu/klement/tlp/" rel="nofollow">http://people.umass.edu/klement/tlp/</a> (p.s. I'd go so far as to entirely skip Russell's intro, maybe..))

Fun fact: John MacFarlane, the developer of Haskell's fantastic PanDoc package is a professor of philosophy at UC Berkeley!<p><a href="http://johnmacfarlane.net/" rel="nofollow">http://johnmacfarlane.net/</a>

Flagged for being shallow linkbait garbage.