Programming is like

Programming is like Buddhism. No one can tell you how to do it. You must do it for yourself. You are the only one who can get in touch with your own reality.

Programming is like the Matrix. There is a difference between knowing the path and walking it. I can only show you the door. You have to go through it.

Programming is like mathematics. There is a crucial relationship between syntax and semantics that fills the soul with ecstasy.

Programming is like the brain. The line is blurred between what is static and what is dynamic.

Programming is like the mind. It is everything and it is nothing. It is you and me, and everything in between.

Programming is like music. The answers are out there, it just requires the right kind of person to capture it and tell it to the world.

The answer to life, the universe, and everything is out there, it just takes some time for the global consciousness to understand everything there is to understand. Communication is critical.

Better start rethinking your symbols, math

Currently bothering me: LaGrange’s Theorem. The theorem states that if G is a finite group and H is a subgroup of G, then the order of H divides the order of G. That’s cool. Except the symbol for “the order of a group G” is “|G|”, and the symbol for “divides” is “|”, so the theorem states “|H|||G|”.

Someone better get on this and rewrite some textbooks with a different symbol for “divides”. I propose @ or $.

Tags are good, folders are bad

Organization by means of folders is bad for most things because it requires me to determine a hierarchy of categories, to determine the relationship among objects. Also, a traditional hierarchy only allows for an object to exist in only one place, i.e. with only one path which defines it.

Organization by means of tags is good because the organization is an emergent property, an epiphenomenon of the system based purely on semantic relationships, the “semantic network” of the system. Also, tags allow objects to have multiple “connotations”, if you will.

For example, last.fm successfully uses tags (well, I guess it’s the users of last.fm who assign tags) to help determine the relationship among artists, songs, albums, etc. In this way, The Cardigans can be tagged with “pop”, “rock”, “female vocalists”, “swedish”, “alternative”, etc. When tags are proposed by a sufficiently large (and sufficiently diverse) population, an artist’s place in the world can be more fully understood. To categorize The Cardigans under “pop/rock”, like CD stores do, is not only inaccurate but also insufficient. Once there is a great enough volume of tags, i.e. meta-information (information about artists, songs, etc.), the weighted semantic network of the system shows how closely related the tags we have chosen are.

Semantic networks are beautiful.

My semantic web

I like the tag cloud that you can see on the right side of this blog. It shows the syntactic and semantic links between the symbols floating around in my mind which make up…me. What I really want, though, is an undirected, weighted graph showing the connections between tags. That would be beautiful.

In any case, I’m going to keep tagging posts with lots of tags. I like tags, I’ll write more about them later.