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Friday, January 14, 2005

Math and Object-Oriented Programming

by Asim Jalis

One of the neat things about math is that reuse is extremely simple and pervasive. Since mathematical proofs are written for people you can easily allude to someone else's proof and expect the reader to get it. You can say, "based on the result by this other person in this other paper, we know that X is true", and then you can continue from there. In computer science it is not as easy. You can't say in the middle of a program, "let's use the zip functionality, since we know it exists". You have to be a lot more specific. I just wrote a console stopwatch in ruby. And then I got stuck. There appears to be no way to read unbuffered standard input. That's not quite true. There might be a really complicated way in which I have to bind to a win32 function and then call it. To do this I have to cut and paste a lot of magic into my code. Now in the past I would have struggled to get to the other side of this dead-end. But now given that I am experimenting with inverting the necessity->invention paradigm, I just gave up quickly, and decided to go with Ctrl-C, which the program does catch. Ctrl-C has a problem: if I am in the wrong window I can accidentally kill some other program. I guess I'll worry about this if it becomes a big problem. Perhaps the right attitude in approaching innovation as an effectual process is to simply respect obstacles when they creep up and then to start moving in a different direction. Ruby is clearly not the right language for applications that require sensitivity to keyboard events. The advantage that I can see of abandoning goals quickly are that: (a) one does not get burned out -- there are fewer negative associations with programming, (b) one naturally moves in a direction that produces the greatest yields.