Dear Adam,
Yes, the conceptual differences between an Object system and a Structural system are distinct, especially at the level of programing. This is not equally the case at the operational level. That is, the ontologies of Object systems tend to stay inside the mind-set of logic rather than carrying forward an real world operational phenomenology.
I have been mucking around with ancient stuff myself. Mereology (part/parts/wholes) seems to offer a cross-over insight into what I see as a basic flaw in computer (AI) translations of the real world. Husserl apparently mucked around with this stuff in his early writings and I can understand how he might go from the relationships of part/parts/wholes to phenomenology.
In a simple example (talked about in a simplified way), we start with the handle of a tea cup (part) add it to a tea cup (parts) put these two on a saucer (whole) and, by implication, we have a table (flat surface).
What do you thinK?
And, yes, we forget yesterday in our rush to catch up with tomorrow. I like to play Who Wants to Be a Millionaire with my communication students. I ask them, for a million dollars, in which decade was the Fax machine invented: 1) 1840s 2) 1920s 3) 1980s 4) 2010s.
cheers
keith
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Adam Parker wrote:
You raise an interesting puzzle - I was talking simply in the terms used by
programmers of the day to highlight the era with which I would be
concerned... There is a distinct conceptual difference between an object
system like Smalltalk, and a structured system like COBOL or FORTRAN. Alan
Kay once noted that object orientation was a practical Platonic joke, in
that ideas (objects) gave rise to manifestations (instances). He also
tellingly compared them to monads at the same point... (*The Early History
of Smalltalk* Alan C. Kay *ACM SIGPLAN Notices* Volume 28, No. 3, March 1993
Pages 69-95).
What is remarkable is taking time simply leafing through these documents and
discovering what has been known and for how long. I was looking yesterday in
a cybernetics proceedings from the late 70's (the 1978 ICCS in Tokyo &
Kyoto) and found a paper planning the first fiber to the home systems with
several million planned subscribers, complete with suggested business models
for services (the HI-OVIS prototype, see
http://www.nmda.or.jp/nmda/HiOVISwhat.html). The core concepts of Facebook,
Youtube, Gmail, Google were all there, clear to the hindsight eye, even
though only 35,000 people ever received the service. Yet today, we here in
Australia argue about it in public political discourse, as though it's never
been considered before...
(I'm amazed at how few people I meet in my field are aware that we already
had mouse-navigated hypertext with video conferencing and groupware back in
1968... And just what that means for claims that new tech will necessarily
revolutionise the world overnight.)
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