I've been always advocating top-down approach to software development. This was based on my experience. Bottom-up leads to impedance mismatch problems; top-down creates clean architecture. I know I'm right, but how do I convince others ( Read more... )

The study of music offers a very good perspective on the struggle between simplicity and complexity ( Read more... )

In order for one software component to interact with another, it has to have access to it. Modern languages give programmers control over access, and for a good reason. A very important question in software development is, "Who are the clients of this object?". "What objects can modify the state of this object?". The rule of thumb is to design the ( Read more... )

In software engineering, monoliths are bad, components are good. Fair enough! Good software follows the tree-like structure. That much is obvious ( Read more... )

Intrinsic complexity is related to lossless compression. We measure intrinsic complexity by trying to squeeze the data into smallest size possible. This can be done by writing a program that, acting on some initial data (which are part of the program and count towards its size) , recreates the original. That's the Chaitin-Kolmogorov definition of ( Read more... )

It's very frustrating when people use the word complexity in scientific context without defining it. And it looks like different people mean really different things when they talk about complexity. I'm trying to organize various definitions.

Intrinsic ComplexityIn mathematics people use the Chaitin-Kolmogorov definition: Complexity of an output is ( Read more... )

It's time to poke some fun at the Church of Singularity. It's a very scientific cult and it doesn't ask you to pay money for the enlightenment--quite the opposite in fact! Like many other religions it comes with some dietary recommendations (eat a lot of antioxidants and supplements, otherwise starve yourself as much as possible). Most of the ( Read more... )

Plato believed that ideal abstractions existed. In fact he though that all the imperfect things we observed in our universe were but the shadows of perfect ideas. We could never create an ideal circle in our world, but the idea of a circle existed by itself. Numbers, points, geometric figures and solids, existed for Plato more than beans, dots, ( Read more... )

"A New Kind of Science" (NKS) is written in such monotone drone that it makes me wonder if maybe Wolfram suffers from Asperger's syndrome. With the kind of science he's developing, it would be an asset-- and I'm not saying it facetiously. One of his excellent points is that despite all claims of objectivity, scientists selectively go after " ( Read more... )

I never finished this thought:
The fact that we can study the Universe and formulate simple laws that govern its behavior is a miracle. For the longest time this miracle was simply attributed to God. Scientists studied physics and mathematics in order to get some insight into God's creation. The theory was that God created the Universe with ( Read more... )