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From: | Tim Daly |
Subject: | [Axiom-developer] Embedding Axiom (Hickey and fold/unfold) and Reifying time |
Date: | Sat, 21 Nov 2009 12:00:21 -0500 |
User-agent: | Thunderbird 2.0.0.21 (Windows/20090302) |
Martin Baker wrote:
On Friday 20 November 2009 23:17:25 Tim Daly wrote:There is an excellent talk by Rich Hickey about modelling time, identity, values,perception, state, memory, etc.Tim,While I was watching this talk I was wondering about the difference between the mainstream computing issues verses mathematical computing issues.I get the impression that the mainstream issue, from this talk, is about how to run multiple algorithms in parallel?If we are trying to solve a set of equations, is there a natural parallelism ? For the reasons discussed in the talk, should a rule based method be preferred wherever possible and explicit coding of algorithms be discouraged?Martin Baker
Reifying time...All of that being said, I think that there is a lot to learn from Hickey. There is certainly a lot to be gained by writing in a functional programming style (which Axiom is not
using internally now).I found his idea of reifying time interesting. Time, according to Hickey, is not a flow
but an ordering on a set so you cannot measure A-B but you can decide A<B.I would use this "reify time" idea and combine it with locking primitives. The lock variable could be a timestamp. That would be unique and it would enable me to
know if A was changed before B. Access to the system clock could be made unique so that no two timestamps can be equal unless they were performed by the same process.I really love his immutable data structures work. I am sorely tempted to rewrite some
of the internals to use these.
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