{"id":1206,"date":"2009-09-23T11:03:56","date_gmt":"2009-09-23T11:03:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/meeseeks:5080\/blog\/?p=1206"},"modified":"2009-09-23T11:03:56","modified_gmt":"2009-09-23T11:03:56","slug":"myopic-utilitarianism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/2009\/09\/myopic-utilitarianism\/","title":{"rendered":"Myopic utilitarianism"},"content":{"rendered":"

What are the odds, eh?\u00a0 On the same day that the Guardian publishes an obituary of theoretical computer scientist, Peter Landin <\/a>(1930-2009), pioneer of the use of Alonzo Church’s lambda calculus as a formal semantics for computer programs, they also report that the Government is planning only to fund research which has relevance\u00a0\u00a0to the real-world<\/a>.\u00a0 This is GREAT NEWS for philosophers and pure mathematicians!\u00a0
\nWhat\u00a0might have seemed, for example, \u00a0mere pointless musings on the correct way to undertake reasoning – by Aristotle, by Islamic and Roman Catholic medieval theologians, by numerous English, Irish and American abstract mathematicians in the 19th century,\u00a0by an entire generation of Polish logicians before World War II, and by those real-world men-of-action Gottlob Frege, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Alonzo Church – turned out to be EXTREMELY USEFUL for the design and engineering of electronic computers.\u00a0\u00a0 Despite Russell’s Zen-influenced personal motto – “Just do!\u00a0 Don’t think!”<\/em> (later adopted by IBM) – his work turned out to be\u00a0useful after all.\u00a0\u00a0 I can see the\u00a0British research funding agencies\u00a0right now, using their sophisticated and proven prognostication procedures to calculate the society-wide economic and social benefits we should expect to see from our current research efforts over the next 2300 years\u00a0 – ie, the length of time that Aristotle’s research on logic took to be implemented in technology.\u00a0\u00a0 Thank goodness\u00a0our politicians have shown\u00a0no myopic utilitarianism this last couple of centuries, eh what?!
\nAll while\u00a0this man apparently received no direct state or commercial research funding for his efforts<\/a>\u00a0as a computer pioneer, playing with “pointless” abstractions like the lambda calculus.
\nAnd Normblog also comments<\/a>.
\nPOSTSCRIPT (2014-02-16):\u00a0\u00a0<\/strong> <\/em>And along comes The Cloud and ruins everything!\u00a0 \u00a0Because the lower layers of the Cloud – the physical infrastructure, operating system, even low-level application software\u00a0– are fungible and dynamically so, then the Cloud is effectively “dark” to its users, beneath some level.\u00a0\u00a0 Specifying and designing applications that will run over it, or systems that will access it, thus requires specification and design to be undertaken at high levels of abstraction.\u00a0\u00a0 If all you can say about your new system is that in 10 years time it will grab some data from the NYSE, and nothing (yet) about the format of that data, then you need to speak in abstract generalities, not in specifics.\u00a0\u00a0 It turns out the lambda calculus is just right for this task and so London’s big banks have been recruiting logicians and formal methods people to spec & design their next-gen systems.\u00a0 You can blame those action men, Church and Russell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

What are the odds, eh?\u00a0 On the same day that the Guardian publishes an obituary of theoretical computer scientist, Peter Landin (1930-2009), pioneer of the use of Alonzo Church’s lambda calculus as a formal semantics for computer programs, they also report that the Government is planning only to fund research which has relevance\u00a0\u00a0to the real-world.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[13,14,28,35,45,50,73],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1206","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-computer-science","category-computer-technology","category-forecasting","category-history","category-logic","category-mathematics","category-rhetoric","p1","y2009","m09","d23","h11"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1206"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1206\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1206"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1206"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vukutu.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1206"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}