Reality has Levels

It’s been a while since I blogged. I’ve been busy.

A major theme emerging from ‘writing my book’ is that we humans are very bad at confusing our models of reality with the reality we are modelling.

I started planning with the ‘Freemind mind-mapping tool for hierarchical brains’ before finding my own creative process had a network architecture and discovering ‘concept mapping’ which uses graphs to represent concepts and propositions. I saw that graphs were what I needed and decided to experiment with building my own software tools from bits I had lying around.

I didn’t have a current programming language, so I set out to learn Clojure. Being a Lisp, Clojure uses tree-structures internally to represent lists and extends the idea to abstractions such as collections but the only native data structures available to me appeared to be 1-dimensional.  I confidently expected to be able to find ways to extend this to 3 or more dimensional graphs but despite much reading and learning lots of other things, I’d failed to find what I was looking for. I had in mind the kind of structures you can build with pointers, in languages like ‘C’. There are graph libraries but I was too new to Clojure to believe my first serious program needed to be dependent on language extensions, when I haven’t securely grasped the basics.

This morning, I think I ‘got it’. I am trying to build a computational model of my graphical view of a mathematical idea which models a cognitive model of reality. There was always scope for confusion. Graphs aren’t really a picture, they are a set of 1-dimensional connections and potentially another set of potential views of those connections, constructed for a particular purpose. I was trying to build a data structure of a view of a graph, not the graph itself and that was a really bad idea. At least I didn’t get software confused with ‘actual’ reality, so there’s still hope for me.

Yesterday, I used Clojure/Leiningen’s in-built Test-Driven Development tool for the first time. It looks great. The functional model makes TDD simple.

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A Functional Mindset

When I started learning Clojure, I thought I knew what functional programming was but I’ve learned that the functional paradigm is now more than I expected.

Everyone agrees that it’s a computational model based on evaluation of mathematical functions, which return values. This is generally contrasted with imperative programming languages such as FORTRAN, C, JavaScript or Python, which are also procedural and some of which are object-oriented but may make functional coding possible, in a hybrid style. I wouldn’t recommend learning functional concepts in a language that gives you short-cuts to stray back  to more familiar territory.

Clojure is a member of the Lisp family, first specified in 1958. The unusual feature of Lisps is their homoiconicity – code and data are the same thing. Learning Clojure has informed my thinking about business process change.

Some modern, functional languages such as Clojure use immutable data whenever possible, to eliminate side-effects. This allows better use of multi-core processors but requires a complete change in thinking, as well as programming style. ‘Variables’ are replaced by fixed ‘values’, so loops have to be replaced by recursive functions. New data can be created but it doesn’t replace old data. Yesterday’s “today’s date” isn’t automatically wiped when we decide today has happened.

Objects with their methods and local data were designed for simulating the current state of real-world objects by changing (mutating) object data state. The object model, like relational databases, has no inbuilt representation of time. Functional programming splits these objects back into separate functions and data structures and because values can’t change, they may be transformed by flowing through networks of functions, some recursive, to keep doing something until a condition is satisfied. Eventually, code must have a side effect, to tell us the answer.

Rather than computation being a conditional to-do list with data being moved between boxes, it becomes a flow of data through a network of ‘computing machines’; and the data and machines can be transformed into each other.

I hear that map, reduce & filter data transformation functions will change my world again.

Lispbian Pi. A Lambda Delta.

I’m conflicted. Part of me says that ‘us old timers’ shouldn’t assume ‘the way things were when we were kids’ were better but we know the Raspberry Pi was an attempt to recapture the spirit of the BBC Micro Model B and that seems to have gone quite well. I got a Pi 2 and I’ve worked out that it is more powerful than the first computer I worked on, a DEC VAX-11/780 which supported about 16 terminals, most used for teaching college level computing. Having that machine to myself would have been an unimaginable amount of processing power for one developer. Banks ran their financial modelling software on boxes like that. So why does the Pi feel so slow? We wasted our gains on GUI fluff.

When I started computing you learned just enough of the command language to get going. So, that’s bash on a pi. Then an editor. For reasons that should become obvious, let us choose emacs. When I first used the VAX/VMS operating system, it didn’t have command line editing. If you made an error, you typed it all again. Getting the facility to press up-arrow, edit the command and re-execute it was a big advance. We should keep it. Bash has that, using a sub-set of the emacs keys, so that’s a way into emacs.

The next big improvements I remember were X windowing and symbolic debugging. We got debugging first but it became far more powerful with multiple terminal windows. The GUI was OK, I guess but DEC didn’t give us many free toys so the main advantage to a developer was having lots of terminal windows. emacs can do that, without the overhead of X.

When I decided to re-learn coding a while back, I got my shortlist of languages down to Python, Java and JavaScript but picked Python because I was already learning a new language and the Object paradigm, so I didn’t want to have to learn web at the same time. I heard about the modern Lisp dialect Clojure and changed horses mid-stream. I’m convinced by the argument that functions and immutability can save the universe from the parallel dimension.

Last night I deep-dived into emacs and found myself in an editor session with 4 windows. Why do I need more than that to learn about computation and data transformation? This guy seems to have come to a similar conclusion http://hackaday.com/2015/09/23/old-lisp-languaged-used-for-new-raspberry-pi-os/ I’ve also wondered whether a purely functional OS might make Sun’s ‘the network is the computer’ dream a little easier. emacs is written in Lisp.

I think a dedicated Lisp machine may be a step too far back. How would you browse in the world-wide hypertext library when you got stuck? But a Linux with bash, emacs, the Java Virtual Machine and libraries, Clojure via Leiningen and Cider to plug everything together might make a fine Lispbian Pi! Is all this chrome and leather trim completely necessary in the engine compartment?

It is unfortunate that the Raspbian upgrade left Leiningen broken.

Objects vs Functions

I learned to ‘programme computers’ long ago, almost before there was no “me” in ‘program’ and certainly before I knew how to ‘team’. I had a very brief and unsuccessful exposure to functional programming in LISP (not Lisp) then stopped. I did other ‘Data Processing’ things.

In recent years I’ve been working as an analyst, alongside people who write code according to the object model. I think I have a feel for objects but never having written code in an object-oriented language, I can’t be sure. I decided to try, in the Python language, then got distracted by the shiny Clojure language which is functional. I feel that right now I’m approximately equally confused by objects and functions, so I thought I’d write this quickly before I know what I’m talking about. I can come back later to laugh at my naivety, along with the rest of you.

Like the person who wrote this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4246018 ,
“I’ve been watching some talks online recently by Rich Hickey of Clojure fame”
The post asks “So if I follow Hickey’s advice, how am I supposed to represent a book? As a vector of vectors of vectors of vectors of strings? If so, then how do I prevent a change in the representation of the Book from breaking client code?”

I found the question very interesting because representing ‘books’ in a functional language is exactly what I want to do. I think differently to the author because  I’m not yet trapped inside the object paradigm. I can see that ‘book’ is a real-world class of objects, a very specific and limited implementation of the representation of a small subset of all the information in the world. That’s what my ‘book’ was going to be about and why I’m now playing with functions instead of writing it.

Objects are good at simulation of real life systems. They encapsulate small sub-systems of a process and it’s local data into an object. What I always struggled to understand was what you did with the data that didn’t want to be enclosed – “information wants to be free”. People seem to cope by inventing objects that don’t really exist: to be data shepherds.

Functions are good at abstraction. A book is a single output format from something much richer. That’s what I want to write. Data and processes are complex. Objects and functions are simplifying models; there may be others.

p.s. (not Lisp) Get it?

Why I want Clojure

In the final year of my degree, I had to complete a major piece of work; a kind of dissertation equivalent for the illiteratti of Computer Science. I chose to implement a neural network [ this originally said “semantic network” but that was Freudian slippage. ] My project supervisor, a PhD researcher, suggested that I use Lisp with a library for fuzzy logic.

We didn’t have The Interwebs in those days, so I went to a book shop to order a Lisp book, well, THE only Lisp book, which I had to order from the US:

(LISP 1.5 PRIMER (BY (CLARK WEISSMANN)))

Do you see what he did there, apart from the obvious shouting? All computers shouted, in those days.

It mostly went wrong from there on. My mate Mark wrote a comparison between Algol 68 which we’d been taught and BCPL, the forerunner of C; another block-structured imperative language but typeless. I had chosen to do something difficult in a language I knew nothing about. I tend to take the path less travelled, but Mark’s path led to a doctorate. “That’ll learn him”, as Badger would say.

I learned that it is easy to be taught a computer language by someone who knows how (if you think in the right way) and it’s quite easy to move to a slightly different language. I’ve done it several times, but Lisp has a completely different computing paradigm and the book didn’t arrive in time. I was beaten by Lisp once but I didn’t feel it was a fair fight. I arrived back at the Clojure shore of Lisp recently, determined on wreaking revenge. This time it was going to be different!

I started work seriously last week but had a few bad days. I still wasn’t “getting it”, but this weekend, I found myself a new sensei, Rich Hickey. He seems to understand my need for a conceptual framework to hang up the weapons I’m being handed. I may be able to function soon. I now know what “programming to abstractions” means. It doesn’t involve my head and a solid, vertical surface.

UPDATE: In Weismann’s introduction, he writes: “In learning a symbolic programming language such as LISP, however, we cannot call on our experience, because the formal skills for representing and manipulating symbolic data processing is not part of this experience. Thus, we have the added task of learning a basic set of formal skills for representing and manipulating symbolic data before we can study the syntax of the LISP 1.5 programing language.”
I guess that hasn’t got any easier with Clojure

Learning to grok Lispen

This is not my late entrance into the Unix editor flame wars. I’ve always disliked vi and emacs about equally. I’m sure that both are amazing if you have a memory and use them every day. I don’t. I am, however, interested in computational models. The Unix ‘small pieces loosely joined’ philosophy had always leaned me towards vi. I knew emacs had ‘Lisp inside’ but I didn’t care. I had a bad experience with Lisp at university, but what really put me off was that emacs isn’t just an editor; it’s an environment. It duplicates things that happened elsewhere in Unix. You go in there and you don’t come out until home time. In the Winter, you don’t see light. It is neither small nor loose and I didn’t understand why. Was it the first IDE?

Richard M. Stallman hacked on emacs at MIT’s famous AI Lab. The Lab and its culture were torn apart by a war over intellectual property  of the family Lisp machines. It was a difficult breakup and RMS was abandoned by both halves of his family. In reaction to creeping commercialisation he started the GNU project which later enabled GNU/Linux &c.

I’ve realised only recently how incredibly unimportant Unix was to RMS. He simply wanted somewhere to run a Lisp environment that couldn’t be taken away from him, or others who subscribed to the original MIT AI hippy culture and ethics of free sharing of code and information. He ported a ‘C’ compiler to port emacs and started a movement to maintain everything else he needed.

The latest trend in current computing is ‘platforms’. We have gone back to worrying about the ancient concern of application portability. We’ve divided into language tribes: Java, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, .Net, Apple, Google – each with their own library system, to free us from the tyranny of operating systems, designed to free us from hardware. RMS did that in the 70s/80s.

I fought against the idea of Clojure (a Lisp dialect) running on the Java VM rather than a real OS. Another version runs on .Net and one is being ported to JavaScript. I get it now. People want to get stuff done and to do that, they need the support of a tribe (or two.)

MIT’s free educational videos contributed to my understanding of these issues. They used Scheme (another Lisp) before moving to Python to get access to more libraries. Perhaps they should move back to Clojure.

 

State Change

A couple of weeks ago I started ‘preparatory drawings’ for a great work of the blogging art about application portability. That was hard. This is a quick caricature of the resultant pile of half-sorted words.

I decided to learn to code in Python, having dismissed several other options; including Java, Ruby, HTML5 and JavaScript. I’d even considered having another go at Lisp but dismissed that as impractical. Surprisingly, I didn’t consider Perl, for my laziness http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?LazinessImpatienceHubris.

Since I went to that Clojure talk I’ve referred to before, I can’t shake the feeling that there was something about immutability that I shouldn’t ignore. Conventionally, I’d replace the assignment of ‘Python’ to the variable LanguageToLearnNext with the new value ‘Clojure’. There would be no trace of the fact that the language I WAS going to learn next was Python – but I’ve written about it several times and now I’ve broken the links. If this was code, that would be a problem.

Variables have no time dimension. Neither does the relational model. Michael ‘JSP/JSD’ Jackson told me that. At around the same time, there was a buzz around parallel architectures and programming. There is again now, if you talk to people who are ahead of the game. They call it concurrency now. Physics has caught up, overtaken the hardware engineer’s RISC wizardry and erected its road-blocks again. We don’t know how to make our processes go faster; so there need to be more of them spinning. We live in a word of multi-core processors.

Clojure is immutable by default, which prevents concurrency scrambling coders’ brains. In Clojure, there is still yesterday’s LanguageToLearnNext and now there is a LanguageToLearnNext for today. Variables are so last century.

See: http://clojure.org/state if you want this explained properly.