Re: Design is intent.

From: Laurent Bossavit (laurent_at_dontspambossavit.com)
Date: 03/26/05 

Date: Sat, 26 Mar 2005 21:29:52 +0100

Shayne,

> Your choices of course. Isn't there some quote about blowing like a leaf
> with the wind? Some people direct their own lives;

And how did they come to be that way ? At one point it wasn't so - they
didn't choose to be born, for instance. (I'm choosing to indulge my
appetite for amateur philosophy, with that question...)

> Well, the confusion we're talking about now is thinking that the code is the
> design. It'd be harder to slip into this confusion in the days of machine
> code and assembly, but people do it nowadays because the code is more
> expressive.

Is it "all or nothing" ? If we say that design is in the head, what
trips us up in "the code *is* the design" is equating something material
with something mental - mixing logical levels. If we say "(some of) the
code expresses (some of) the design", then it's a matter of degree.

"The code expresses all of the design" becomes an ideal attainable in
principle, if not realized in practice with current languages and their
limitations. (But we're making headway - the hype in some circles about
a framework called Ruby on Rails is a case in point; the Ruby language
places exceptional emphasis on expressivity.)

The comparison with natural language could prove interesting - if we
assume that natural language can express any idea we are capable of
having (and there's no reason to think otherwise), how does it *do*
that?

> I'd say that taken literally, it's nonsense, because the class (if you're
> talking about an OO class) isn't an abstraction at all. It's really more
> like a machine that produces Bars.

I'm not seeing how e.g. an abstract class (oh damn, here's that word
again in a third distinct sense) is like a machine... It can't function
in autonomy. How does it "produce" anything ? The subclasses can be said
to "produce" instances, but I wouldn't say that of the base class.

You said "taken literally" - that's part of how I meant the question;
when *we* conceive of an abstraction called Foo, and our code describes
a class Foo, is it unreasonable to take the short-cut and call the (OO)
class Foo an abstraction ?

Laurent

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