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Category Archives: Software development

The limitations and fundamental nature of systems are not understood

Recently, I’ve become more and more aware of the limitations of conscious thought and formal models of entities and systems. We don’t understand how political systems make decisions, how world events occur, or even how we choose what to wear on any particular day. Cause and effect doesn’t exist in the form it is commonly [...]

Posted 22 December 2012 † johan § Bioinformatics § Computer science § Philosophy ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , ,

The “Friedrich principles” for bioinformatics software

I’ve just come back from Biohackathon 2012 in Toyama, an annual event, traditionally hosted in Japan, where users of semantic web technologies (such as RDF and SPARQL) in biology and bioinformatics come together to work on projects. This was a nice event with an open and productive atmosphere, and I got a lot out of [...]

Posted 13 September 2012 † johan § Bioinformatics § Computer science ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , , ,

How one might develop a Heideggerian AI that uses software equipment

This year I’ve spent a fair amount of time trying to read Martin Heidegger‘s great work Being and Time, using Hubert Dreyfus’ Berkeley lectures on the book as supporting material. By now I’ve almost finished division 1. I’m learning a lot, but it’s fair to say that this is one of the most difficult books [...]

Posted 05 August 2012 † johan § Computer science § Philosophy ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , ,

Platonism and the dominant decomposition

I’m in Portland, Oregon for the SPLASH conference. There’s a lot of energy and good ideas going around. I gave a talk about my project, Poplar, at the FREECO workshop. At the same workshop there was a very interesting talk given by Klaus Ostermann, outlining some of the various challenges facing software composition. He linked [...]

Posted 26 October 2011 † johan § Philosophy ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , , , , ,

What makes a good programming language?

New programming languages are released all the time. History is littered with dead ones. There are also many long time survivors in good shape, as well as geriatric languages on life support. What makes a programming language attractive and competitive? How can we evaluate its quality? There are many different aspects of this problem. Ease [...]

Posted 02 September 2011 † johan § Computer science ‡ Comments (0) ° Tagged: , , ,