Eastern Philosophy In Software Design

Eastern Philosophies are interesting to any software architect.

Few Philosophies are

ShaatVaad
AnekantVaad?

I'm interested in the topic, but I'm afraid you haven't really said anything here.

I am working towards to write down many things. ShaatVaad is just to start with. Hopefully I will be able to fill it with few more derivations.

-- RohitLodha

In my opinion SmalltalkLanguage in particular and ObjectOrientation in general have ideas which are concordant with TaoChia. In Smalltalk, for example, you can change anything in your image, well not exactly anything, but a lot more than in other traditional ProgrammingLanguages.

ObjectOrientation is about making things simpler. One class has only one responsibility. That would be considered too simple before ObjectOrientation, but now it is considered wise. -- GuillermoSchwarz

I dunno...you can read eastern (or other) philosophy into anything, but unless you're heavily into deconstructionism, that's not the same as it actually being there. Smalltalk and OO did not originate with any eastern philosophy.

And if one does prefer the "things are there if you see them there" approach, the question still remains, how does it benefit us to see resemblances to eastern philosophy in Smalltalk?

I think it might be interesting to create a language based on, say, Taoism. Very obviously, it couldn't have any variables!

** Sure it can. Ten thousand of 'em! **

No, that's the mother of the 10,000 variables. :-)

Sure, the world was not built by philosophers, they just stood in the middle of the built world and then they created philosophy to explain what was already there. No surprise in there. The purpose of philosophy is not explanation per se, but explanation of how the world was made for newcomers (us) to continue the same original ideas and therefore succeed. I think there is no deconstructionism in applying theories (or philosophies) into artificial constructions like ObjectOrientation.

Why do you need to benefit from a philosophy? If you can benefit from a theory is only because you arrive to the right conclusions. I see no fault in that.

Because otherwise why shouldn't I go seeking parallels to Batman, applejuice, paleoanthropology, or anything else, in software? If there is no benefit, then why bother with any of them? Or equally, why not waste time on any random connection? That's why. Without pragmatic utility, philosophy rather reliably goes adrift, with nothing to anchor it. "Pragmatic" here could include things like aesthetics, of course.

I'm not sure what are you talking about.

"The Tao that can be named is not the eternal Tao." Thus, no variables. "No, the mother of 10,000 variables." --> "The Tao is the mother of the 10,000 things." :-)

Taoism does not forbid anything, it just recommends not to stop anything, accept things the way they are, move on and make sure you benefit from everything, so that you can take care of other people. It does say that names are not the real things, but so says any language. Well, maybe any language besides machine language.

How does Taoism relate to Smalltalk? Smalltalk is not static, but dynamic. Taoism is about being dynamic.

-- GuillermoSchwarz

Ever notice that Taoism is full of "10,000" this and "10,000" that... and wondered why the number 10,000 is so special? It's simple, really: Whereas European numbering tradition assigns new terms to powers of 1000 (powers of 10 where the exponent is divisible by 3), the Chinese language assigns new terms to powers of 10000 (powers of 10 where the exponent is divisible by 4). The way one says "one million" in Chinese literally translates into English as "100 ten-thousands" ("baak man" in poorly-romanized Cantonese), and billion (10^9, that's "milliard" for some of you) is "ten one-hundred-millions" (or "sahp yihk"). Conversely, the Chinese have simple (non-compound) terms for 10,000 (10^4) and 100,000,000 (10^8), whereas in Western languages we use a compound form for these numbers.

Just another OffTopic observation.

Actually, the fact is that OOP mirrors Platonism a lot more than Taoism. This was very aparent to me in college when I was double majoring in Philosophy and Programming.

I just thought I would throw this interesting comparison of Zen philosophy and the ForthLanguage. See http://www.ultratechnology.com/efzen.htm

 --SamuelFalvo?