Philosophy Major bad Programmer
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Oh, just a passing thought, but had your guy had a good grounding in Symbolic Logic in his coursework? That was one of the bigger advantages of a Philo. vs. some of the other fields, as few of them dealt in Boolean or other discrete mathematics and had no familiarity with De Morgan's Rule and the other shortcuts.
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On you mean "The negation of a disjunction is the conjunction of the negations." This kind of trap produces compound conditions that should be totally outlawed in software development!
Frank Towle wrote:
On you mean "The negation of a disjunction is the conjunction of the negations." This kind of trap produces compound conditions that should be totally outlawed in software development!
Um, it also allows compound logical statements to be broken up in to a series of pure conjunctive clauses (i.e. Horn clauses) which allows one to search a set of Horn clauses for those that are true for a particular set of facts. This is the essence and basis of the Prolog programming language. Properly used, the De Morgan transformation and other logical transformations allow logical statements to be reorganized into whatever best fits the computing environment you must use. It's like the C language: don't throw it out just because some idiot can overwrite the operating system in DOS.
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Frank Towle wrote:
On you mean "The negation of a disjunction is the conjunction of the negations." This kind of trap produces compound conditions that should be totally outlawed in software development!
Um, it also allows compound logical statements to be broken up in to a series of pure conjunctive clauses (i.e. Horn clauses) which allows one to search a set of Horn clauses for those that are true for a particular set of facts. This is the essence and basis of the Prolog programming language. Properly used, the De Morgan transformation and other logical transformations allow logical statements to be reorganized into whatever best fits the computing environment you must use. It's like the C language: don't throw it out just because some idiot can overwrite the operating system in DOS.
Interesting - I recall being able to define the 'probability' of something being a fact, think we called it 'fuzzy logic' but I didn't find the specifics. Is some of your last reply related to this? I don't have the time to look up the stuff you mention. :)
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@Alan, this is fun. I actually co-designed and implemented an Expert/AI system for telecom troubleshooting in the late 1980's (NOT with my philosophy friend) using Prolog, C, Peer-to-Peer networking, fault-tolerance, USGS Mapping, Touch screen, voice response and anything else we could get our hands on. Our hand picked development team was a real cross section of life and skill set including our Prolog instructor. We even attended the 'Third Annual Artificial Intelligence and Advanced Computer Technology Conference', Long Beach, CA, April 1987. We presented our working prototype to the Senior Engineers of a major telecom company who doubted this could be done - they brought in AI PROFESSORS from the same university XCON/OPS5 came out of... The professors said Artificial Intelligence was still in the investigation stage and wasn't ready for prime time. Final result: The 'major' telecom company used OUR system in their fancy demo facility to show prospects the future of telecom systems management.
Wow, I had not seen OPS5 in print anywhere in a long time.... Used to do that on a DEC MicroVAX II.
I need a 32 bit unsigned value just to hold the number of coding WTF I see in a day …
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Mr. Spear was writing about a fantasy world - not reality! You write like a real Ph.D Some humans were brilliant programmers, Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, Charlie Bachman and many others come to mind regardless of what I did. Don't think any of them had one of those - you know (ph.d)
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Correction Steve Jobs was not a brilliant programmer though no doubt he was a brilliant salesman. Common misconception, in reality Jobs sold Wozniak's programs. ;P
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Hi r, I am a brilliant programmer - created the very first mainframe terminal emulator program for the Apple II - called it 'STEM' (you figure it out). Wished I'd had Steve around to sell it for ME!