I find it interesting that we can think about [simple and complex] mathematical structures. How did we get the ability to do so and why we can do so?
I distinguish between mathematical structures and "reality". From my perspective, mathematical structures are being used provide succinct description of the perceptible portion of "reality", the Universe as we say. Need all mathematical structures exist?
What can we say about [biological, AI, or even theoretical] systems that can deal with abstract mathematical structures: to be able to construct, modify, specialise or generalise such structures in a extra-computable manner?
>How did we get the ability to do so and why we can do so?
By having to predict or own futures?
When we're deciding which tree to climb for the most fruit and balancing our choice against the one that attracts the least predators we are taking a lot of complex concepts in a very fuzzy manner. The threat we imagine may not be real. The rewards we imagine may not pan out.
This reality simulator we made to survive happened to also work very well when we extend it into maths, which if math is reality would make sense.
This refers to the pic(1) preprocessor to the troff(1) typesetter. Troff is a historical typesetting software with a long history in the Unix ecosystem. Having personally used some of the modern implementations (e.g. GNU troff or groff, heirloom troff) of troff for personal projects, it has been a pleasant experience.
One of the first “real” applications of Unix was in the AT&T documentation department. It not only reinforced the practicality of the Unixy “small tools linked by pipes” approach, it also encouraged the “little languages” approach to those tools, which brought us lex and yacc as people built things like eqn and pic to feed into troff.
To discover more, just google “unix little languages”.
Then you arrive at questions such as "Why do we exist?", even "Why anything exists at all, what was the need for all of this?"
> Why do we feel that we exist? Who does the feeling part?
There’s the non-helpful answer “I think, therefore I am.” I don’t think there’s any good answer to these questions. We can think about ourselves, we can think about existence, so we feel we exist? Let us imagine a person can not receive any external stimuli, can not send any instruction to control the movement of body, [e.g. a brain with blood circulation to keep it alive, but no input/output], in awakened state, now what should they feel? [Such a horrible state!] It seems they should feel their existence only on the basis of the functioning of their brain.
> In C, a read from an uninitialized variable is an
unspecified value and is allowed to be any value each time it is read. This is important, because it allows behavior such as lazy recycling of pages: for example, on FreeBSD the malloc implementation informs the operating system that pages are currently unused, and the operating system uses the first write to a page as the hint that this is no longer
true. A read to newly malloced memory may initially read the old value; then the operating system may reuse theunderlying physical page; and then on the next write to a different location in the page replace it with a newly zeroed page. The second read from the same location will then give a zero value.
Lots of programs malloc a lot of memory, and do nothing with it for a while. This allows the os to wait for a low load time to handle memory allocation.
Racket and DrRacket are great, but Racket has a ways to go if you want to package and ship desktop and mobile applications. It can be done with a lot of work, but the result isn't great.
Racket continues to improve. I would love to see more energy put into making it viable as a commercial application development system.
>>I would love to see more energy put into making it viable as a commercial application development system.
From what I learn from reading about Racket from people in this forum. It's supposed to be a language to develop other languages. The other uses are to teach introductory programming classes. It's not designed to be a full fledged production grade programming language.
They also seem to be working on discarding the Lisp syntax entirely and making a new language out of Racket with a new syntax called 'Honu'. The project name is Rhombus/Racket2.
I've spent way more time with Racket than Common Lisp (just picked it up over the last month) and Racket just doesn't have the same development experience as Common Lisp. There's no iterative / interactive development in Racket, by design [0]. That means you have to stop-and-reload-the-world every time you make a change.
I distinguish between mathematical structures and "reality". From my perspective, mathematical structures are being used provide succinct description of the perceptible portion of "reality", the Universe as we say. Need all mathematical structures exist?
What can we say about [biological, AI, or even theoretical] systems that can deal with abstract mathematical structures: to be able to construct, modify, specialise or generalise such structures in a extra-computable manner?