I'm motivated to write this because, while doing a routine calculation using an old 25 year old tool that no one ever much liked but a few people, for whom I have the deepest respect, I found that it had been ported to Javascript and is now online at http://www.calchemy.com/uclive.htm
Here's what happened: I needed to calculate how much air flow my algae photobioreactor needed to sustain growth of 32grams/meter^2/day extracting CO2 from air. Here's what I entered. Try it: (6ft)^2*pi;32g algae/m^2/day;416ppm(co2/air)*1.98kg/m^3;.505carbon/algae;.27 carbon/co2?L air/sec I decided I need to go ahead and call the AirGas folks and tell them to go ahead and deliver a CO2 dewar. The ';' operator says, "figure out the formula by dimensional analysis". You can tell if the answer is sensible (and it does give you the interpretation without the ';' as well as telling you if you have a dimensional mismatch and what that mismatch might be). Open source now, too <https://github.com/rtestardi/calchemy>! Imagine a spreadsheet where a column "format" can be units, and all you need to specify are the input columns to that column, and the formula is derived by dimensional analysis. This can be done. "OK, cute stuff," you say. "Maybe even a big productivity booster for hobbyists like you," you say, "but what's the big deal? I mean, C'mon... 'Formal Language Theory Has Its Head Up Its Ass"? Yeah, I'm afraid so. I'll not bother writing again what I wrote as a response over at "Alarming Development", but I will post it here again, because it pretty much sums up not only how bad things are. James Bowery MARCH 12, 2019 AT 3:12 PM <https://alarmingdevelopment.org/?p=1242#comment-69285> Feynman said that every physicist should have a sign with the number “137” hanging on their door to remind them of how little the physics community really knew — to keep them humble. To physicists, 137 is an embarrassment that they all know about but, like the crazy aunt in the attic, no one wants to talk about. There is a similar humbling and embarrassing aphorism that all computer language designers should hang on their doors: “Miles and Kilometers are not data types and Distance is not an abstract data type.” Whenever I run across “type theory” as the theoretic foundation for programming languages (meaning all the time), I bristle. Bertrand Russell said his theory of types was “…not really a theory but a stopgap.” “Type theory”, as the basis for formal verification, has built an impressive edifice on this bad foundation. Type theories, and resulting programming language design, seem a kind of cargo cult, ritualistically pursued by later minds. My question to programming language designers is simply this: Why the elaborate “type theories” while empirical dimensions of the real world are ignored in formal foundations to the point that we have billion dollar investments in space probes going to waste because someone failed to do the appropriate conversion from miles to kilometers? After a 40 year career as a programmer dealing with life and death issues in nuclear reactors and automated ordnance and aerospace inspection, it is difficult to express my frustration. Adding “units” and “dimensions” as an afterthought to programming languages evinces a deep philosophical problem not just in programming languages, but in the foundations of mathematics. As Bertrand Russell said of his now-long-forgotten “relation arithmetic”: “I think relation-arithmetic important, not only as an interesting generalization, but because it supplies a symbolic technique required for dealing with structure. It has seemed to me that those who are not familiar with mathematical logic find great difficulty in understanding what is meant by ‘structure’, and, owing to this difficulty, are apt to go astray in attempting to understand the empirical world. For this reason, if for no other, I am sorry that the theory of relation-arithmetic has been largely unnoticed.” Although I was able to provide some support in revival of Relation Arithmetic while at HP’s “Internet Chapter II” project, that effort was quickly killed. https://web.archive.org/web/20130806070425/http://www.boundaryinstitute.org/bi/articles/Relation-arithmetic_Revived_v3.pdf The $500M funding for “Internet Chapter 2” was urgently required to import more H-1bs. And, no, that’s not just a bitter old man talking — I was specifically ordered not to hire Tom Etter, whose mathematical background was critical to the effort to bring relational dimensions we are all familiar with into the foundations of mathematics thence programming languages, and to hire instead H-1b workers. There is something going on here that won’t stand the light of day and no one dares talk about it for reasons that are now glaringly obvious. https://youtu.be/JQCJCTgzCFo?t=756 ------------------------------------------ Artificial General Intelligence List: AGI Permalink: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/T044a258b4a99cfd7-M95b9fc6a41f0c4c51e8cef16 Delivery options: https://agi.topicbox.com/groups/agi/subscription
