In followup to recent threads... On a related topic, though somewhat tangentially, in a smattering of posts scattered across the Internet I'm on record arguing *against* what I call the "name -> object" paradigm (that's like an arrow in between them) whereas here I've just been thinking how easily Python helps us make sense of this dogma.
In philosophy going back to St. Augustine at least, you've got this picture of nouns or names "pointing" (in some magical unspecified way) to cows in the field or whatever. According to this school of though, language itself is essentially just "(word, thing) pairs" and the "process of meaning" involves doubling and mapping to make "word pictures" fit facts or fancies. Wittgenstein's first philosophy was a careful encoding of this view, using the in-vogue pre-computer logical notations of his day. In this view, language is all about nouns and their many "relationships" -- prototypical of "attributes" in later OO, reflective of state. Anyway, thanks to Wittgenstein's second take on the matter (an overhaul or recasting), a school of us came away seeing the word "cow" more as a part of some vast api for controlling stuff at runtime, less as a pointer to anything. Words become tools in this alternative summary vision, operational bits. Screwdrivers needn't "point" to be useful, and the screws they turn aren't their "meanings". Likewise with "cow" (another tool). ** We inherit these controller functions through our culture, plus pass on some innovations. [ I'm not saying I'm always proud of a culture I inherit from, vis-a-vis its treatment of cows for example -- redesigning the api seems in order, might clear up some other design flaws in the process ] In Python, the magic of "pointing" relates to our native concept of *dictionary* as that which pairs names with objects. The fact that module.__dict__ and self.__dict__ have a somewhat parallel meaning in Python helps get across how modules are themselves somewhat like class definitions, in terms of providing namespaces. My understanding of Perl is this identification actually got made when it went OO -- am I right about that? Anyway, just wanted to archive something along these lines, given all my work deprecating the name -> object paradigm elsewhere. That's work I don't want to undo, even as I admire Python's logical design. Kirby Key referent: http://www.grunch.net/synergetics/mathphil.html ** -- often useful to say when pointing, as when trying to single out that one animal (a cow) from some others. _______________________________________________ Edu-sig mailing list [email protected] http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/edu-sig
