By the way, a wonderful example of the "QWERTY phenomenon" is that both the Greeks and the Romans actually did calculations with an on-table or on-the-ground abacus that did have a zero (the term for the small stone employed was a "calculus") but used a much older set of conventions for writing numbers down.
(One can imagine the different temperaments involved in the odd arrangement above -- which is very much many such odd arrangements around us in the world today ...) Cheers, Alan ________________________________ From: K. K. Subramaniam <[email protected]> To: [email protected] Cc: Alan Kay <[email protected]> Sent: Sat, July 30, 2011 3:09:39 PM Subject: Re: [fonc] HotDraw's Tool State Machine Editor On Thursday 28 Jul 2011 10:27:26 PM Alan Kay wrote: > Well, we don't absolutely need music notation, but it really helps many > things. We don't need the various notations of mathematics (check out > Newton's use of English for complex mathematical relationships in the > Principia), but it really helps things. I would consider notions and notations as distinct entities but they often feed each other in a symbiotic relationship. Take decimal system for instance. The invention and refinement of decimal numerals made many higher notions possible. These would hindered with Roman numerals. Notations need to be carefully designed to assist in communicating notions to others or to connect notions together. BTW, the bias ;-) towards written forms in computing should not blind us to the fact that speech is a form of notation too. The speech-notion connection has been studied thousands of years before written notations (cf. Sphota, Logos or Vakyapadiya entries in Wikipedia). Subbu
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