On 12/5/12 2:32 PM, Roger Critchlow wrote:
We're very successful clock makers as a species. As long as all the
parts of a mechanism are connected together into a causal graph, so we
can twiddle this part and see what it does, then we can work things
out and make wonderfully complicated clocks. Hence we make really
awesome electrical power generation stations, huge electron factories
of enormous complication. But, when we connect our generators
together into grids, we have a history of oops where a squirrel or a
tree and an unforeseen causal connection takes millions of dollars of
clocks offline in a few minutes. We fix the problem, and it happens
again in a different way. We understand how to engineer the
generator, because it's a clock. We're still learning how to not
engineer the grid on the fly, because it's a parallel distributed
system which only works like a clock when it wants to tease us.
Why not make grids like clocks? Why must members of the grid have
agency? Central planning!
The observation about isolated external references reminds me of
Control.Monad.ST
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi=10.1.1.144.2237&rep=rep1&type=pdf
http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/base/4.3.1.0/doc/html/Control-Monad-ST.html
Marcus
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