I'm taking great pleasure in reading Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking http://www.amazon.com/Intuition-Pumps-Other-Tools-Thinking/dp/1480512222 by the great Daniel Dennett http://ase.tufts.edu/cogstud/incbios/dennettd/dennettd.htm
Here is what Richard Dawkins had to say about the book in the New York Times review of books: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/15/books/review/richard-dawkins-by-the-book.html But the best new book I have read is Daniel Dennett’s “Intuition Pumps and Other Tools for Thinking.” A philosopher of Dennett’s caliber has nothing to fear from clarity and openness. He is out to enlighten and explain, and therefore has no need or desire to language it up like those obscurantist philosophers, often of “Continental” tradition, for whom obscurity is valued as a protective screen, or even admired for its own sake...Dennett is the opposite. He works hard at being understood, and makes brilliant use of intuition pumps (his own coining) to that end. The book includes a helpful roundup of several of his earlier themes, and is as good as its intriguing title promises. Here are some quotes from the first pump, making mistakes: "One of my goals in this book is to help you make *good* mistakes, the kind that light the way for everybody." "I am amazed at how many really smart people don't understand that you can make big mistakes in public and emerge none the worse for it." "The general technique of making a more-or-less educated guess, working out its implications, and using the result to make a correction for the next phase has found many applications." The above quotes pretty well summarize my approach to the static type checking project. And here is a doozy: "we philosophers specialize in all the ways there are of getting things so mixed up, so deeply wrong, that nobody is sure what the right *questions* are, let alone the answers." Folks, this is an empowering quote. For sure, I am not sure what the static type checking project is all about. But after reading this quote, I came up with the following questions: 1. "Isn't it true that Python and C programmers design their programs in pretty much exactly the same way? If so, what *exactly* is it about C that could not be duplicated in Python?" 2. "Might it be possible that some *design-level* tool, applied to Python, might enable C-like performance in Python?" These were totally new questions for me. They would not have happened with the first intuition pump. Edward -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "leo-editor" group. To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to [email protected]. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/leo-editor. For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/groups/opt_out.
