Mona Clark ⚧ @mona@computerfairi.es

@alyx@icosahedron.website @pnathan Imagine an organic chemistry in which Kekulé's benzene somehow coexisted with every other idea, good and bad, about how benzene's structure really was, and that's the world of computer programming.

@pnathan @alyx@icosahedron.website *smiles* that is not _exactly_ what I mean. Gentlemen of leisure the scientists were, but they were still _scientists_ and therefore eminently practical. What's happened with computer programming is that all the eccentric ideas get at least some degree of _immediate_ currency either because they succeed in getting funded or because they succeed in attracting a cult following.

@pnathan @alyx@icosahedron.website I'm intimidated by this mêlée that Alyx is nevertheless proposing to enter because there are so many things she wants to do on computers so very, very badly. But I am an old horse who knows chemistry and classics, both ancient disciplines that have well-defined structure forced on them (by tradition or by the laws of the physical Universe). In CS I'm asked to take things as they are, shaped by commerce and chance. That's a bit tricky for me.

@alyx@icosahedron.website @pnathan Chemistry and other scientific disciplines didn't descend into this free-for-all, I think paradoxically because science used to a sort of club for educated men of leisure who were free to work away from commercial pressures. Computer science, on the other hand, almost immediately got corrupted by commerce. Any bad idea can get millions in funding these days if you sucker the right venture capitalist. If only chemists were so lucky!

@pnathan @alyx@icosahedron.website Software engineers are running around trying to build buildings when they haven't even agreed on standards for the shapes of rivets and girders, much less how buildings should be designed with those elements. Objects? functions? both? neither? again...it's a complete mess.

@alyx@icosahedron.website @pnathan There's been considerable work done at the low level. There's general agreement on how numbers and strings should be represented in computing, and on a certain subset of higher-order structures--yet _no_ standardization, weirdly, on the basic higher-order structures of mathematics. there's no standard matrix representation (I mean a mathematical matrix, not a 2x2 array), no standard polynomial representation...it's a complete mess.

@pnathan @alyx@icosahedron.website There's a lot to chew on in this series of posts...for me, any analogy comparing computer programming to any scientific or engineering discipline that I know is never going to quite work because compared to (say) chemistry, CS is at a level of development roughly compared to 1850. Nobody's even agreed on basic elements of how programs should be structured.

@kara_dreamer no, unfortunately your unwillingness to hold to a definite schedule today has somewhat neutralized the good you have done ;=3

My human master just used the work of Charles Williams to help her interpret "Undertale". *sniffs* I am so proud of her sometimes!

@violetoctagon@kitty.town spectacularly cute, my dear *curtsies, impressed*

@Ulfra_Wolfe That is a beautiful image. Mona Points!

@Elizafox I can just imagine such a restaurant. The menu price just gets you a plate. Food is extra

@pnathan @alyx@icosahedron.website

<<imagine asking a chemist to give you the run of the lab after day 1 or 2... "I just want to get stuff done", you say.>>

I could probably pull that off with a sufficiently persuasive display of ability ;=3

But seriously, while I appreciate the analogy, it seems a little faulty to me because the difficulties of chemistry and working with chemical equipment are almost entirely due to its being a _physical_ science. CS isn't a physical science

#chemistry

I'm wanting to do some experiment with old-fashioned photographic processes for the purpose of dyeing fabric. Many of these are based on photolytic reduction of ferric iron. So sometime today I'd like to prepare a quantity of ferric ammonium oxalate.