Monday, July 8, 2024

Inventing little languages

For the record, in college I was worried about Ontology and the name relation. I studied the inverse of quotation marks, as a notation to help express ideas about naming. I played with definitions of 'truth' leading to ideas of probability in finite collections of 'if-then' statements. I majored in Philosophy. Took symbolic logic (from a guy named Webb) and was puzzled by the idea that "but" meant the same thing as "and".

For the record, I spent a while in early grad school thinking about simplified algebraic entities I called "lingos". They were sets, closed under a binary operation. I played with different forms of set theory being embodied in different forms of element '∈' definitions. I was always interested in little algebraic systems. I played with semi-groups, and normed semi-groups. None of it was very deep. I had to quit all that to focus on passing Math exams and get a Ph.D. in Mathematics.

Later as a software engineer I spent a good deal of time designing user interface features and time trying to understand basic programming constructs such as memory versus program - data versus instruction.

And finally, I have been looking hard at the basic meanings of "and" and "or" ever since I read Bertrand Russell admitting confusion about them (which he forgot about later in his career). That might have been before college. Understanding these has only been possible lately with a clear articulation of the '*' and ','  narrative elements.

The point is that I have actually been thinking about these things my whole life.

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