“This is in some sense a restatement of some things which I “knew” before, but I didn’t know them then as I do now.”

For the last four years I’ve been working on a book for programmers who want to learn mathematics. It’s finally done, and you can buy it today. The website for the book is pimbook.org, …

“(I am writing this across the room from an absolute unit of a black lab, whose name I imagine to be Bear or perhaps Winchester, whom I am summoning the energy and wherewithal to go up and pet.)”

Previous to joining Pivotal Labs, I didn’t do a whole lot of pair programming. Hoo boy. It’s been a little over two months since I started, and the number of hours I’ve spent solo…

reasoning about the system should be done recursively on its structure. ​ good software design is ultimately an art. ​ another example of reasoning via an interface. ​ I suspect that interfaces are in fact synonymous with compositionality. That is, compositionality is not just the ability to compose objects, but the ability to work with an object after intentionally forgetting how it was built. ​ can interact in complex ways that block understanding ​ More generally, I claim that the opposite of compositionality is emergent effects. The common definition of emergence is a system being ‘more than the sum of its parts’, and so it is easy to see that such a system cannot be understood only in terms of its parts, i.e. it is not compositional. Moreover I claim that non-compositionality is a barrier to scientific understanding, because it breaks the reductionist methodology of always dividing a system into smaller components and translating explanations into lower levels.