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A comment on Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981). Parent comment

Re:Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981) by Retric on Thursday February 09, 2017 @08:21PM (#13612567)
People are associate not procedural so objects do map somewhat better than functions. Many of the hardest problems in computer science are very short term. Navigating a car across the country is not that hard, not hitting anything or breaking any laws in the next 10 seconds and every 10 seconds along the way is vastly more difficult.

It's easy to calculate a trajectory to toss a ball into a hoop, it's much harder to get a robotic arm to do so.

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Re:Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981) by kensai on Friday February 10, 2017 @03:14AM (#13613963)
At a molecular level, we could argue that everything is procedural in humans as well. Of course things get complicated at biological neural networks where parallel processing becomes more important.

In the end, both humans and machines have to follow the laws of nature (physics) in order to process information. There is nothing magic about it, at a certain point of abstraction we both (all) work in the same information processing way.

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Re:Design Principles Behind Smalltalk (1981) by Tarean on Friday February 10, 2017 @03:41AM (#13614079)
When trying to come up with hard problems in computer science I would think np hard, not robotics.

Building a robot to toss the ball is still hard but that is an engineering and physics problem. The calculations remain simple.

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