Computers are symbol processing machines. All the hits of computing. All the mega-applications. All the applications that have actually made a difference in the world. They are all examples of this same principle : identify an interesting syntactic commonality and create a tool to support working with it. Without worrying what the data means... Relational databases? The web? Blogging tools? PhotoShop? Java? All of them are widely adopted, generic solutions, because they make interesting syntactic generalizations but are semantically uncommited.
http://blahsploitation.blogspot.com/2005/09/i-always-figured...
Computers are symbol processing machines. All the hits of computing. All the mega-applications. All the applications that have actually made a difference in the world. They are all examples of this same principle : identify an interesting syntactic commonality and create a tool to support working with it. Without worrying what the data means... Relational databases? The web? Blogging tools? PhotoShop? Java? All of them are widely adopted, generic solutions, because they make interesting syntactic generalizations but are semantically uncommited.