A Kantian view is an improvement: there is some of both sides. We bring a particular structure of perception to the external phenomena, and it matches to some degree the 'regularities' in those external phenomena.

And this describes software: we have a preconceived set of data structures and algorithms, yet we can fit them to all kinds of structures of ad hoc business uses.

We cannot simply draw all the structure from observation. We must impose something of the material which we are modelling with. The whole task of engineering, in general and in each case, is to find a balance, a practical meeting of the two.

This is not really something that OO has 'wrong' that something else can fix. OO has weaknesses, but the deeper 'problem' is never soluble: the essence of engineering design means it is always an imperfect tradeoff.

I like the direction you're going here, but I would argue this structure is not unique to Kant. You could read Plato (or any idealist -- Schopenhauer or Philo or Hegel for that matter) the same way. The ontological structures are broadly the same, the difference lies in epistemology and the nature and origin of the formal epistemological structures to begin with.

Kant locates the origin of ideals/forms/categories in the mind only, as an essential pre-existing structure of the mind (think: hard-coded ROM), where Plato located their origins in reincarnate memory (not sure what the computer analogy would be there -- recycling a motherboard at Fry's?).

I remember in high school philosophy class describing prototype-based systems as Aristotelean and class-based as Plutonic. I'm amused you've hit upon the same general idea. (For what it's worth, I like Self, apparently named after an Aristotelean philosopher with rational self-interest.)

Any chance you could expand upon this? I'd be interested to read more about this (and other) parallel/s.

I think this is a reference to Plato's Theory of Forms, in which every object we see partakes of some idealized (static, eternal, and real) form (ie, is an instantiation of a class). Except... in Plato's theory, everything is a somewhat corrupted or imperfect image of its form. The theory has a lot of problems (the third man problem, for example).

See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Theory_of_Forms

Well, yes. There's various interpretations of what kind of existence Plato thought the Forms actually had - whether he believed in a literal "realm of the Forms" or not. And while you'd be hard pressed to find someone who actually subscribes to the theory of Forms these days, there are a lot of things in, for example, the philosophy of Mathematics that smell a lot like it.

I think the idea of Forms is still quite valuable

Aristotle takes kind of the opposite tack - he is also very focused on building ontologies and taxonomies, but he views them as constructions of the intellect imposed upon their subjects, rather than being the most fundamental reality of the subject prior to its actual being. It's pretty much the same distinction ragenwald talks about in the OP.

As for the general isomorphism between metaphysics and philosophy, you can find it almost everywhere, depending how hard you want to look (and how far you want to stretch your metaphors...). But metaphysics is largely concerned with the types of things and entities in the world, and how they can possibly interact. If you think of the "software space" as its own universe, it's pretty easy to draw parallels. Forms and Categories are low hanging fruits, obviously, but a few other parallels spring to mind:

- Kant's seperation between Phenomena and Noumena relates to the difference between interface and implementation, as well as to the concept of abstractions in general.

- How a software component's "epistemology" (how it "knows" about other components in the system) works can be compared to different philosophers - do they operate on a consistently readable shared state (an empirical world?) or do they request information from a central broker service (God brokers sense impressions, ala Berkeley?)

- Berkeley's idea of direct impressions only in the mind has some relationship to the concept of laziness.

- etc.

I'll try to think up some more and post them later. It's less that you can write a paper on the startling isomorphism between theories, and more that it's really easy to use software metaphors to describe philosophy and vice versa (though software tends to be much more concrete, obviously).

"Aristotle takes kind of the opposite tack - he is also very focused on building ontologies and taxonomies, but he views them as constructions of the intellect imposed upon their subjects, rather than being the most fundamental reality of the subject prior to its actual being."

Well, not exactly, and in fact this would turn Aristotle into his metaphysical opposite: a nominalist in the mold of Occam.

For Aristotle the formal cause of a substance is in fact absolute, every bit as real and 'prior' as with Plato, the big difference between the two being the question of epistemology, or how we become acquainted with the form to begin with. Yes, Aristotle argues that we know the form of a thing from experience, but the form of that thing, and the abstractions we produce from many experiences from similar things, are as real as with Plato and, as in Plato, point to higher, more organized spiritual structures that comprise ultimate reality.

Call me when somebody comes up with a Whitehead-ean programming paradigm.

"Kant's seperation between Phenomena and Noumena relates to the difference between interface and implementation, as well as to the concept of abstractions in general."

I'm not sure Kant would allow that phenomena are all that abstract. They're not eidetic/formal (although later Husserl would argue that they intend towards eidetic objects), they're merely the subjective experience of a particular thing. The (purely hypothetical) relationship between the noumena and phenomena are (naively and hypothetically) one-to-one, if there is any real relationship at all.

The n/p distinction is made by Kant not to emphasize the abstract nature of our mental experiences, but rather to emphasize a radical epistemic uncertainty regarding the objects that we would naively assume "exists" apart from the experience.

a bit late, but thanks for the response.

On of the biggest parallels might be: Most software is not written to be understood by anyone except the author.

There is a truth behind this joke. Reading the many excited comments about parallels between philosophy and coding makes me think that another view could be needed to balance this. Western philosophy was bent toward logic, and that may be the reason we see some relations with coding, which is really related to logic. But other philosophies do not focus on logic and thus do not parralel so much with coding, or at least not the same way. I think about Chinese philosophy, which I know a bit more. Its main focus being how to help humans living together, i.e. how to civilize humans (and "is it possible?"), the above parallels vanish away, more or less.

Still some parralels can be drawn. A taoist coder would let things happen, let the code find its way spontaneously toward the result, like the knife of the butcher must find its way into the meat. Taoism applied to code would produce independant pieces of software that live by itself and may have no intended usage (e.g. the yes command in coreutils).

A confucean coder would always follow the standards (the rites), always consider his production in context of a bigger picture, would produce a software that is very strict for himself and forgiving for others, would write programs tending to improve the life of others.

It has been said that wise Chinese of the old time where confucean the day and taoist the night. While this is actually because taoism is related with sex, the parallel could be that a good hacker/coder should be confucean at his day work, and taoist for personal projects.

None of them would thing in "ontology", though, because this is something, like the idea of God, that has no deep meaning in Chinese ancient philosophies. They would not debate too much on languages and the meaning of words, they would just use them as fit. They would use OOP as a tool, when it helps writing better code (when one need to glue state and actions together).

Do I contradict myself? I said "no parallels" and then "there are some parallels". But the ones I draw just apply to any activity of any human being, not just coding.

There's some Western philosophical precedents for this tack as well. Heraclitus comes to mind, later Nietzsche, Kierkegaard. William of Occam I suppose would never allow 'classes' at all, only radically individual one-off objects.

Two modern philosophers that I think may provide a better conceptual foundation for a less reified/Platonic/Aristotelian/Formalist view would be Alfred North Whitehead and Henri Bergson, both of whom described the ingression or duration of individual substances into other substances. Rather than hard borders (interfaces?) that interact in static and unchangeable ways, substances actually change each other at these borders. Bergson in particular I think would be interesting at many levels of the SDLC -- from emergent design (he advocated an 'emergent' fingertip-feel, intuitive approach to Science) to the nature of objects and hierachies.

What about the notion that an interface can change/morph according to the client that consumes it? This would move towards a more Heraclitean/Whiteheadean/Bergsonian paradigm.