Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)

Re:Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012) by samatman on Thursday February 12, 2015 @10:23AM (#9039103)

I understand why Alan Kay said what he did, but a closer analogy would be to Euclid's Elements. If one follow's Lisps axioms, one ends up with Lispian Computation, elegant, clean, tail-call optimized.

Other axioms of computing lead the user in different directions, notably Hindley-Milner. Lisp carves territory in mathematical state space, not physical reality.

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Re:Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012) by abecedarius on Thursday February 12, 2015 @11:17AM (#9039438)

Maxwell's equations in the usual Heaviside form aren't even the most elegant way to write them: http://www.av8n.com/physics/maxwell-ga.htm

I'm curious how people might carry that through the analogy.

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Re:Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012) by MeadowTheory on Thursday February 12, 2015 @02:16PM (#9040711)

I'm rather partial to the differential form version. Something about the neat almost symmetry (in the layman's sense) of the two equations. And how deceptively innocent looking they are.

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Re:Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012) by jheriko on Thursday February 12, 2015 @01:43PM (#9040481)

Einstein tensor notation is amazing. :)

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