I was in Oslo. I was in Reykjavik.
In these places I thought about how the world is born. For example the world of data. If everything is a sequence of zeros and ones then there are no data --- unless they come from data.
When you start to think there are numbers and characters and strings and instructions you start to have data and then you start to have records and tagged unions and objects and all that.
The world of interactions is born in the same way. There are always messages, asynchronously born, issued, exchanged, received, processed. This has been so for thousands of years. There are however nothing we can catch there, nothing on which we can build --- not yet. Only when you single out a streak, or a zig-zag, of messages, some collection of messages, and say "here is a conversation" and you now see not messages but a flow which makes up a conversation, that is, you only have to single out one collection of messages as a flow, as an exchange, that is when a conversation is born.
Then you have many conversations, just as you have many data.
That is how types come about. Types in their basic form are there to single out, and once you learn to single out, once you can de-lineate, put a circle on the ground and find the "figure" (hence the "ground" too) you say (and this is a violent act, in a philosophical sense) there are messages inside (so in fact this is the first time you have seen those messages) and there are messages outside of it, only at that time you start to have a type, since types are there to delineate and describe, you want to say this is a "number", this is a "function/procedure over numbers", a basic form of types is something which can never be separated from individualisation.
I know this part is subtle. I know I need concrete examples. Not today. Here I hurriedly record my further thought from Reykjabik.
Static analysis can make things right and there are many powerful methods: for that purpose we first need something to start with and that is not static analysis. Similarly assertions and logic however snappy your reasoning would be are not something you can ultimately rely on since there is nothing you can ultimately rely on --- when you think you are not relying on anything you are doing so based on some tacit understanding of a closed community (which may give you comfort but which does not give you clarity). No ultimate. So you need to rely on something which has an explicit act of starting. I do not know why this is like this but it is so.
Kripke, a great thinker, wrote about something similar --- about an act of naming. For many "names" no ritual of naming as he described may have actually taken place. What he meant is that it is an explicit act, even if an unconscious act, you communicate that decision of naming, even if one on the receiving side does not see that it is a decision. And how it was fitting for me to think about these acts in Reykjabik, in the world of volcanoes and barren lands, where we need to name, we need to delineate, since if we do not do so we do not have anything to cling to, we cannot (re-)claim a place for human.
(By the way that is why there are only few good names in science and they are what will remain. And science of computing is almost not science --- at least its subject is so new in comparison with what we know as natural sciences or even mathematical sciences. So it has very few good names --- of course we have many fashionable ones but good ones are rare).
And just as yellow is yellow and a dog is a dog we have data, and we reach delineation of the whole collection of messages --- in the past, now and in the future ---- zig-zags of interactions, flows of interactions, we say "here is a conversation taking place" and "this conversation has such and such structure" and I do not think I am proposing this as a new technology, I am describing how it has begun and how it is always beginning repeatedly, just as an act of naming is taking place every time everywhere every now-and-then, but let me tell you this at least, albeit in a low voice: I do suspect things begin like this since I have some recollection of seeing them taka place.
In fact how can you analyse if you do not have the target of analysis? How can you assert and reason if you do not have the target of assertion and reasoning? What do you reason? What do you assert? Of course you can leave things implicit ... but that may be a bad strategy, in the end. And what I am saying is something well-known in science: do not think clever ideas work, clever ideas never work, only deep understanding works. One thing we have known for a long time in science is all good ideas are accumulative and almost uninterestingly built up towards generality and uniformity.
But I am not saying we cannot have that moment of striking clarity, like when Turing wrote to his mother he had found something very different from theories by his contemporaries, that his theory runs.
And it ran, and is running. That abstract discovery (with others' subsequent contributions including and notably Von Neumann's) has led to what we know as computing. And quite a few decades after that discovery perhaps only these days we started to have theories which can describe and understand the meaning of that discovery as science. But that is another story.
I was in Oslo, I was in Reykjavik. Tonight I wrote a few lines from what I remembered there, as well as after I came back to Britain. I am a foreigner living on British soil, and perhaps a foreigner for ever wherever I live. But I invite you to this abstract topos, a forum, since neither is what I pointed out above about science telling us that we cannot enjoy a few conversations, dialogues --- this is the place friends can exchange ideas in a most abstract and most concrete way, in a way which is about something universal but which can only be done in a most personal way, as human has continued to do so since they found this way of conversing and as they will continue to do so as far as human's history lasts.
kohei
