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Today I will present my Onward! Essay "<Redressing...
# share-your-work
k
Today I will present my Onward! Essay "Redressing the Balance: A Yin-Yang Perspective on Information Technology" at SPLASH (as a remote participant). It will be live-streamed at 18:00 UTC

on YouTube▾

. The topic is how computing technology can be made to better support processes of learning, understanding, and trusting, for individuals or for society as a whole (we call it "science" then). Such support has requirements very different from those for designing and constructing software systems for deployment as tools.
m
Good luck! And hopefully you have less or no streaming issues and off course..no echo 😊
k
I opted for pre-recording my talk, so at least technical issues are limited to the Q&A session. I have yet to experience a remote presentation without any technical problems.
m
Good decision!
s
Judging from the few talks I saw with either remote speakers involved or done completely remote, there’s a good chance it’ll work smoothly. I know, surprising. Fingers crossed and good luck!
l
it was and went great, well done!
g
@Konrad Hinsen I enjoyed your talk. There was a question about "how many layers should there be?". IMO, the answer is "an infinite number". This thought squeezed a blog out of me.
k
@guitarvydas Your layers and mine and not quite the same. For yours, which are roughly layers of abstraction, I agree that there should be no limit to their number. My layers are layers of documentation, with the actually running source code being the ultimate one. I doubt it makes sense to have more than three layers, but only experience can tell.
The recording of my talk remains available at the same URL, but it's easier to find with a timestamp: https://www.youtube.com/live/L1pOMC41bS8?t=3370 I found Onward! to be a very good first encounter with CS conferences, even though the role of remote participant is a bit frustrating. SPLASH had set up a Discord for conversations between on-site and remote participants, but it hasn't been used much. Meaning that in practice, being a remote participant is not very different from being an anonymous watcher on YouTube. Thanks to @jonathoda and colleagues for organizing this track!
g
@Konrad Hinsen IMO, abstraction and documentation are one in the same. Human-oriented documentation of intent. The goal being to have documentation that is compilable and executable, i.e. documentation that cannot go out of date.
k
Documentation for who? My talk is about documentation for users. Non-programmers, who don't care about the software architecture, but only about the user-visible functionality. Giving them code, no matter how well written, is like giving the circuit diagram of a TV to someone who just wants to watch TV.
m
Have you got an example of "yin-friendly type systems"?
k
The best I found so far for software (as opposed to 19th century maths) is order-sorted term algebras for rewriting systems, as implemented in the OBJ family of specification languages. That's what I used for my digital scientific notation. You can construct the type structure along with the terms and rules, which is nice. But it's a "one-type-system-fits-all" approach, like everything else I have seen so far. For anyone interested, the best entry point for exploring order-sorted term algebras today is Maude, a descendant of OBJ3.
m
Thanks, I am going to dive in deeper and read about it .. since I operate on the "yang"-side this is opening up a new world for me, but I am open for change 😀. I currently dont have a type system in code flow canvas (or at least very limited), and I am doing some research to how to implement this and this might provide some fresh insights
t
Nice paper!
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