A stimulating thought in a stimulating thread https://twitter.com/wcrichton/status/1495166007022739456

This is a really great thread! I like the split he makes around existing hardware vs formal reasoning, I'd love to think and explore what else fits nicely into that ontology. I suspect there's a lot.

You could summarize a large part of my goals as trying to unify those two branches.

A very good thread, thanks for the pointer. I couldn't stop myself from jumping in 😉 I have been thinking in this space as well for a long time, though contrary to @Andrew F, I am not out to unify the two branches, but to exploit their complementarity. One reason is that I see the two branches as much more fundamental than their manfestation in software. For example, the experiment/theory distinction in science is very similar. Experiment explores the "existing hardware" of nature, whereas theory builds model to reason about nature.

Well, it's a lens, anyway...

Re: processes vs objects in mathematics. “_structurally_-as objects, and operationally-as processes” reminds me of work in structural computing that aims to synthesise notions of structure, data, and more recently behaviour. Asking questions like “what would it mean for an entity to be potentially computed and computing at any time?” or “system infrastructure must assume that any entity is at all times (at least potentially) both structured and structuring.” See https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24647-3_12 and https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-540-24647-3_1