brianclements

One of the big foundational insights that chapter 2 of SICP gave to me was the separation between data, and it's representation. It is important as a programming concept but also as a philosophical one. And the first thing that popped up in my mind upon this insight was how similar it was to my (novice) understanding of the Uncertainty Principal in physics.

Let me elaborate. So the Uncertainty Principle "assert[s] a fundamental limit to the precision with which certain pairs of physical properties of a particle, known as complementary variables, such as position x and momentum p, can be known simultaneously."[1]

In a way, a datum, lets say the quantity "2", that is not being used, or coerced into a specific form in any way (string, number, function, list) also exhibits varying probabilities of being one form or another simultaneously. When you try to represent that data when you set it, use it, whatever, you coerce it into a form, like "wave function collapse". It's stored as binary, mapped as hex, labeled as a variable, represented as whatever forms your language is enabled with (string, symbol, int, float, etc.) and every step of the way, each representation has its various actions that can be done to it. Anyone else have similar insights?

Anyway, I would love more opinion/insight or other reading material on some of the more philosophical insights of programming languages computation theory in this line of thought that come to your minds. Thanks!

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncertainty_principle

I'm curious if there is research, startups, open-source projects, etc., pertaining to this topic which has intrigued me for a while.

Law and code are very similar conceptually it seems: they outline variables, environments, conditions, then execute procedures. The big difference being computers do one, and people do the other. Politics discusses this notion of "efficient" government and I want to take it even further. I'm curious about a world where, let's take property taxes for example, we can search repositories for every implementation (procedure/function) of property tax law (code) in a given country (within all states/counties), and not only see it publicly (open source), but be able to use the code for testing (how effective is this "algorithm" for a given outcome?), RFC's, forking across localities, tweaking, and all the other processes that work so well in software design.

Efficiency and smart management in software is modularization, clear roles for parts, and easy ways to plug things together (and avoid NIH syndrome) I feel like (in a programming analogy) every single city/county/state rewrites everything scratch all the time!

Of course maybe these are just different mediums that allow for very similar processes and I'm just amazed by that. But I can't help but think there is something here.

So here's the question: If in the future, a very progressive group of technophiles wanted to start a new country from scratch on a moon or space station somewhere, do you think they would do everything on a github style medium with software design type methods? Should they? Could they? Do you always need humans to enforce/interpret the laws?