[Cuis-dev] new YouTube video on Cuis Smalltalk

Thu Aug 8 12:00:54 PDT 2024

Hi Boris,

On 8/5/2024 9:54 AM, Boris Shingarov via Cuis-dev wrote:
>> The basic idea is to exploit the duality between 'functions and tables (or
>> processes and memory). English has nouns which refer to "objects", and
>> verbs which refer to "actors" and "relators". This is a Newtonian
>> epistemology. Modern physics and philosophy tend towards the idea that
>> both "objects" and "actors" are just different aspects of the notion of
>> process.
> After decades of re-reading and re-reading "Children of All Ages", this
> paragraph never ceases to astound me, by how explicit it is about the
> nonclassical character of Smalltalk.  The 20th-century "New Science" —
> the physics of Einstein/Bohr/Heisenberg, the logic of Brouwer/Gödel, etc
> — is *essential* to it: if we restrict ourselves to the "Newtonian
> epistemology" (classical physics, classical logic, classical calculus),
> then, (paraphrasing Schweitzer) "nothing remains of it, beyond that there
> was a teacher from California named Alan Kay".

Of course the consequences of the full realization of this have not been 
explored in the more limited Smalltalk-80.

> The duality of object's state and behavior, is just the categorial
> duality of algebra (data) and coalgebra (functions), perhaps along the
> lines of Boehm–Berarducci encoding [1], or Vassili Bykov's "How to get
> rid of Objects in Smalltalk" [2].

Haven't read this before. It was fun. Thanks.

> Of course this all is just another
> name for the topological duality between open/closed sets, or the quantum
> duality between adjoint bra/ket, etc etc — these are manifestations of
> the same phenomenon discovered around the first decades of the 20th
> century.  When I first bumped into Kay's writings, I was struck by the
> magic how Kay was able to write the above paragraph so much earlier
> before systems like CLOS (in which the connection is obvious) were
> constructed [3–7].  So I became curious, and a little digging led me to
> Papert, Rosenblatt and Minsky; this was the moment when I became aware
> that Kay did not operate in a vacuum, that the ideas of biologically-
> inspired massively-parallel communicating agents were already actively
> researched; became aware of the fight between the "connectionists" and
> the "symbolists"; and of how naïve that fight proved in light of the
> tremendous progress which was made in the following decades [8].
>
>>> The next major revision of Smalltalk was Smalltalk-80. Kay was no longer
>>> on the scene to argue that any language should be simple enough for a child
>>> to use. Smalltalk-80, says Tesler, went too far in the opposite direction
>>> from the earliest versions of Smalltalk: “It went to such an extreme to
>>> make it compilable, uniform, and readable, that it actually became hard to
>>> read, and you definitely wouldn’t want to teach it to children.”
>>>
>>> Kay, looking at Smalltalk-80, said, “It’s terrible that it can’t be used
>>> by children, since that’s who Smalltalk was intended for. It fell back into
>>> data-structure-type programming instead of simulation-type programming.”
>> I think that both Tesler and Kay are exaggerating here,
> Can you explain why you think they are exaggerating?
>  From my own personal experience (which of course is not universal, this
> is why I am genuinely interested in learning about others' experiences,
> hence asking) of trying to advance Smalltalk from the systems in use
> today towards what Kay appears to say in his writings, I find the above
> quote quite literally correct.  And in this my-own-experience when I
> describe building a Kay-like Smalltalk, I have in some cases heard
> fierce criticism of Kay (in a few cases transitioning into ad-hominem
> arguments against him).  When I try to poke harder, in most of such
> cases the deeper problem turns out to be that the opponent is firmly
> entrenched in the "Newtonian epistemology", and engages in quantum
> denialism bordering on Cargo-Cult Science.  The real challenge of the
> situation is *competition*.  It's 2024 on the calendar; my competitors
> have implemented post-quantum (cf. post-intuitionist etc.) algorithms,
> reconciled the Connectionist and the Symbolist viewpoint, they are
> engaging in kinds of computing completely unthinkable in the Newtonian
> context.

This is intriguing. I'd really like to know howsuch Kay-like Smalltalk 
would result. I'm sure it is a trip in uncharted territory. People 
rejecting that maybe are afraid of it turning out not to be practical. 
That's irrelevant. The important part is that it is interesting!

> By saying this, I don't mean to criticize Smalltalk-80 or to say that
> we should build a "Kay-like (nonclassical) Smalltalk" to *replace* Cuis
> because the latter is Newtonian.  To suggest it, would indicate a lack
> of understanding of Bohr's correspondence principle.

He he. Of course.

> Finkelstein explains this very nicely [9, 10]:
>
> "Most of the pioneers of the quantum theory, including Einstein, de Broglie,
> Schrödinger, and Wigner, retained more of the ontic classical epistemology
> than Heisenberg and Bohr, and rejected the quantum project in principle.
> Einstein's view is clearly stated and frequently quoted:
>
>> There is no doubt that quantum mechanics has seized hold of a beautiful
>> element of truth, and that it will be a test stone for any future
>> theoretical basis, in that it must be deducible as a limiting case from
>> that basis, just as electrostatics is deducible from Maxwell's equations
>> of the electromagnetic field, or as thermodynamics is deducible from
>> classical mechanics.  However, I do not believe that quantum mechanics
>> will be the starting point in the search for this basis, just as, vice
>> versa, one could not go from thermodynamics (resp. statistical mechanics)
>> to the foundations of mechanics.
> – Einstein 1936
>
> Bohr believed that quantum mechanics "will be the starting point in the
> search", as Einstein put it, but proposed nevertheless to give classical
> concepts a permanent place in its foundations.  To be sure, Bohr noted,
> our "classical" (that is, classical) concepts are "gross and inadequate",
> and nature "leaks through them like water through a net".  At the same
> time, Bohr explicitly rejected the idea of a "quantum universe" (in the
> sense of a universe described by a ψ vector).
>
> When the concept of a "ψ vector" or ket for the universe was broached
> to him, he responded vehemently "You might as well say that we are only
> dreaming that we are here."  He held that we must use classical concepts
> to communicate about our experiments if we wish to be understood.
> Heisenberg soon accepted Bohr's position on this matter, and it became
> part of the Copenhagen quantum theory:
>
>> The concepts of classical physics form the language by which we
>> describe the arrangements of our experiments and state the results.
>> We cannot and should not replace these concepts by others.  Still
>> the application of these concepts is limited by the relations of
>> uncertainty.
> – Heisenberg
>
> The insistence of Bohr and Heisenberg that we *cannot* use quantum
> concepts to describe the episystem seems over-dogmatic today. … We
> experiment with a praxic, post-Copenhagen position here.
>
> == END OF FINKELSTEIN CITATION

Nice.

> So even if one characterization of Smalltalk-80 would be that its
> designers "rejected Kay's Smalltalk project in principle", they would
> be just following in Einstein's and Schrödinger's footsteps.
> More seriously, though, if we are to build a Kay-like Smalltalk, it does
> not *replace* Smalltalk-80 just like quantum mechanics does not *replace*
> Newtonian mechanics.  In other words, Bohr's correspondence says that
> a Kay-like Smalltalk must necessarily be embedded in something like Cuis.

I thought you were going to say that a Smalltalk-80/Cuis like system is 
a trivial consequence of a the existance of a Kay-like Smalltalk. May be 
both assertions are true.

> -----
>
> Looking back at what I just wrote, I am sorry I am not really *explaining*
> but merely pointing in the general direction of what kind of thoughts
> have been occupying my mind in the past dozen years.

I take that as meaning "Work in Progress". The current state of this is 
a bit like Greek Philosophy: It is not that you have all the answers, 
but that making the right questions is already a lot.

> Also I must warn about my choice of quantum mechanics as the example of
> "twentieth-century science".  It is only because that's what I am familiar
> with, NOT because it's better.  A topologist reading this post, can
> criticize me like "hey Boris, why don't you talk about the familiar
> open/closed sets instead of those obscure bra/ket", and it would be
> perfectly valid.
>
> [1] https://okmij.org/ftp/tagless-final/course/Boehm-Berarducci.html
> [2] https://live.exept.de/doc/online/english/programming/humor.html
> [3] https://doi.org/10.1017/S0956796800001490
> [4] https://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0960129500000694
> [5] https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4613-1437-0_5
> [6] https://doi.org/10.1007/BFb0053063
> [7] https://www.cs.ru.nl/B.Jacobs/PAPERS/JR.pdf
> [8] M.L.Minsky, S.A.Papert.  Perceptrons. (Make sure you have the 1988
>      edition, not the 1969 original).
> [9] D.R.Finkelstein. Quantum Relativity.
> [10] S.A.Selesnick. Quanta, Logic and Spacetime: Variations on
>       Finkelstein's Quantum Relativity.

Thanks Boris. I really enjoyed reading this. FWIW, even if my own 
efforts are directed to exploring the potential of the Smalltalk-80 
approach, it makes me happy you're exploring the much wider potential of 
Kay's original Smalltalk vision.

Cheers,

-- 
Juan Vuletich
cuis.st
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