Effective Computation

One thing that strikes me is how much effort we humans put into writing highly precise rules for machines.  As I grow older, one thing that preoccupies my thoughts is how I can effectively reduce the verbiage that the machine needs.

Current programming methodologies require an army of programmers.  A ton of people to implement a solution to a problem.  And, if I were to trust my intuition, the reason everyone underestimates the time to make something arises from a natural high-level view rather than a fine-combed every-detail accounted for view.

What has happened, then, to give a high level view is a massive number of functions.  Really, a ton of functions.  Highly specialized functions.  Want to delete a file, there's a function.  Want to list all folders, another function, etc. etc.  there is little consistency amongst the APIs.

But, let's step back a bit.  What are we actually working with?  Linear algebra has this nice notion of a vector space.  As long as certain basic rules are obeyed, then a set is a vector space.  Then what is the verbiage that we see so often in programming languages?

First, the data.  It's all dictionaries.  An array is a dictionary with unsigned integer values as keys.  A set is a dictionary with just keys, nil values.  A queue is a dictionary with keys always increasing and the minimum key being removed...  File systems are dictionaries of dictionaries.  A 3D scene is a dictionary forming a tree of dictionaries.

We can even further simplify it to a tree.  A binary tree.  As a dictionary can be implemented using one...

If we can access all data uniformly, then what do we do with logic?  Bring the most common logic into the API.  Find through the file system is the same as find a node in a scene graph.  This essentially forces consistency across the entire API.

If we want to drop the learning curve and increase the speed of development, then it is this that we must consider.  Focus on what is peculiar to the software at hand, not get marred in the details that all software reinvents as a rite of passage.