Monday 9 September 2013

Did Borges predict the OO vs functional programming debate?


On a long train journey recently, I finally got around to having a look at the copy of Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges that I've been meaning to read for so long. It didn't disappoint; already in the first story, "Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius", there were parts that made my jaw drop.


In this story, Borges tells a tale of the discovery of a volume of an encyclopaedia of an imaginary world called Tlön. This volume, which had been discovered in mysterious circumstances, describes an imaginary world, complete with geography, history, literature and philosophy. This alternate, very different world, has some very intriguing aspects:
"For them, the world is not a concurrence of objects in space, but a heterogeneous series of independent acts. It is serial and temporal but not spatial. There are no nouns in the hypothetical Ursprache of Tlön […] For example, there is no word corresponding to the noun moon, but there is a verb to moon or to monocle. […] In [the languages] of the northern hemisphere the basic unit is not the verb, but the monosyllabic adjective. Nouns are formed by an accumulation of adjectives. One does not say moon; one says airy-clear over dark-round or organs-faint-of-sky or some other accumulation."
Furthermore:
"second degree objects can be combined with others; using certain abbreviations, the process is practically an infinite one. There are famous poems made up of one enormous word, a word which in truth forms a poetic object, the creation of the rewriter. The fact that no one believes that nouns refer to an actual reality means, paradoxically enough, that there is no limit to the numbers of them."
I can't help but think that this is a striking description of functional programming in its purest form, as contrasted with the prevailing object-oriented ways of thinking about software: describing reality using functions that compose to more complex functions, with no notion of explicit state.

Borges even includes a discussion of the nature of state, specifically about the notions of identity and equality. A fable in the imaginary world describes a story, considered a paradox in that world, of nine coins that were initially lost then re-found over the next few days:
"They explained that equality is one thing and identity another, and formulated a kind of reduction ad absurdum, the hypothetical case of nine men who, on successive nights, suffer a violent pain. Would it not be ridiculous, they asked, to claim that this pain is the same one each time? […] They argued thus: that if equality entails identity, it would have to be admitted at the same time that the nine coins are only one coin."
So did Borges foresee the notions of functional programming when he wrote this story in Buenos Aires in 1941? Well, Church had already published his Lambda calculus in the 1930s but I still doubt that's the case! More likely is simply the fact that Borges was a master of playfully investigating topics in his stories, like language, logic and ontology. And these are the basic building blocks of thought that are also the foundations of software.

That, or I have just been thinking to much about functional programming lately and I'm reading too much into this as a result, Bible Code style… In any case, I look forward to reading more Borges, who knows what else there is to be found!

1 comment:

  1. Online casino site review and ratings - LuckyClub
    Best online casino site in the UK. It is a large number luckyclub.live of online casinos with a variety of games and markets to choose from. You can find the best

    ReplyDelete

Real Time Web Analytics