Exploration Through Example

Example-driven development, Agile testing, context-driven testing, Agile programming, Ruby, and other things of interest to Brian Marick

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Thu, 24 Apr 2003

Two book references. No, three.

Laurent quotes from Winograd and Flores's Understanding Computers and Cognition and also links to a discussion page. I read Winograd and Flores while sitting in on an odd course that Simon Kaplan taught at Illinois, and it quite excited me, to the point where I hunted down Flores's dissertation. Some influences linger - for example, their discussion of Heidegger's notion of "ready-to-hand" tools helped me think about what I call "just what I needed (almost) bugs".

(Kaplan's course was where I first read the wonderful Proofs and Refutations, Imre Lakatos's book on the philosophy of mathematics. It's written as a stage play about the history of Euler's conjecture that, for polyhedra, V-E+F=2).

I'm reminded of one last book. To write this blog entry, I had to create a new category for it, misc. That reminded me again of how much I dislike hierarchies as a way of representing/organizing my very non-hierarchical brain. I love Blosxom, my blogging tool, and I think it's a cute hack the way it uses the file system hierarchy to organize, but that cute hack is in fact an example of a "just what I needed (almost)" bug. (Well, maybe it's not a bug, given how much code it saves.)

Categories are in fact a tool of limited usefulness. Plato said we should "carve nature at its joints" (like a good butcher does), but lots of nature doesn't have any joints. This point is put nicely in George Lakoff's Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. I found it pretty convincing.

I wish I had a blogging tool that let me tag entries with multiple keywords (or went beyond that), but was as easy to install, use, and control as Blosxom.

## Posted at 08:50 in category /misc [permalink] [top]