Another difference with music that strikes me is the level of abstraction : a note is a note. A line of code (especially in a imperative setting) is much more than a line of code.
But this is exactly what "semantics" is about, or not? It is the question, when you have a set of symbols or abstractions, what sort of things do they represent. Interesting to think that the old greeks and chinese basically used only 4-5 sort of abstractions to explain the different forms of matter in the universe (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Classical_element), whereas now we use at least 100 sort of atoms, and millions of sort of molecules. And without the simple abstractions by Euclid (point and lines), we could not evolve mathematics and most of modern sciences. And my point is, that abstractions (concepts) change over time depending on the tools or instruments we use. Without piano's, there would be no Bach, Mozart or Beethoven. And in general, music would have been far less differentiated without the introduction of new tools (compare the differences in compositions between Palestrina, Telemann, Corelli, Bach, Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Wagner, Schoenberg). Also, in painting you see the emergence of many new idea's by having better ways to make paint and colors, and by the uses of lenses. Similarly, Von Neumann machines allows us to think about programming in a certain way, i.e. step-by-step-by-step-by-step.... but it seems that we start to learn that the amount of steps we can execute per second is not really relevant for many sort of problems. Ok, there are still many area's where we can profit from better algorithms and machines that would improve the calculation of some FFT, but what counts more is often the WAY we think about our abstractions. I think this is why functional programming is interesting. This discussion on programming approaches reminds me as well on the fight between empiricism and rationalism. The former philosophers tried to learn and generalize by experience (maybe the "hacker" idea), while the latter tried to improve ways of deductive reasoning (the mathematical approach). I think only later philosophers such as Kant could merge concepts from both worlds (from the senses and ideas), but to my knowledge, this had more impact on politics and ethics, rather than science or mathematics. (The source codes by Kant are quite difficult to read. It seems he wanted to write this way to increase the level of thinking.) ___________________________________________________________ Telefonate ohne weitere Kosten vom PC zum PC: http://messenger.yahoo.de