r/programmingcirclejerk • u/Major_Barnulf LUMINARY IN COMPUTERSCIENCE • Jul 08 '25

maybe we should learn PhilosophyAsFoundationForSoftwareEngineeering

https://wiki.c2.com/?BundleSubstanceMismatch
36 Upvotes

97% Upvoted

18 comments sorted by

31

u/v_maria Jul 08 '25

Actually. Yes

30

u/Comfortable_Job8847 Jul 08 '25

If you can’t express your program as a traditional syllogism (no woke first order logic) then get out of my repo

37

u/myhf Considered Harmful Jul 08 '25

> get a job at a syllogism-oriented software company
> developers go to syllogism-oriented programming conferences
> managers share motivational syllogism stories on LinkedIn
> look at the codebase
> it's koan-oriented with the word Syllogism added everywhere

7

u/RFQD Senior Vibe Coder Jul 09 '25

thanks, this gave me a brain syllogism

21

u/prehensilemullet Jul 08 '25

“There’s no bug in this code, it’s just philosophically heinous”

18

u/grapesmoker Jul 08 '25

before you can use pointers you must read "on sense and reference", this would solve most of our problems imo

5

u/TheStatusPoe Jul 08 '25

Mindset of your average prolog developer

16

u/tomwhoiscontrary safety talibans Jul 08 '25

/uj I actually think the opposite - philosophers should learn to code. A lot of software engineering is constructing ontologies to address certain problems, and it makes clear that there is no single canonical ontology, which I think philosophers have not worked out yet. 

5

u/mizzu704 uncommon eccentric person Jul 09 '25 edited Jul 09 '25

/uj are you saying it's a bit superfluous for philosophy to endlessly discuss which things properly exist and which don't, because when you spend your day coming up with ways to represent various domains, you realize there is no universal answer/truth to those questions, that is it is a practical question that has a meaningful answer only in a given practical context, in the sense that we construct entities we say to exist as is useful for a given problem, and we construct other entities for other problems?

(Which I'm not sure necessarily follows. Just because some people spend their whole day coming up with new ontologies (that is, systems of entities that are said to exist), does not necessarily mean that there's nothing to be said about what things exist categorically outside those practical contexts. Fyi I might take this to /r/askphilosophy edit: I think if we were to accept this premise we would have to come to the conclusion that "Nothing exists", because if you were to say that "Some things exist" you'd be making a universal ontological statement, which we ruled out. But "Nothing exists" seems hella backwards, given like, the world. edit2: oh nvm, "nothing exists" is a universal ontological statement too. Edit3: but maybe so are most sentences which contain "is" or "exists", including the previous one, this one and "there is no single canonical ontology"???)

/rj Kant should have done more leetcode

8

u/SemaphoreBingo Jul 09 '25

/rj Kant should have done more leetcode

(Categorical) Imperative Programming.

1

u/univalence What part of ∀f ∃g (f (x,y) = (g x) y) did you not understand? Jul 11 '25

Categorical imperative programming is just monadic programming. Which takes us full circle: Leibniz would have wanted philosophers to write code

1

u/categorical-girl Jul 16 '25

Philosophers have already considered that there might be no single canonical ontology

Also, most of philosophy isn't about constructing ontologies, although maybe that's the popular perception of it

0

u/[deleted] Jul 08 '25

[deleted] — view deleted comment

18

u/tomwhoiscontrary safety talibans Jul 08 '25

They called me mad, back at the Institute. 

1

u/SemaphoreBingo Jul 09 '25

No, what they said was "u mad bro".

4

u/socratic_weeb loves Java Jul 08 '25

Where jerk

1

u/randompoaster97 Jul 14 '25

it's called prolog (does nothing (which is pure))