From: Christian Szegedy <szegedy@...>
Date: 2002-09-08T04:31:06+09:00
Subject: Re: Larry Wall's comments on Ruby

Albert Wagner wrote:

> precludes the principles from applying to a complex program.  I suppose that 
> there is either another "complexity theory" or the one that you pointed me to 
> has been bastardized in the pop science community.

I am a (discrete) mathematician. My brother happens to be a
professor of complexity theory at the Rutgers University.
The complexity theory, I pointed to, has its origin in the 1970-s.
It started with the recognition of the clear distinction between the NP 
and exponential complexity classes. It is a very serious and highly 
fruitful branch of computer science. One could say that this is
where the main focus of computer science lies. There is nothing 
"bastardized" about it.


> My understanding was that 
> OOP technologies grew out of some sort of studies in complexity, and were an 
> attempt to deal with that complexity.

I don't know about any reason for OO techniques than human psychology.

 From a mathematical point of view there is no principal difference
between Ruby and a Turing machine and malbolge. (It is only the 
user-friendliness.)

> 
> Somewhat related:  I saw a graph some years ago that impacted on me.  The y 
> axis was randomicity and x was complexity.  It was to illustrate that (a) if 
> randomicity was sufficiently high then statistical methods were useful and 
> (b) if randomicity was very low and complexity was low then standard 
> mechanical methods were useful.  What I found startling was the large area in 
> the middle and to the right that were not random enough for statistics to be 
> reliable and too complex for mechanical methods.  Yet, it was just in this 
> area, where no reliable tools currently existed that most of the interesting 
> and important problems of our time existed.

Sound like pseudoscience to me...

Regards, Christian