Entangled monolith? [was: Re: GR proposed re: choice of init systems]

[Joel Rees]

2014/10/21 7:56 "Andrei POPESCU" <andreimpopescu at gmail.com>:
>
> On Ma, 21 oct 14, 07:46:14, Joel Rees wrote:
> > 2014/10/21 4:12 "Andrei POPESCU" <andreimpopescu at gmail.com>:
> > >
> > > On Ma, 21 oct 14, 03:00:59, Joel Rees wrote:
> > > >
> > > > Would one expect the parts of a monolith to refrain from knowing
too much
> > > > about each other?
> > >
> > > How can a monolith have different parts?
> >
> > Well, that's kind of the whole point with monolithic software.
> >
> > Things that should have parts, effectively, don't.
>
> I'm not questioning whether it should or not have parts.
>
> > In other words, you can't separate the parts out and work with them
> > individually without being very careful about the side-effects of the
> > changes you're making.
> >
> > But surely you know that?
> >
> > (I wouldn't think this OT, but I'll respect your choice.)
>
> I was actually curious about the expression "entangled monolith", which
> doesn't make sense at all for me, but then I'm not a native English
> speaker. In my understanding this doesn't even qualify as a pleonasm.

Words are funny creatures. So are ideas. But that doesn't help explain, I
suppose.

I think it's less a matter of English, and more a matter of how much you
may have studied/been indoctrinated in the concepts of semantic
entanglement/linkage. Or, perhaps, of your opinions concerning the size of
the set of NP complete problems.

Well, there are cultural biases. I've sure found a lot of Japanese
programmers who write C that looks more like CoBOL. And when I try to
explain the necessity of keeping a clean symbol space, they think first in
terms of declaring all the (global) variables at the top of the file so
everyone knows what they are.

Anyway, if you think about Ric's comment about the movie 2001, well, the
monolith is not subject to being taken apart and analyzed. Dave's
interaction with it is pretty much passive. 2001 is a great movie, very
thought provoking. But I think it encourages a passive attitude towards
things one doesn't understand.

I'm not much in favor of that attitude.

--
Joel Rees

Computer memory is just fancy paper,
CPUs just fancy pens.
All is a stream of text
flowing from the past into the future.
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