Rich Hickey - Are We There Yet? A deconstruction of object-oriented time [PDF]

The developer of Clojure (a JVM based version of Lisp) uses the process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead to make some remarks about the future of programming languages. Perhaps concurrency would be easier if instead of having mutable objects in memory we had static actual entities that are referred to by different temporal functions.

It’s an interesting slideshow at least. I’m sort of used to helping myself understand different philosophical theories by thinking about them in terms of a C-like system of pointers and functions (ie. a Kantian “concept” is a boolean function that takes in sense-data [which Kant calls intuitions] and returns true or false), so it’s interesting to see someone trying to do this in the opposite direction.

Still if someone makes a programming language with a Whiteheadian non-simple location or a cosmic pursuit of beauty, I’m pretty sure brains will explode.