Don't even ask how I got to this on the Web. I don't know. It is a case of a monkey typing on a keyboard.
DomAlgebra created by James Robey looks like a be all, do all common connector to all the stuff and stuff that can be done when you go behind and into the amazing and complex domain behind the User Interface we call our "Browser of Choice". Different systems behind that interface are analogous to the Tower of Babel story.
Climb a tree to the moon and take a first step look at what is behind the User Interface on your browser. It is called "View the Page Source". You just opened the door to the fascinating world of HTML. Easy wasn't it. You just got almost to the top of the tree, at least that is how I feel when I enter the domain.
Embedded in that HTML code (a language that some people can actually read as if it was English) are scripts that do the heavy lifting. The doors to more limbs on the tree to climb like rungs on a ladder. However this ladder is not essentially linear. One step leads to another in a relational manner. It gets complex but all the complex structure is the product of a collective human mind. It can be understood exactly in its detail and totality. Just because it can be does not mean that it can all be understood by a single person. Maybe not. It would be more like disbursed knowledge. For example: If the whole software system collapsed---crashed and nothing remained nor any means to reconstruct it then how many human minds would it take with the source knowledge of the entire system to reconstruct it. In this example there is no time constraint.
Answer: n brilliant minds. A hundred? A thousand? Interesting question but they would probably all agree at the beginning to use the same object oriented language. Being brilliant they would also see the opportunity to not recreate the old system but to improve it in the process by eliminating subsets of the system that were not originally designed using object oriented methodology. Those systems that had to have bridges built from their legacy systems to fit into and operate with and object oriented system domain.
While the Tower of Babel story focuses on the destruction of the Tower and its consequences, the Information Age is all about the building (rebuilding if, based on faith, you believe the bible story) of the Tower of Babel in the Book Of Genesis.
"God came down to see what they did and said: "They are one people and
have one language, and nothing will be withheld from them which they
purpose to do." "Come, let us go down and confound their speech." And so
God scattered them upon the face of the Earth, and confused their
languages, so that they would not be able to return to each other, and
they left off building the city, which was called Babel "because God
there confounded the language of all the Earth".[3]"
Attaining conceptual ultimate "Unity" and its next step "Non-Duality" was therefore forever denied by "Division" and scattering of everything. A breaking forever of the concept of Unity into Duality to forever deny the attainment of Non-Duality that is in the domain of pure spirituality existence and knowledge. The "Great Computer Crash" back in biblical/mythological history. The situation that establishes the fact we can never get there. Can we?
We are rebuilding the Tower with a single methodology with increasingly "single language" unification.
"They are one people and
have one language, and nothing will be withheld from them which they
purpose to do."
"End Timers" working in Information Technologies are certainly worried about their job security! God is going to take notice and get us again by destroying our Cloud beyond a system restore. Is it God's chosen Dominionists that will bring down the new Tower of Babel technology is creating to unite our ability to speak and communicate by overcoming things that divide us and give us the power to see things in new ways and and the means to deal better with old problems. I agree with Cris Hedges here. They are a threat to many systems and institutions. Also tools that would be used by special interests.
The ultimate test of God against Man where the score is 3 to nothing. Could we do a system restore after the worst God could do to enforce the fact that she is God and Man never will be?
That goes into wild flights of fancy in the world of science fiction. However, God is a pattern and maybe if we figured out the game the rematch might be a toss up.
But I digress. Because I can and it amuses me.
DomAlgebra or Dom Algebra is a fascinating product.
It is small wonder that so many Information Age products incorporate some metaphorical connection to the Tower of Babel. DomAlgebra makes none but certainly could if all the metaphorical trademark names are not already captured.
The Web Browser is the foundation level of the new Tower of Babel.
How high can it go?
Structural analysis of the original Tower specs speculated that the builders of the tower would run out of oxygen to build higher before they achieved the crush factor of the foundation.
From Wikipedia:
"In his book, Structures or why things don't fall down (Pelican 1978–1984), Professor J.E. Gordon considers the height of the Tower of Babel. He wrote, 'brick and stone weigh about 120 lb per cubic foot
(2,000 kg per cubic metre) and the crushing strength of these materials
is generally rather better than 6,000 lbf per square inch or 40
megapascals. Elementary arithmetic shows that a tower with parallel
walls could have been built to a height of 2.1 km (1.3 mi) before the
bricks at the bottom were crushed. However by making the walls taper
towards the top they ... could well have been built to a height where
the men of Shinnar would run short of oxygen and had difficulty in
breathing before the brick walls crushed beneath their own dead weight.""
OOP with Tower of Babel references google results here. Presented for your edification.
1 comment:
I am the author of the product you talk about here, and I haven't stopped since then
you can find more at hypertag.io and tagos.io
Frankly, running across your post was the most interesting thing to happen today. Interesting analysis even as I would maintain a little unification around accessibility to bring programming to a larger populace are worth it! I learned coding at a young age, and I often consider how much fun this would have been back then, had i had it.
on twitter at @domalgebra. ta, and thanks for the read!
Post a Comment