Programming Languages and Concept Lattices

Nowadays, it seems more and more supporters are
being won by the view that arithmetic is a 
further development of logic;
that a more rigorous establishment of 
arithmetical laws reduces them to purely 
logical laws and to such laws alone..."

• from “Function and Concept by Gottlob Frege
• You can read his book, The Foundations of Arithmetic, here.

Wait what?

• I stumbled upon this quote while reading about Begriffs, which were referenced in my Formal Concepts Analysis coursework. I’ve been thinking about that a bit, since my path has been influenced by continued interest in mathematical logic and how it ties into computer science.

• I’m specifically learning a bit about Concept Lattices, which are super amazing! There is even software that allows you to add and delete relationships and connect nodes and edges together in such lattices! Just wicked! :D

Concept Lattice terms / things to think about

• Infimum
• Supremum
• What constitutes a complete lattice?
• Transitivity
• Irreducibility

Don’t you go to school?

• Yes! I had my first Programming Languages class and I loved it! Sure, this isn’t Programming Language Theory, which resembles more Discrete Mathematics, but it’s about Programming Languages, and we get to make a compiler! So I’m psyched. We actually spoke about Cobol, Algol, Lisp, JIT, etc.
• It was really a bit sad because our class was half-full. It seems sort of like a metaphor; students (at least from my school), if given the chance, may not necessarily care about languages other than the ones they have to learn. I wish there were some way to encourage people to try out other languages!

Anyways

• I was supposed to hang out with my mentor tonight at JPL, but I was offered an opportunity to help out at a recruiting event. So I’m up for that. I’ll get to meet a bunch of recruiters, get paid for my time and meet a bunch of programmers and even get fed. I mean..I see no downsides, and it’s just for a couple hours.

And that’s about it!

• Oh, I spoke about Matthias yesterday, and he popped up in a video via the ACM that includes Racket! My friend, Ben (from POPL) makes an appearance in his group of advisees in the video, too! :D