For those who know both computer science and art history, you might chance upon an observation that early decades of 21st century computer programming has developed to the art of rococo period.

It’s hard for me to hold a chuckle as I learn more about rococo period art and recall the amount of literal decorators my code was required to have at a, possibly fictional, job that I once may have had or heard about. (Obviously, there’s often more decorators than code.)

If you know, you know.

Beyond the formalized linguistic decorations used by the code base, there are also implicit requirements about documentation, formatting of documentation, linkage to code, spelling, grammar, flow and search-ability, ease of maintenance of documentation to correspond to code… Here I interpret the documentation as decorative additions to code which does not require documentation to run.

Sure, today we still feel that code documentation is essential to correctness of code. But I bet most baroque and rococo artists also felt that decorative extravagance is necessary to produce art.

And last but certainly not the least, every machine learning paper is obligated to have open source code and theorems proved in math proof language. Although they often in the appendix and footnote, they tend to be quite more substantial than the paper itself. I’ve even come to discard papers that do not include them. We consider proofs and implementation essential to peer reviewed academic papers. Can these extravagantly implemented extras be like the decorative aspects of art from rococo period?

Will we discard these? Decorators and natural language documentation in code, and paper source code and proofs? Will we collectively be able to develop to an intellectual level where these things are integrated and homogenized together? Will we realize larger artistic structural patterns, forms, themes, etc.

Perhaps we will arrive at a day of “neoclassic computer age” during which we reject and explicitly discard some of the elements we think to be essential today. Can you imagine a paper that works very hard to not include mathematical proof? @paperswithoutcode #provablyprooflesss #illogical #programvariance #BIGOMEGA anyone?

Or a piece of code striving to be without documentation? or perhaps we would even write code deliberately and systematically incorporating what we consider software bugs today like they’ve done with dissonance and atonality last century. Proofs with the most subtle errors anyone ?

The code without doc actually seem quite feasible, even using just the technologies we have today. But my mind’s mind dissipates like fog in the sun when I think of the others…

🧐

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P.s. a child is preparing for a California Music Teacher Association Certificate of Merit test (level 1) I have the opportunity to learn more about these periods that I’ve known since Mr. Wilkerson’s world history class late last century. Very late and slow learner I am… but I learn, nonetheless. ✌️

One time, a dear family member told me of a trick for drinking ice water. I’m told that drinking it very slowly will tend to soften the discomfort of the very cold water hitting the stomach—the water warms up as you swallows.

Recently, I’ve found a situation where this doesn’t end well. If one is to drink some very cold ice water (think 32oz cup filled with ice cube, then add water), due to the cold temperature, the water may sooner cool your throat than warm up. The resulting shrinkage of blood and other liquid filled vessels causes tiny little bubbles to pop up on the tip of the tongue. my guess is the construction of blood vessels actually ends up pushing some blood back into the tongue causing the pressure increase.

The good news is that if you then take another sip of the same cold water and hold it on your tongue, the coldness causes the bubble to shrink. This is likely caused by one of several things: the liquid inside the bubbles shrinks due to cooling; the blood vessels in the tongue constricts and helps to equalize the pressure; or it could also be that the cold kills your sensations of pain.

In all cases this whole problem arose in the application of a symbolically learned heuristic (somebody told me) One often needs a reminder that what must have seemed to be very wise solutions to a physical problem in the past may not be useful to new problems due to the bounds of their effectiveness.