← Back to context

Comment by mpweiher

1 year ago

> Plenty of state -- even mutable state -- is essential complexity.

Arguably most of it!

After all, computer don't compute.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA&t=297s

One of the miseries of life is that everyone names everything a litte bit wrong, and so it makes everything a little harder to understand in the world than it would be if it were named differently. A computer does not primarily compute in the sense of doing arithmetic. Strange. Although they call them computers, that's not what they primarily do. They primarily are filing systems. People in the computer business say they're not really computers, they are "data handlers". All right. That's nice. Data handlers would have been a better name because it gives a better idea of the idea of a filing system.

Related: The Norwegian word for "computer" is "datamaskin". Or, "data machine".

  • And in the Romance languages, some variant of “ordinator”, meaning someone who orders, regulates, or arranges, closer to the tasks we actually expect of computers.