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Comment by chasingthewind | Hacker News Reader

When I was right out of college I worked with a guy who had a PhD in philosophy and had studied Kripke closely. He was working in software at the time because it’s hard to make a living as a philosopher. He gave me one of his extra copies of Naming and Necessity. I had never read any philosophy and I was amazed.

Kripke was truly a brilliant philosopher.

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> He was working in software at the time because it’s hard to make a living as a philosopher.

Yeah, there are a lot of us. Spend a few years deeply studying logic and reasoning, and programming really just feels like a different version of the same thing.

Learning an algorithm is very similar to learning an argument or a proof, and designing algorithms is very similar to designing arguments.

I think you've just discovered Curry-Howard isomorphism!

> Yeah, there are a lot of us.

I wouldn't say a lot, I've never met a fellow philosopher/developer in person. I would expect there would be more!

I did a Philosophy/CS double major for undergrad. I work as an SRE now, but when I was in school there was one other student in my cohort who was also doing the same pairing, she intended to go work on machine ethics last I heard.

There really are a number of delightful intersections between the two subjects and I have considered writing a book on them,“Philosophy for Computer Scientists” or perhaps “Computer Science for Philosophers” :)

Good Lord I wish more people understood which elements of RDBs are essential features of the logic they’re based on; which ones are results of the way the relational model screwed up the logic it was supposed to be based on (hello there, Closed World Assumption); which ones are results of the way SQL screwed up the relational model; and which ones are just elements of a performance and security model that is quite independent of the logic (eg. there’s nothing in the logic which dictates that adding a row is routine but adding a table is a Big Deal). It probably doesn’t qualify as a delightful subject, but it would be a great service if someone could explain this stuff to people.

I minored in philosophy. Was tempted to go all the way. But money. And I always did love computers.

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