To Be Is to Be a Value of a Variable (2006) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

To Be Is to Be a Value of a Variable (2006) [pdf]

dcs.warwick.ac.uk

29 pointstosh6 comments

The phrase "To be is to be a value of a Variable" was inspired by Quine (1948), not Boolos (1984) in his seminal "On What There Is": https://www.uvm.edu/~lderosse/courses/metaph/OnWhatThereIs.p...

The paper is still worth reading today.

Yes, thank you! And Quine spoke about „the value of a bound variable“ if I am not mistaken which seems like a minor point, but there has to be some universe of discourse and some quantification has to go on for a variable to be bound.

This is a good quick background on Quines motivation and further developments btw: https://philosophy.stackexchange.com/a/23798

This look like a point-by-point rebuttal of a private mailing list discussion? Wouldn't it make more sense to link to https://www.dcs.warwick.ac.uk/~hugh/TTM/DTATRM.pdf ?

Also https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/99350/did-date-and-da...: TTM has had no significant impact. The few products that have attempted to implement TTM's ideas are 'hobby products' developed and supported by cranky, strongly opinionated and difficult to deal with individuals. The answerer would never recommend anybody use these products.

Alphora was supposed to be really nice to use and a definite improvement on SQL. It didn't have market share so it never got more market share, that's why it failed and not for technical inferiority.

> The few products that have attempted to implement TTM's ideas are 'hobby products' developed and supported by cranky, strongly opinionated and difficult to deal with individuals

Do you actually know anything about the TTM? Can you point to some of these products other than Alphora? (I've looked at them and their just research projects/personal projects IIRC). Do you think the SQL is the pinnacle of RDBMS languages? Cos it bloody well isn't.

> supported by cranky, strongly opinionated and difficult to deal with individuals. The answerer would never recommend anybody use these products.

Interesting how this also applied to the early GNU project as well, with you-know-who being its creator, and yet the end result turned out to be quite markedly different: GNU and FSF, whatever one's opinions may be on the people behind those things, have had enormous impact.

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