Initial

I think I initially started this blog because I wanted to communicate with people better.  At the time I was feeling very low and part of the problem seemed to be that I found difficulty in expressing myself to others.  I had spent the previous eight years intently focused on the technical details of communication.  That is, what exactly are things.  The first half of that was college.  The whole point of taking classes is to get better at describing things exactly.  After all examinations posses two tools:  Direct inqueries as to what certain things are and puzzles which are easier to solve when you have a proper understanding of what a certain thing is.  The second half was the first four years of my professional career.  Honestly, that probably should have been more focused on expressing myself and communicating with my employers and coworkers, but that's not what I made it about.  I made it about understanding programming languages.  And then later when I started to run out of new distinguishing characteristics of programming language I made it about understanding mathematics.  It's time for me to swtich the purpose of this blog from practicing expression to using expression.  


I don't particularly have anything specific I want to express.  However, I have spent a lot of time thinking about different things that are important to me.  Some of that might be useful, and I want to try and express some of it to you.






So what's important to me.


I'm a christian.  Unfortunately, that's quite an ambiguous term.  I believe that Jesus Christ is the son of God, he died for our sins, and whoever believes in him shall have everlasting life.  There's more, but this is the most important part.  I can talk about it later.


I like understanding how things work.  I like tearing things apart and comprehending their exact nature.  I've noticed that there's a couple of techinques that help me to understand how things work.


Realize that normally the way you think something works is incorrect.


Lambda calculus.  I actually kind of like to think of this as the logic of implementation.


Logic.  Logic is actually kinda big.  And it's sort of ambiguous where the boundaries are.  Classical, intuitionistic, substructural, BNF, sequent calculus, natural deduction, etc.


Typing.  Typing could actually be grouped with logic, however to me logic is simply how you ensure that typing is correctly enforced.  I think the important part is actually the ability to describe different aspects of things exactly.


Of course there's also algebras, category theory, discrete and continuous mathematics, but I'm not convinced that stuff is that useful for the way I like to understand things.  Maybe they'll show up from time to time as I figure out why I would want to use them.


I've been educated as a computer scientist, so some of that will probably show up.  And I work as a software engineer.  Also, philosophy, certain types of fiction, videogames, and programming languages.