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.NET Philosophy

I couldn't help but wonder uncanny similarities between our world and a managed environment, like Microsoft .NET CLR, when I was debugging an object reference issue the other day.


Philosophically speaking, barring few exceptions, we, people from all ethnicities, share a similar pattern or a code to live our lives from birth to demise. We do pretty much the same things at a macro level yet there are idiosyncracies which belong to us and us only. The only constants across this human-function are our birth, human anatomy and our demise from this planet.


So, here goes the parallel analogy in a managed world, An object is instantiated just like we are. It goes through multitude of state changes just like we do, we go through several social and behavioral changes in our lifespan. An object is referenced by other objects just like we associate with people from various ethnical and cultural backgrounds to form a social circle. And, finally, an object is garbage collected when its not needed anymore just like we are when our bodies can't function anymore.


I could go on further explaining the analogy from all the perspectives of object oriented programming in a managed world but I'm sure you get the point.


And, we thought we were not living in a matrix?

 

Published Monday, July 03, 2006 1:58 PM by tarunkohli
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Comments

# re: .NET Philosophy

Monday, July 03, 2006 6:37 PM by adouglas
Well put.  Keep it coming ...

# re: .NET Philosophy

Tuesday, July 04, 2006 1:40 AM by Sanket Bakshi
Well Tarun,
I agree with the point that there is a great resemblance in how a human mind behaves to where we are going with the collosus computing powers and logics.
I had this very personal favorite thought from a long long time and thats - Each and every thing that a human mind thinks of or does, is nothing but a set of very complex logical equations. We think that we are more "intelligent" than the machines just because we are not able to understand those equations to the mathematical level - yet".
Intelligence is just a word, what is important is the meaning that it implies - Doesnt this statement sound familiar ;)

--Sanket

# re: .NET Philosophy

Tuesday, July 04, 2006 1:41 AM by Sanket Bakshi
Oh BTW,
In your analogy,
What do you compare the "Object Reference Not Set" error to ;)

# re: .NET Philosophy

Thursday, July 06, 2006 11:30 AM by tarunkohli
Sanket,
Well said! Even though I agree with you around our mind thinking in terms of complext logical equations yet we know there is a lot of fuzziness in the way we lead our lives on a day to day basis. This could be compared to the concepts of physics at the Classic Newtonian level with quantum stuff. Even though our laws are well defined at the Classical physics level yet the same laws fail at the quantum level and there isn't anything to bind them together yet.

Our lives are pretty much the same -- They can be defined or rounded at a holistic level but the same rules can't be applied on the way we lead our lives. I hope I'm making sense.

BTW, about the object reference problem -- we could say that an association has moved onto another dimension but we still keep holding on to its memories considering the association is alive. We could also compare this at multiple levels in terms of human perception about certain things like deep friendship when it's reallly not, image of success when in reality the circumstances point the other way etc.

# re: .NET Philosophy

Thursday, August 10, 2006 9:32 AM by Sanket Bakshi
The "fuzziness" that you refer to, is what I refer to as the "yet un-understood mathematical equations".  The Laws of Classical physics do not work with Quantum physics simply because of the change in the paradigm of how things work - does it again sound similar to the fuzziness around?. The important point here is that even though they are not same, we know that both are logical in their own paradigm and that they can be expressed in explicit mathematical equations - complex though. How they relate to each other is something which is still in the "fuzzy" area. Its quite appropriate example that you have taken and I agree to your statement that - our lives are pretty much the same. Its the relationship that is missing!
Things that do follow an equation, follow a pattern. Even though you have varied emotions and behaviors with the human mind, I see them as the 'delta' that tends to move between the limits. I havent yet seen a totally uncommon human mind that simply does not think like any other human. If you have a single such person, then that probably proves the anomaly. (What you get by dividing 100 by 3 - There is always one decimal missing in the equation. you have to round off)
*phew*

And to tell you - I did like the Object Reference Not Set analogy - now that I know what is stands for. :)

# re: .NET Philosophy

Thursday, September 21, 2006 8:43 AM by ravi.bisht
Well said .But how do i relate to Resurrection. I would love to have Weak reference set for me. :)

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