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The Universal Design Pattern: "The most specific event can serve as a general example of a class of events."

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  1. hereticalgorithm
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    Here's a PDF copy of GEB, the relevant section starts on page 357 (tho I advise getting your own copy and reading the entire thing). This concept struck me as an example of what a dialectical...

    Here's a PDF copy of GEB, the relevant section starts on page 357 (tho I advise getting your own copy and reading the entire thing).

    This concept struck me as an example of what a dialectical materialist framework would call the unity & struggle of opposites - between particularity (ex: instances, events, rows) & generality (ex: classes, types, schema). The two components of this contradiction can (and should) be identified, but cannot be absolutely separated- a class without instances is empty (and how would you design a class without implemention in mind?), an instance without a class is chaos. Furthermore, a class can be a particular implementation of another class, yet serve as a general class for many others.

    I'm also not sure if my tags are right, and would appreciate feedback cuz this post blends a bit between categories. I also included that beginning quote in the title b/c it seemed to be more descriptive than just "Universal Design Pattern".

    More practically, Steve's identification of JavaScript as an implementation of this reminded me of his prediction back in 2007 that it would take off. Obviously this post came after, but I wonder how much JavaScript's property modeling strengths played into that success (vs it's success just being historical accident).

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