He’s Just Had Coffee

So back in 2003, Jaron Lanier talked about “phenotropic programming” which use pattern recognition to connect components. It strikes me that one could look at systems like Agenda and wikis as things that acknowledge the structure should be allowed to arise from phenomena, rather than needing structure to be defined a priori, for fun lets characterise them “immanent”, rather than “transcendant” approaches. Lanier’s phenotropic systems seem to add a powerful new abstraction to the immanent approaches. To go one step crazier, if one were to look (with a nod to the Pliant gurus) at Christopher Alexander’s Pattern Language - the notion of a pattern is a kind of shared unit of know-how as a “solution to a problem in a context” - could one fantasize about a kind of programming that used a kind of pattern logic:

1. establish context (using pattern recognition)
2. detect presence of problem (again, pattern recognition)
3. enact solution.

… then I wonder if that might enable a kind of “folk programming” we haven’t really seen. May a kind of immanent, phenotropic approach to programming might be more accessible to more people than the classical protocol-oriented, transcendent approaches. Anyone want to help build one and see?

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