Mariano Guerra 2022-02-14 12:25:53 Mariano Guerra 2022-02-14 12:43:03 Asked Felienne Hermans where to read about syntax/semantics of Excel and she mentioned this:
Jack Rusher 2022-02-14 13:23:12 This seems like a great way to harvest ideas for a spreadsheet-like product 😄
Mariano Guerra 2022-02-14 13:34:45 kind of, I was thinking that maybe starting where people are at and apply "future of coding ideas" from there may be more productive. At the same time I get the feeling that there should be many obvious ones already solved, but I can't find many. The trigger was trying to help someone with a complex spreadsheet with zero knowledge of excel myself, I wanted some sort of visualization/debugger for it to be able to see the structure underneath the sea of cells
Mariano Guerra 2022-02-14 13:36:27 I think the "let's start with a spreadsheet, but a new one" may be a big jump for excel/gsheet users, maybe tools that work with excel as a first step would work better.
Tom Larkworthy 2022-02-14 13:43:25 I know people using excel commercially for operations research (think deciding where to build a new power station) and there are a few different pieces of software to support that use case (there is an inbuilt solver too). E.g. https://opensolver.org/
Nick Smith 2022-02-19 09:56:22 Does anyone know when the term "schema" was first used in computing (e.g. "database schema")? It has an interesting (and related) meaning in psychology, which seems to predate the term's use in computing.
Nick Smith 2022-02-19 11:48:34 Interesting. I had only looked up Codd’s first paper and noticed he hadn't used the term there. But in his 1972 paper, he's using the term as if it already has an accepted meaning. So perhaps computer scientists were talking about “schemas” prior to the relational model?
Mariano Guerra 2022-02-19 12:37:48 yes, I thought the same about the usage without having to explain it
Orion Reed 2022-02-19 12:45:58 It was definitely in use by computer scientists before it became an established term in the database world.
I believe it was Jean Piaget who introduced ‘schema’ to psychology in the 1920s-1930s.
But schema had already been developed in philosophy (such as Kant in Critique of Pure Reason). Also developed in logic to specify rules of inference, mathematics to describe theories with infinite axioms, and adequacy conditions in semantics.
Point being that psychology was itself appropriating a prior term. So pinning down when this happened for computing is really hard. Many early computer scientists were influenced by the prominent theories of mind when thinking about the nature of information, knowledge, reasoning, etc.
I’d have to dig harder but my suspicion is that there'll be written accounts of ‘schemas’ in computing going back into the 50s, because the prominence of things like constructivism, first-order logic, and the theories of mind/knowledge/reasoning that used that term became prominent in the 30s, right as many of those people were in school/university.
Orion Reed 2022-02-19 13:19:34 ^ was on my phone so couldn’t easily add references.
Schema in logic, in philosophy, in Kantian philosophy.
First introduction of what became relational databases in 1969 in this paper.
The last link there is an interesting example, because even though the term “schema” doesn’t appear it is exactly what is being described and developed. So perhaps the term was used post-hoc to put all the related ideas under a single term.
Nick Smith 2022-02-20 00:42:40 Yeah, it appears logicians and philosophers use the term "schema" too. However, the meaning in psychology seems to be the closest to the meaning in database theory.
The term "program schema" was seemingly coined in 1958. It means something similar to "pseudo-code" or perhaps an AST. I'm not sure if this usage eventually morphed into what we know as "database schemas", or if it is just coincidence.
Nick Smith 2022-02-20 00:44:29 It's surprisingly hard to figure out the mindset of the 50s-70s...
Orion Reed 2022-02-19 13:50:59 The notion of provenance gets used a lot where I work, it’s a great term which (roughly speaking) refers to the lineage of data. Provenance documents the inputs, entities, systems, and processes that influence data of interest, in effect providing a historical record of the data and its origins. The term is probably worth a discussion on its own, but my question to y’all is this:
Where provenance charts the history/past of data, is there a term that refers to its future, such as possible transformations, movement, etc, etc. My mental model here is something like a light cone where provenance defines a specific path within the possible histories of the data, its counterpart would define the possible, or probable future path.
I’m mostly just looking for a good term because I think it would be useful, I’ve been trying to mush different etymologies to find something that sounds okay but nothing great has come out of that yet. I’m not expecting there to be much work on really developing the notion concretely, but if there is I’d certainly love to know about it!
Tom Larkworthy 2022-02-19 17:04:15 Service designers have a process called "futures thinking" which contains a diagram very similar to what you just deacribed
Orion Reed 2022-02-19 17:17:19 ^ Cool! Different kind of field but I can definitely see some useful stuff there.
Tom Larkworthy 2022-02-19 17:17:53 I heard of this through "Annika Hamann. Lead UX & Service Designer, and Futures Thinking at Futurice." I am sure she would be happy to share some references
Tom Larkworthy 2022-02-19 17:29:19 Oh sorry. A more concrete thing is reachability analysis in (e.g. Markov decision) processes which deals with the state distribution becoming fuzzier over time. I don't know anything so fitted to data though
Nick Smith 2022-02-20 00:52:53 fate?
Or, you could use the terms source and sink, or dependencies and dependents.
Tom Larkworthy 2022-02-20 06:30:31 Now I thought of Markov chains describing the path of passwords... it made me laugh. An important property is " The stationary distribution of a Markov chain describes the distribution of Xt after a sufficiently long time that the distribution of Xt does not change any longer. " It's when the chain forgets its initial conditions. For a password this is when it has reached the darknet and haveibeenpwned! It's doesn't matter about your security, all passwords will eventually reach this state regardless of which database you originally store it in!
Konrad Hinsen 2022-02-20 08:31:14 Sounds like a good topic for a scientific paper: "The fate of passwords and its relation to the heat death of the universe" 😉
Konrad Hinsen 2022-02-20 08:36:58 To be a bit more constructive: various domains of science dealing with dynamical systems and/or causality have discovered this concept, but use different names for it. In statistical mechanics, it would be the accessible phase space. Reaching even farther for analogies, the null space of a matrix in linear algebra is similar as well, when you see the matrix as describing constraints. Bayesian inference is all about this, in a way, the overarching question being: given what I know, which constraints does it impose on what I don't know?
