Lego bricks and Emergent behaviour

[flysand7]

I will start the thesis with a small example. Suppose you are designing a music streaming service. People can search for, listen to and add music to their playlist, as well as add playlists, rearrange music in their playlist and so on. When you approach such a problem, first you have to figure out the common tasks which are supposed to be easily achievable with your program make sure that each one is performable with relative ease. After that an implementation could take on two forms:

1. Design and implement each feature separately. Make sure that "there is a button for each feature". You want to add a song to a playlist? Make a button "add to playlist". Then you have playlists, music files and the rest of the features be implemented as concrete objects with concrete semantics.
2. Find an abstraction over your problem and implement few behaviours that make all of the problems above solveable. This set of few behaviours now not only defines the solutions to your problems but also makes new tasks possible to solve. It makes users be able to use the software in a new way, discover something new.

The core idea of the thesis is abstraction as a way to simplify problem into a set of few behaviours. The set of few behaviours emerges to give birth to new behaviours. Depending on the number of consequent operations one can achieve n^p different behaviours from n simple behaviours and p consequent operations.

This gives rise to my terminology. There are systems that were designed the first way -- those are non-emergent, because all of the codepaths and behaviours were already explored. The systems that were designed the second way are emergent -- the behaviours emerge from the set of primitive behaviours.

The possible topics for the discussion:

• Examples of emersive and non-emersive systems design and their affect on people's perception on the software and its power (Windows vs. Linux, C vs. other PL, filesystems et cetera)
• How this sort of abstraction affects ease to design. How easy is it to experiment with this sort of abstraction.
• Difference/Similarity of the ideas of emergeability and lego bricks (@ryanfleury expected)
• Is it possible to implement a programming language/tool that will make it easy to program emergent behaviours? What sort of system may give the best rise to the idea of emergency. If OOP is a way of abstracting over multiple behaviours, thus an ideal representation of the design pattern (1), is there a counter-paradigm that would be an ideal representation of the design pattern (2).

[flysand7]

I find that this topic might be too broad for a 3-hour-or-so discussion, maybe it should be split up into several discussions, if people find it interesting enough.