All useful programs are run on machines with devices whose operation makes that program useful.
"Programs" without computational models and operational semantics are, for sure, discrete mathematics. But almost no one cares about those abstract programs, except for discrete mathematicians.
I'd say it's Edgar's view here which is the mystification. He wishes to pretend that the state of an LCD screen as it plays a video game is can be defined symbolically, and hence transformed in its definition.
This is nonsense.
Programming has never been discrete mathematics. And all those discrete mathematicians ("Computer Scientists") who wish it so are the origin of all this dumb mystery around it. Computers are useful because they are electrical devices, and through operation, transmit power to connected devices, whose physical state has relevance to us. I move a joystick and the electrical state of the LCD screen (etc.) changes, and so on.
Pretending that this can be given a denotational semantics is the charlatanism by which AI zealots also claim the world is some abstraction.
denotational semantics = the meaning of a program is a mathematical object
If programs, such as video games, are mathematical objects, then the world is one too. But, of course, they are not. They are physical objects distributed in space and in time -- hence why people play them.
ED's discrete mathematics idealism here is the windmill he's tilting against. This is the origin of the very confusions he's annoyed with.
No, programs are not abstractions, and that is why almost every programmer bothers to write one.
"Programs" without computational models and operational semantics are, for sure, discrete mathematics. But almost no one cares about those abstract programs, except for discrete mathematicians.
I'd say it's Edgar's view here which is the mystification. He wishes to pretend that the state of an LCD screen as it plays a video game is can be defined symbolically, and hence transformed in its definition.
This is nonsense.
Programming has never been discrete mathematics. And all those discrete mathematicians ("Computer Scientists") who wish it so are the origin of all this dumb mystery around it. Computers are useful because they are electrical devices, and through operation, transmit power to connected devices, whose physical state has relevance to us. I move a joystick and the electrical state of the LCD screen (etc.) changes, and so on.
Pretending that this can be given a denotational semantics is the charlatanism by which AI zealots also claim the world is some abstraction.