Re: [Algorithms] General purpose task parallel threading approach

[Conor S. <bor...@ya...>]

"Agreed. "Reductio ad absurdum" is a technique most often used by parties who
cannot defend their position within the original bounds of the debate, and
therefore find they need to expand the playing field, so to speak. "

Reductio ad absurdum is a great technique often used to show that another argument is absurd by taking your own argument to a level of absurdity. It's still a formal logical argument and it's still a formal logical fallacy to dismiss a reductio ad absurdum. Just because it's silly, doesn't mean it's not perfectly valid. The point was that programming is nothing but composition of general components from the very low to the very high level.

"Perhaps the meta-issue is that there is no agreement in the past 205 posts
on what "general" actually means? According to dictionary.com, "general" can
be said to mean "not specific or definite". Using this definition then,
anything above the subatomic level cannot be said to be "general" because
the instant protons, neutrons and electrons assemble themselves into a
particular number and order of each, they achieve specificity and discard
generality."


Now we are getting back to the crux of the matter and has been mentioned. Generality in my mind is where you can use a component to solve multiple different unforeseen problems, not just the problem you may originally have used it to solve. For example, the generic functions and collections in the standard library are good examples of that kind of generality without much loss of functionality. It's not a good idea every time to make things that general, but it is a good idea enough of the time not to dismiss the idea out of hand by assigning the absolute truth of a "thou shalt not" to it. That was why originally I said, it depends on what you're doing an if it makes economic sense to do it. 

For a lot of companies that are selling frameworks and middleware, it makes good economic sense to be general. For someone coding a specific piece of game logic, it doesn't. That said, you can take "general" to stupid levels as well if you really want to, to the point where it doesn't actually do anything, but why would any reasonable person do that?

Cheers,
Conor


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