Formula One

The Formula One Metaphor

Geek Hero

Connected

When things get hectic, crazy, and unmanageable the solution for me is to reconnect. Reconnecting is like grounding oneself again. Finding equilibrium. To know the world is still real, still out there, and not as bad as it might seem. As it stands now there are three things that reconnect. First, a real and deep conversation, second, riding the bike, and third, partaking in the eucharist. I imagine many people share the first. And many people have their hobbies that center them, the bike just happens to be mine. The third is a surprise, even to myself. As a child I went to a Catholic grade school in New York City. It has always left some impression on me. Being in Boston and having made friends in an anglo-catholic church, going to some of those services has brought out some of those impressions. It is a new sensation to me that partaking in the eucharist is a connecting experience. Previously it was a very seldom occurrance. An action, in which God is present and active, that brings you together with those around you, as well as Christians who are also partaking in it elsewhere is incredibly connective and grounding.

I feel an incredible loss for all the years in which this action, this sacrament, and it’s theology have been lost on me.

Dead End

If I ever want to get out of this programming back-water I feel myself in I need to get on the ruby and python trains. It is all about my own personal priority as this point. Be honest with yourself for goodness sakes!

Your Kingdom Come

Laura writes about the Kingdom work we do in helping feed, cloth, and fight for people’s justice:

The work we do does not in some sense help to further establish the kingdom. So what is it’s purpose? All this is very confusing, and I am still discerning what exactly that means for how we are to live our lives.

Having just read the first half of Bonhoeffer’s Ethics it seems that this question is best handled with Bonhoeffer’s treatment of the penultimate and ultimate.

The penultimate prepares the way for coming to Christ. Without the ultimate the penultimate will shatter

Bonhoeffer’s Ethics 1

for my own note-taking and posterity

The Love of God and the Decay of the World

I appreciated the straight-line of logic employed by Bonhoeffer. He starts at one point, plots a trajectory and just keeps going. His first move is straight out of Genesis, and in my opinion right on point.

The knowledge of good and evil shows he is no longer at one with his origin

In a world where relativism reigns, the defeat of other ethical systems by supplanting the knowledge of right from wrong, good from bad, with the lack of a choice based on one’s participation in Christ is genius both on the philosophical and pastoral level. To show that Christian ethics is something wholly other than every other ethics is a unique move. The inherent claim there is that Christianity cannot be compared with the other institutions and systems of thought – there is something significantly difference about Christianity. With that intuition I heartily agree.

Bonhoeffer goes on to exemplify this distinction of knowing good and evil as setting oneself in the place of God, as the judge, the arbiter of what is right and wrong. To judge as if one sets right and wrong is hypocritical, since God is the one who sets good and evil. Jesus’ command to “judge not and you shall not be judged” is therefore to deny oneself the place which is rightly God’s. To not imagine that you are the one who is to uphold the law of God, but rather, to only do the will of God. And that will of God is exactly reconciling the fall whereby which we know good and evil.

To undo that knowledge – which Bonhoeffer explains is not that we have gained anything we previously did not know, it is merely a changed perspective that we now can put ourselves in God’s place giving ourselves a choice that is rightly God’s – is the goal of reconciliation. To know, only in the light of Christ who is the will of God, is reconciliation. And reconciliation does not perform the judgment that knowing good and evil does. Whereby one judges according to his own definition of good and evil, he determines to make every man is his own image, not in God’s image. To know, through union, and what Bonhoeffer calls action, is the way to act in the will of God, and not create disunion.

These very actions that create peace and unity is what love is. Though we cannot purely define is that way. Bonhoeffer demands that we understand God is love. Not that we know what love is, therefore we know who God is. This love comes from God, and is God’s, and His alone. Our love, is merely God’s love that we express, whether it be to our neighbor or back to God. That is the only love available. Any other is based on selfishness (which I have written about here before). If Christ is the supreme revelation of God, and God based on his love for us sent his Son to die for us – in order to recreate that unity which was lost – this is how we should understand love. Jesus’ suffering and death was an action that created unity. Though Bonhoeffer warns us that love is not defined by the action, but by the man Jesus.

On OO Design

I do not understand the righteous insistence on making every ontological “thing” into an object with it’s own properties. All my objections are entirely practical, which is precisely why I used the “righteous” rhetoric. With this stringent ontological approach comes the attempt to pin-down precisely the semantic meaning and use of words which destroys the natural meaning of language, along with its necessary nuances. It is entirely unnecessary to employ a new “specialty language” in which your terms are so very defined such that you need to write a dictionary as the first step in writing a specification. This should be an alert that you are doing something wrong.

But, on to the topic at hand. What are my objections to this righteous insistence?

1. Making Hard Things Easy

The goal of any design should be to abstract the more tedious, painful, and/or hard parts of any job into smaller and easier parts that can be re-used. By making lots of objects, you are simply moving the tedious nature into keeping track of what is where. The goal of any design is not to spread out everything into its ontological place. If you are not making hard concepts achievable in very few lines of code, what you are doing is fruitless.

2. Maintainability

More code is harder to maintain than less code. More classes means more code. More classes means more dependencies, and those dependencies can easily be obscured by further bad design. More often that not, objects are not really the black boxes the intend to be. Not know where, or how often the smallest object is used can create a maintainability nightmare because you fear changing it. Goodbye any chance of refactoring.

3. Readability

Programmers rely on holding the giant super structure of the code in their memory at once. You can relieve that pressure by placing as much code in a single screen as possible. And you can group this code such that you only see a specific block of code related to a specific sub-routine in any one screen. After all you can only focus on one thing at a time. By spreading functionality hundreds of lines away, or in another file, makes it that much harder for someone who is reading your code to understand what is going on.

4. Execution

Every programming language has inherent overhead in creating and managing objects. More objects means slower execution and more memory consumed. Most entirely OOP frameworks (in any arena, not just the web) suffer growing pains fairly early on when the more trivial scripts turn out to require over 100mb of memory.

There Is No Process

Stop arguing, defining, and writing down processes. It is a waste of time. There is no process. The only process is thinking on your feet. Including only who and what you need to. We’re all adults. We’re all smart. Process gets in the way of progress immediately.

Identity of God

This phrase from Bauckham, in his new book Jesus and the God of Israel is causing a stir. I wrote a paper (that I did not get to present unfortunately) based on this book, with some anecdotes from Hurtado’s How On Earth Did Jesus Become a God?. Both books, and as a result the paper, are written from the historical angle. I have not put it up here yet because I am not yet sure it is clear. Normally that happens through conversation partners, which on this topic have been hard to come by. I tried to have a conversation about this topic, and it has created a serious rift. You will certainly see something on this topic here eventually.