Arguably the best blogpost I've read on this topic (of ownership):

https://without.boats/blog/ownership/

I and just about every designer of Common Lisp and CLOS has had extreme exposure to the MIT/Stanford style of design. The essence of this style can be captured by the phrase the right thing. To such a designer it is important to get all of the following characteristics right:

* Simplicity -- the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the interface to be simple than the implementation.
* Correctness -- the design must be correct in all observable aspects. Incorrectness is simply not allowed.
* Consistency -- the design must not be inconsistent. A design is allowed to be slightly less simple and less complete to avoid inconsistency. Consistency is as important as correctness.
* Completeness -- the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases must be covered. Simplicity is not allowed to overly reduce completeness.

I believe most people would agree that these are good characteristics. I will call the use of this philosophy of design the MIT approach. Common Lisp (with CLOS) and Scheme represent the MIT approach to design and implementation.

The worse-is-better philosophy is only slightly different:

* Simplicity -- the design must be simple, both in implementation and interface. It is more important for the implementation to be simple than the interface. Simplicity is the most important consideration in a design.
* Correctness -- the design must be correct in all observable aspects. It is slightly better to be simple than correct.
* Consistency -- the design must not be overly inconsistent. Consistency can be sacrificed for simplicity in some cases, but it is better to drop those parts of the design that deal with less common circumstances than to introduce either implementational complexity or inconsistency.
* Completeness -- the design must cover as many important situations as is practical. All reasonably expected cases should be covered. Completeness can be sacrificed in favor of any other quality. In fact, completeness must be sacrificed whenever implementation simplicity is jeopardized. Consistency can be sacrificed to achieve completeness if simplicity is retained; especially worthless is consistency of interface.

Early Unix and C are examples of the use of this school of design, and I will call the use of this design strategy the New Jersey approach. I have intentionally caricatured the worse-is-better philosophy to convince you that it is obviously a bad philosophy and that the New Jersey approach is a bad approach.

However, I believe that worse-is-better, even in its strawman form, has better survival characteristics than the-right-thing, and that the New Jersey approach when used for software is a better approach than the MIT approach.

Richard P. Gabriel, Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991)

Richard P. Gabriel, Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big (1991)

The urge among mathematicians to save the 'convention' after the rise of paradoxes in foundations. Even the rigorous formalist that Hilbert was, famously relied upon Cantor's paradise.

Nicholas Bourbaki, Elements of the History of Mathematics (1984)

On the approach of Brouwer's intuitionism that eventually lead to modern-day constructivism.

Nicholas Bourbaki, Elements of the History of Mathematics (1984)

Got a reprint of this classic earlier this month. Good memories of learning exterior products for the first time from this. I wish/hope someone writes a biography of Spivak, always fascinates and inspires to know about people who dedicated their life to see the universe through the keyhole of a specific area. Spivak did that for all things related to geometry. A rare persona, and much rarer today.

I'll be reposting some posts from here and the other channel to my Mathstodon account, found some really good people and communities there. I'll eventually automate a bridge, but that has to wait until my self-hosting setup is ready.

Open letter to Zuckerberg from Pixelfed's main developer.

In a different sense, Tarski already had an axiomatic system for Euclidean geometry that was both decidable and complete. Godel's incompleteness theorem can't touch this axiomatization because it is not as expressive to include parts of first-order Peano arithmetic.

Moreover there is an algorithm to decide whether each theorem, lemma and sentence of the axiomatic system can be provable or not.