Promise TheoryMark Burgess, Jan A. Bergstra
Promise Theory
by Mark Burgess, Jan A. Bergstra · first published 2014
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…are often obscured by terminology that fails to reify the abstractions at a level where its wide scope becomes clear. The candidate I would push forward as the proper reification would be Mark Burgess' Promise Theory. Mark's starting point isn't, "what's the most general algebra I can form for encoding mathematical objects", but "what happens if I generalize points in spacetime to be a special case of any kind of…
on “Category theory is a universal modeling language” ↗I hear you. The book I mentioned (Thinking in Promises) is the introductory-level public book. https://www.amazon.com/Promise-Theory-Principles-Application... is the heavy-duty scientific stuff. "In Search of Certainty" (https://www.amazon.com/Search-Certainty-Science-Information-...) is somewhere in-between. I would say promise…
on “The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)” ↗Basic concepts of promise theory (10 minute video by Mark Burgess who came up with it): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2TPsB5WuZgk 2014 introductory article: https://www.linuxjournal.com/content/promise-theory—what-it Basic book on…
on “The sad state of sysadmin in the age of containers (2015)” ↗A new podcast series by @botchagalupe, with Mark Burgess, author of Promise Theory.
on “In Search of Certainty: What Are the Scaling Laws of IT?” ↗I once attended a talk by Mark Burgess on Promise Theory. It turns out to be not so much a theory and more like an odd collection of sayings. For example, what is a promise in promise theory? Not really clear. What can you actually do with promise theory,…
on “How CFEngine stays ahead of the pack” ↗Having clear wellset expectations is a general life skill of extreme value. Greatly under-done, at work and in life. Interesting cross-over with Mark Burgess's Promise Theory, where a promise serves somewhat as a single discrete expectation.
on “Expectations of professional software engineers” ↗…to interface with humans. The first principle, that the form of automation makes a promise to humans, reminds me a lot of both Christopher Alexander's ideas on architecture, as well as Mark Burgess's Promise Theory. Alexander has a lot of ideas on design that goes beyond buildings, and is very influential to the Human-Computer Interface design and OOP. Burgess's ideas speaks a lot about how systems of agents (both…
on “Rodney Brooks’s Three Laws of Robotics” ↗