lisp2240an hour ago
Zero has two roles: as a positional placeholder and as a cardinal value (nothingness or net-zero). This only addresses the former.
j16sdizan hour ago
Afaict, most ancient civization have conception of "nothingness" or "emptiness". The dispute is often whether they consider it as a number or not
gmuslera3 hours ago
Looks like translating a positional numbering system from ancient cultures than ruling out or not if they had the concept of zero. It may be a single use symbol, here is nothing, instead of being part of bigger amounts. Numbering systems doesn't have to be positional (nor go too far).
whatsThisBtn42 hours ago
Gosh I love Wittgenstein for this.
I highly recommend suffering through both early and late Wittgenstein (only wrote 2 books and essentially invented one of the 3 branches of philosophy).
Expect to only understand 10% of what he says, but that is normal.
Separately, pragmatism by William James is an easy 4 hour read and you can have 2/3 of the branches of meta philosophy.
conartist624 minutes ago
What I wonder is: why has nobody noticed that code editors lack a concept of 0?
When you're writing code, you can express any concept except that of an unfilled hole. We've rearranged every part of the coding process in a twisted-up way, all for the lack of a way to express lack.
If you want to be more clear about what I mean, look to tools which can express holes like https://scratch.mit.edu and https://hazel.org. They give the feeling of letting things snap together like lego bricks. Indeed, lego bricks themselves function because of the negative space (the holes) in them!
onestay4221 minutes ago
How about an `extern` variable in C?
NotBenny38 minutes ago
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