I’m reading How Not to Network a Nation, which talks a lot about cybernetics. Not merely cybernetics as the theory of control in complex systems (cybernetics shares a root with “governor”, fans of the etymological fallacy!) but cybernetics as the intersectional discipline matching organisational and management theory with computer science, anthropology, and biology. The study of systems in animals, people and machinery and their (self- or externally-directed) control.
We still use a lot of the ideas from even early cybernetics thought now, such as Claude Shannon’s theories on entropy and information, J.C.R. Licklider’s ARPAnet, von Neumann’s computer architecture, artificial neural networks. But even though the proponents aren’t often associated with the field, I think it’s reasonable to argue that object-oriented programming is a cybernetically-derived systems approach.
A lot of cybernetics theory is about the components of a system and the messages they pass between each other to achieve control and feedback, and in OOP Alan Kay was seeking to model a software system as a network of messages flowing between independent computer program components. He made the analogy with living organisms clear:
> I thought of objects being like biological cells and/or individual computers on a network, only able to communicate with messages (so messaging came at the very beginning — it took a while to see how to do messaging in a programming language efficiently enough to be useful).
More advanced object oriented systems such as Erlang even display autopoesis, automatically spawning new “cells” when old ones are damaged.
There plenty that the intersectional nature of cybernetics still has to inform me about my work. Information theory helps me to understand the utility of a machine learning algorithm. Game theory and biological cooperation and cheating models help describe how a crypto currency is resilient against Byzantine generals.
And now I understand that the biological systems analogy should help me with software analysis and design too.
