Categories: Semantics

Quotes from Sowa’s book

As I was reading Sowa‘s “Knowledge Representation – Logical, Philosophical, and Computational Foundations”, I noted few funny quotes. I don’t know whether Sowa heard them from others or they are his.

Commenting on a bad but common practice: “Code first and think later”;
Talking about the different views of the world by fourth generation languages, object-oriented programming systems, and computer-aided software engineering. “Any one of those tools by itself is a tremendous aid to productivity. But any two of them together will kill you.”
Making the point about the difficulty of keeping definitions consistent from one version to the next: “How was God able to create the world in just six days? He had no installed user base.”

As I said in other posts, an excellent book! Highly recommended.

Savas Parastatidis

Savas Parastatidis works at Amazon as a Sr. Principal Engineer in Alexa AI'. Previously, he worked at Microsoft where he co-founded Cortana and led the effort as the team's architect. While at Microsoft, Savas also worked on distributed data storage and high-performance data processing technologies. He was involved in various e-Science projects while at Microsoft Research where he also investigated technologies related to knowledge representation & reasoning. Savas also worked on language understanding technologies at Facebook. Prior to joining Microsoft, Savas was a Principal Research Associate at Newcastle University where he undertook research in the areas of distributed, service-oriented computing and e-Science. He was also the Chief Software Architect at the North-East Regional e-Science Centre where he oversaw the architecture and the application of Web Services technologies for a number of large research projects. Savas worked as a Senior Software Engineer for Hewlett Packard where he co-lead the R&D effort for the industry's Web Service transactions service and protocol. You can find out more about Savas at https://savas.me/about