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<p dir="auto">On 22 Jul 2022, at 10:17, Kevin Bourrillion wrote:</p>
</div><div class="plaintext" style="white-space: normal;"><blockquote style="margin: 0 0 5px; padding-left: 5px; border-left: 2px solid #777777; color: #777777;"><blockquote style="margin: 0 0 5px; padding-left: 5px; border-left: 2px solid #777777; border-left-color: #999999; color: #999999;"><p dir="auto">Yeah this a bit of a nuisance. It would be nice to have a term that
<br>
covers both "values" and "instances", because in my mind, and instance
<br>
is something that gets instantiated. Ephemeral values don't get
<br>
instantiated, cause they exist. Which means with my view objects of
<br>
value classes aren't instances (?? this surprised me, but I can't
<br>
convince myself otherwise anymore).</p>
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<p dir="auto">Instantiation is overrated IMO. One instance of the concept “natural number” is 42. Either it was never instantiated, or it was instantiated in some platonic pre-temporal epoch from all eternity (which some optimizers use to emulate some kinds of immutable data!), or it was instantiated multiple times, every time someone reached for the number 42. In the end it doesn’t matter when, just what, 42 is.</p>
<p dir="auto">Now, take a somewhat larger natural number which is the godelization of a very large file that you just created for the first time today. Is that number any older or newer than the <em>contents</em> of that file? I would say they are logically equivalent (one being derivable from the other) and therefore whatever age-story we make up for one of them applies quite well to the other (the file content, or the big number that encodes its information content).</p>
<p dir="auto">Thus we get the oddity that any kind of file contents (such as that nice JPG selfie you just took of yourself and your cat) can be interchangeably viewed as being platonically existent from eternity (but you just discovered it) or else a new thing created by you (and theoretically recreated independently by others with similar faces and cats).</p>
<p dir="auto">If you hate that idea of discovering rather than making a JPG file, but accept the idea that 42 is obviously a platonic value, then tell me: How big does a number have to be before it loses it eternal character and becomes just another bit of temporary bit-flux in the infosphere? Because then with your help I can understand why 42 is eternal and your selfie is temporal. :-)</p>
<p dir="auto">This is not idle speculation. In fact, when I talk about an identity-free object in Valhalla, I am talking about something very much like the contents of your JPG file. Yes, there might be 5 copies of it in my JVM, but is it a real event when the JIT makes a 6th copy of it for some reason? Or when the GC collapses them into a single copy (that clever GC)? It is a real event for the hardware, but should we teach Java programmers to care about it, or is it just useless distraction? The godelization argument shows that this puzzle extends smoothly from tiny things like 8-bit bytes up to large value objects that join together many smaller values.</p>
</div><div class="plaintext" style="white-space: normal;"><blockquote style="margin: 0 0 5px; padding-left: 5px; border-left: 2px solid #777777; color: #777777;"><p dir="auto">I do think "instantiate" often carries a connotation of bringing something
<br>
into existence that never existed otherwise, but I'm not sure it *should*
<br>
have that connotation. For example `List<String>` is often called a "type
<br>
instantiation" of `List<E>`" but nothing was birthed into the world by
<br>
writing that; it was just sort of obtained from the ether.</p>
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<p dir="auto">That “ether” being a pre-temporal epoch such as I mentioned. And the godelization argument means that, wherever you get (or rediscover) things like <code style="margin: 0; padding: 0 0.4em; border-radius: 3px; background-color: #F7F7F7;">List<String></code> from is very much related to the source of natural numbers, whatever <em>that</em> is.</p>
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