1.2 Goals
Monod was started by the maintainer as something to do to
assuage his curiosity and nagging preoccupations with
- The future of computation. Current programming approaches are
apparently unable to deal with such issues as complex problems,
parallel programming and bug prevalence, leading to the suspicion that
programming just shouldn't be done the way it's done today.
- Biology. Certain categories of biological phenomena, namely,
cellular biochemistry and evolutionary mechanisms, that seem to
possess strong analogies with computation.
A hallucinatory flash originally hinted that the one may be somehow
related to the other (yes, in a new way, as described below), and
Monod is the attempt to do something about it, to flesh out the
flash.
The rest of this section describes further the two starting points
above. The rest of the book describes the solution.