I am reading a book with very nice poetry on design and technology by John Maeda. The book addresses the pleasure which simplicity can provide in a complex world. Or, it addresses the important question on how to look at complexity and appreciate correct reduction of it.
One of the chapters in the book is called "more emotions, than less". It is stated that humans are disposed to communication with emotional content, and that we naturally try to express emotions. Maybe this is related to our strong instincts for attachments to people. Often, agreeing (or disagreeing) with ideas seems to be more important than the ideas themselves. (I think one can observe this phenomenon in schools for example. Agreeing with a teacher is often more helpful for ones career than trying to pursuit the understanding of ones own ideas. If this hypothesis is true, teachers have some important responsibility: Make their students learn to understand and build their own theories, and not to take theories because of reasons of attachment.)
John Maeda explains the use of the emotional symbols :-), ;-), :-p .And indeed, I once read the statement of a mathematician that he would like to use symbols in programming languages, greek letters to specify surfaces or volumes maybe. Because mathematicians, they transport a lot of information by the use of symbols. How forms in space can be changed to understand a process for example. Anyway, to understand symbols, there must be some form of compilation or interpretation that takes place. In computer science, interpretation is based on attributing symbols to categories, and return a value that corresponds with this state.
