When a bunch of grains of sand make a heap?

The spring is here at last, and yesterday I was walking on a beach. Often walking on sand beaches recall me the "paradox of the heap": you have a heap of sand, let's say made of a million of sand grains. Then you remove one, and get 999,999 sand grains. No doubt, it's still a heap. Now you repeat the process, and eventually you'll get with a single grain of sand in your hand. No doubt, a single grain of sand is no more a heap. This means that, somewhere in the process, what was initially a heap was no more a heap. This paradox, attributed to Eubulides of Miletus, an ancient greek philosopher, demonstrates that some concepts of the real life can't be precisely defined. There are many proposed solutions, such as fuzzy logics or defining things by consensus (e.g. setting an arbitrary amount of sand grains to be the conventional threshold for a heap) - this means that the problem is left with a big degree of uncertainty and disagreement. When I got back home, yesterday night, I learned of James Gosling leaving Oracle and figured out the large echo that the news would have in the community. Also considering that James is not the first, but the n-th prominent engineer that didn't accept the new Oracle/Sun panorama, I'd say that we are facing with a paradox of the heap (with a slight variation: in case of people such as Tim Bray or Gosling or others we should give grains a weight). We know that the new Oracl...

Date: April, 11 2010
Url: http://www.java.net/blog/fabriziogiudici/archive/2010/04/11/when-bunch-grains-sand-make-heap

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