A quick note on inference & poetic design

Ezra Pound’s statements on some of the implications of imagisme and symbolism, it seems, can relate directly to some of the dilemma between object-oriented and functional programming approaches. 1916: “The symbolist’s symbols have a fixed value, like numbers in arithmetic, like 1, 2, and 7. The imagiste’s images have a variable significance like the signs a b and x in algebra.” This is about a year before Alan Turing is born and about forty years before formal modern concept for either of those machine paradigms was established. See Pound’s memoir of the French sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, also Eric Mottram’s work on design control in poetry.