Here's a seminal posting by =kermit at a blog called Subjectivity – mapping the world of digital identity. I buy into the “Subject Oriented Programming” idea – it's wonderful.
More than a decade ago I happened upon this programming language called C+-, pronounced “C, more or lessâ€:
Unlike C++, C+- is a subject-oriented language. Each C+- class instance, known as a subject, holds hidden members, known as prejudices or undeclared preferences, which are impervious to outside messages, as well as public members known as boasts or claims.
Of course it was a joke and I laughed, but the joke stung a bit. It had occurred to me that a claims-based system like this could actually be useful. I had even come up with the name “subject-oriented†for it. So it hurt a bit to find the idea “out there†only as the butt of a joke.
Well, things have certainly changed since then. Today Kim Cameron posted an item titled “Identity systems all about making claimsâ€, and linked to another article by NetworkWorld’s John Fontana which elaborates:
Cameron said the flexible claims architecture, which is based on standard protocols such as WS-Federation, WS-Trust and the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML) will replace today’s more rigid systems that are based on a single point of truth […]
The claims model, he said, is more flexible and based on components that can be snapped together like Lego blocks. Cameron called them Legonic Systems, which, he said, are agile and self-organizing much like service-oriented architectures. The Legonic identity system is rethinking what users know today, he said, and is defined by a set of claims one subject makes about another.
Formulations like this make it clear how fundamental the coming “identity revolution†in computing could be. The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg argued in his book The Legitimacy of the Modern Age that modern science emerged from the sterility of medieval Scholasticism precisely because of its “renunciation of exactitude.†In other words, modern science emerged by replacing the idea of “eternal truth†with that of subjective claims and methodical doubt as epitomized in Descartes.
This incorporation of uncertainty and error continued into the twentieth century with the discovery of statistical mechanics and quantum indeterminacy. Could computer science, with the discovery of digital identity, finally be leaving its own rigid Scholastic period behind as well?
Answer: Yup.
