Watson's Behaviorism in Programming

[canmingir]

Watson's behaviorist theory studies humans as well as animals considering a black box, but only focuses on response to stimuluses so that psychologists examine behaviors of living things without knowing how. The idea was revolutionary that enables psychologists to understand more and more about their patients.

This model is totally applicable to computers along with humans and animals. Eventually it may help developers to code better. But first thing first, we need to define "Watson's Black Box" as a software that only works with stimulus.

When I read more about Watson's idea, it reminds me declarative programming, basically your system should response declarative statements, which are stimulus of the system, and you as a developer of the system don't care what is going internally. I would say databases partially fit into the concept that SQLs are stimulus of the system, however, behaviors are limited since databases don't carry any logic, which is the most important part in order to categorize computers in Watson's behaviorism.