Compositionality
Compositionality is the property that the meaning or behavior of a complex structure is systematically determined by its parts and their combination.
Sutskever's List
Compositionality is the property that the meaning or structure of a complex representation is systematically determined by its parts and their arrangement.
- How it is used
- Frames the rationalist–empiricist dispute over whether reasoning requires explicit symbolic structure or learned representations.
- How deep it goes
- Contrasts symbolic rules with distributed neural representations but stops short of specifying a compositional neural mechanism.
- Examples
- Uses physical symbol systems, logic, learned representations, and benchmark comparisons as contrasting cases.
- What you can do after
- Evaluate/understand competing claims about compositional reasoning through explicit assumptions and benchmark evidence.
Functional Programming in Scala, Second Edition
Compositionality is the property that components can be combined generically to form larger computations without depending on their internal implementations.
- How it is used
- Guides the design of a modular API for composing parallel computations without exposing physical-thread management.
- How deep it goes
- Defines the principle through Runnable, Future, and Par contrasts, but defers the underlying implementation details.
- Examples
- Uses recursive parallel sum, Par.unit, Par.get, Runnable, Future, and ExecutorService as concrete examples.
- What you can do after
- Apply it via a Par data type to assemble recursive parallel computations from explicit subcomputation values.
Read how Functional Programming in Scala, Second Edition explains compositionality →
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