Please excuse the philosophical contents, which really isn't about Lisp
per se, but as these matters came up in the discussion, I'll at least
point out that the quoted (quite common) views aren't as "objective" or
even generally accepted as they may seem to be.
Fred Gilham <······@snapdragon.csl.sri.com> wrote:
> The point of the free market is to maximize value. Value is DEFINED
> as the sum total of the PERCEIVED value of the things under
> consideration. There's really no other way to measure value in an
> objective way.
Note that the "value" being mentioned here is by definition the exchange
value, and nothing but exchange value; it's a fiction by which various
"goods" are given the appearance of being universally comparable. Don't
be fooled by the similarity of that word with what one might call "use
value", which escapes such definitions; there's no necesary and certainly
no objective relation between both. Looking at the important decisions
(e.g. political, in a very broad sense) which are based on this exchange
value, and where this fictional exchange value does often even serve as
supposedly "objective" proof that something "isn't possible", one may come
to the conclusion that this whole mechanism is deeply inhumane, reducing
decisions in society to an essentially blind mechanism which isn't even
primarily concerned with the topics for which it has consequences, and
which happens behind the backs of humans, who remain mostly unconscious
about its operation. (For more background, see the works of the political
philosophy which has become known as "Criticial Theory", e.g. by Marx,
Adorno, Horkheimer, and Marcuse, to name some of the more famous ones.)
> Nevertheless the market is the most democratic way to assign value to
> a system.
That's backwards; the mechanism of economy defines the effective value
of social artefacts and to the roles which humans are forced to take in
it. Democracy ought to be about conscious decisions, whereas accidential
conditions of economy - which ought to be a tool for the purposes of
humans - masquerade as practical necessity. It's about as "democratic"
as the line count of any programs' source code is a measure for quality.
Unfortunately, faced with difficult problems, people tend to opt for
simple answers, even if those answers have little (if anything) to do
with solving their very real problems. Let's at least not add insult to
injury by praising the miserable result.
> Whenever the government intervenes in the marketplace, it by
> definition lessens the value of the system (otherwise people would
> have voluntarily done what the government is coercing them to do).
Please look carefully at the semantic domains which are associated
with the word "value" in texts like this one. The naive interpretation
for the above sentence will be that "lessening the value of the system"
is somehow bad, even though it might sometimes be justified to correct
some worse problem. However, if you think about it, what has really
been stated is just that the conceptual "exchange value of the system"
(what would you exchange "the system" for, btw?) is supposedly lesser
if some regulations are performed by a government. That's a fairy tale,
repeated over and over until people believe that "the market" (which
means, the particular current form of economic evaluation of all life)
is the natural king. Look more closely, the emperor has no clothes.
> o Lisp has the most advanced object system in existence---the ONLY
> standardized object system available <at least it was last time I
> checked....>
Btw, the ISO standard for Ada, revised 1995, specifies an object system.
(I think the official way of pleasing both is to say that Common Lisp
was the first [ANSI] standard for an object oriented programming language,
whereas Ada was the first international [ISO] standard for an OOPL ;-)
-- Marc Wachowitz <··@ipx2.rz.uni-mannheim.de>