Thien-Thi Nguyen wrote:
> if you're interested in choice and freedom of expression
I find this not correct. I did at most propose a different point
of view, I did not defend it so exaggeratedly, and some of you guys
attack me in this way and speak of choice and freedom of expression.
Was it not you who wrote me last week "I believe education about Lisp
is the most important thing we can do at this time, and hope your
course goes well."?
Eli Barzilay wrote now too:
>> (defun num-list (a b &optional (d 1))
>> (do ((x a (+ x d)) (li nil))
>> ((> x b) (nreverse li)) (push x li)))
> BTW, if indentation is completely unimportant, why did you put the
> newlines in those places? Why did you put spaces around some parens
> where it is not needed?
> And if you insist on using this style in public, then why do you put
> these "> " prefixes to stuff you quoted?
You like it to contradict yourself. If you look a little better at my
earth-shaking 3 lines, you would discover that there is some
system. Do you have any difficulty to read it? May be it's
unconventional, but it's rather neat. I see, also on the list,
sometimes code which is less carefully structured.
I learnt those "> " prefixes on Fidonet - a good school in
civilised written remote distance communication.
> The whole point of comparing natural language to programs is bogus.
> When you write English sentences (or any other language), you never
> get them too deep. Try looking at texts that you wrote and find the
> longest sentence, then find the longest function you wrote.
Not so sure. Read Kant or Cicero or Defoe, and you will find quite
long sentences. It's training. Today young people don't read much
and think that a sentence of three lines is a long one.
> The memoization of a function fn using a key which defaults to the
> first function and a test that defaults to eql function and an
> optional name argument is: take table as a new hash table with a
> test as its test function, set the :memo property of the name
Funny. Remembers me of the HyperTalk programs I wrote years ago.
Was not a bad language. Your example shows also that natural language
is rather powerful and that, with some ability, one could formulate
most computer programs in natural language. It seems to me more a
compiler problem. But all these attacks are stupid. In mathematics
really there are complicated formulas or theorems which are almost
impossible to translate into a natural language. Try to translate some
lines of a paper in commutative algebra into English. But I know such
stuff by myself, don't you believe that? How do you know that I
never thought about such things?
I find Lisp a very interesting language, sometimes I think that young
pure programmers don't see everything one can make out of it, and I'm
interested in discussing technical and, if you want, also general or
philosophical aspects, being conscious that many people on the list are
more knowledgeable than I, but this thread, which is not more correct
or constructive, I have no intention to continue. Sorry to those who
instead were constructive.
je
Josef Eschgfaeller <···@felix.unife.it> writes:
> Not so sure. Read Kant or Cicero or Defoe, and you will find quite
> long sentences. It's training. Today young people don't read much
> and think that a sentence of three lines is a long one.
>
Dangerous statement. People who do a lot of news & mail often read a
*lot*. On bad days I probably look at over 100,000 words (400
messages, 50 lines, 5 words a line) a day. And others read a lot more
than me. Of course I'm not reading all that in depth and I don't
*like* reading that much, but I (and many other people) really consume
a lot of written text.
On bad days (or perhaps good days?) I also scan a *lot* of program
source, particularly when chasing bugs in some large system I don't
know that well.
And I'm doing that off a screen with a monospaced (albeit carefully
chosen) font. I have no idea what my rate of consumption of decently
printed text would peak at: for ficton I can certainly do 1000 pages a
day, and again I am nowhere near the extreme. There must be many
people alive today who have read more printed text than there *was* x
hundred years ago, for x a fairly small number.
And it's exactly those people who want their Lisp code indented nicely
-- they've read enough of it to *know* it wins.
--tim
* Josef Eschgfaeller <···@felix.unife.it>
| I find this not correct. I did at most propose a different point
| of view, I did not defend it so exaggeratedly, and some of you guys
| attack me in this way and speak of choice and freedom of expression.
|
| Was it not you who wrote me last week "I believe education about Lisp
| is the most important thing we can do at this time, and hope your
| course goes well."?
this is actually quite interesting. not only is this guy posting from
Italy, he's from outer space. I just _knew_ it was a bad idea to send
Lisp into space.
here on earth, we appreciate the opportunity to criticize people's
actions and have this na�ve idea that to err is human, which means that
even at the time the action indeed WAS the best thing to do, that quality
might not have been fully established from the available information, or
some vital information might have been missing, or, as might readily
happen, the person was not entirely focused on the particular task at
hand and slipped up. none of these faults are personality disorders in
humans -- it's how we normally think and act and respond to others. part
of the idea is to present views and positions to others and then actually
accept input and more information, even if we think we are right to begin
with. so if you have been unable to convince humans, it might just be
that you have not yet discovered that earthlings are more flawed in this
regard than members of your own alien species.
| You like it to contradict yourself. If you look a little better at my
| earth-shaking 3 lines, you would discover that there is some system.
^^^^^^^^^^^^^
you really are visiting this planet only to destabilize the Lisp world,
aren't you, and quite literally so, too? this is what we humans call a
Freudian slip, named after another nutty guy who might as well have come
from outer space himself, considering HIS weird fixation with particular
properties of human behavior, too.
| I learnt those "> " prefixes on Fidonet - a good school in civilised
| written remote distance communication.
and this just goes to show that we just gotta be more careful what we
send out into space via those satellites. I'll bet they get all confused
about who the aliens are in 3rd Rock from the Sun, too. damn!
| Not so sure. Read Kant or Cicero or Defoe, and you will find quite long
| sentences. It's training. Today young people don't read much and think
| that a sentence of three lines is a long one.
again, Hollywood and mass marketing and television commercials are not
what this planet is about. I'm sorry about sending the wrong signals to
your planet, but here on earth, only a tiny minority of young people are
similar to what the adults think they look like. maybe the people who
make TV shows for dumb kids are also from outer space. it would explain
an awful lot.
| But I know such stuff by myself, don't you believe that? How do you know
| that I never thought about such things?
I sympathize. it must be awful to watch us limited humans react only to
what you write and not what _you_ know is communicated to the entire
galaxy from your telepathic superbrain. we're _ages_ away from actually
developing telepathy, you see, so we limit our reactions to what people
do and say, and respond to what people do and say, not the entirety of
their personality, even though you probably do that on your planet. I
remember Robert A. Heinlein using the work "grok" to describe the merging
of oneself with knowledge of something else.
I hope they don't terminate you just because you have been exposed, but
if you do have to go, could you tell the SETI project what to look for?
enjoy your stay. and I'm glad Lisp is what attracted the aliens, too.
#:Erik
--
@1999-07-22T00:37:33Z -- pi billion seconds since the turn of the century
Josef Eschgfaeller wrote:
> Not so sure. Read Kant or Cicero or Defoe, and you will find quite
> long sentences. It's training. Today young people don't read much
> and think that a sentence of three lines is a long one.
Maybe, but OTOH I remember an editor's footnote in
"Kritik der reinen Vernunft" which says that some sentence
could not be reconstructed due to lack of a recognizable
grammatical structure, i.e. unreadable programs tend to
be buggy.
Btw., I recently did an experiment (with VIM on a DOS box):
I changed the color of the parentheses (why the hell does
vim colorize *them* at all?) to an almost (adjustable with
the contrast knob of the monitor) dark grey in scheme.vim.
The readability of the code did almost not suffer (what
I missed was a correctly working autoindent).
Ralf
Ralf Muschall writes:
> Josef Eschgfaeller wrote:
> > Not so sure. Read Kant or Cicero or Defoe, and you will find quite
[...]
> Maybe, but OTOH I remember an editor's footnote in
> "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" which says that some sentence
> could not be reconstructed due to lack of a recognizable
> grammatical structure, i.e. unreadable programs tend to
> be buggy.
Kant's late & great books are landmarks of academic obfuscation.
His stylistic barbarisms make reading the "critiques" about as
pleasant as chewing leather. (With the exception of some passages.)
rthappe
Rolf-Thomas Happe wrote:
> Ralf Muschall writes:
> > Josef Eschgfaeller wrote:
> > > Not so sure. Read Kant or Cicero or Defoe, and you will find quite
> [...]
> > Maybe, but OTOH I remember an editor's footnote in
> > "Kritik der reinen Vernunft" which says that some sentence
> > could not be reconstructed due to lack of a recognizable
> > grammatical structure, i.e. unreadable programs tend to
> > be buggy.
>
> Kant's late & great books are landmarks of academic obfuscation.
> His stylistic barbarisms make reading the "critiques" about as
> pleasant as chewing leather. (With the exception of some passages.)
>
> rthappe
eschew obfuscation ;-)
--will
Josef Eschgfaeller wrote:
> Not so sure. Read Kant or Cicero or Defoe, and you will find quite
> long sentences. It's training. Today young people don't read much
> and think that a sentence of three lines is a long one.
Thank you for patronising young people.
I would advice you to read something a bit more upto date like Witgenstein
or something pop like Simenon. They are able to say something without using
long sentences.
I find that reading long obscure multi-line blocks of code tedious. More so
since it is almost always unneccessary.
Although I don't have the capacity to consume the scary amount of text
that Tim can (doesn't it hurt?), there are times where I too have to read
alot of code. And it would make my and alot of other programmers lives alot
easier if people would try and KEEP IT SIMPLE. There are very difficult
idears and problems to be tackled in this world (thats what makes it
interesting) but obscuring these problems by making things more complicated
than they need is something that should be abhorred.
Sorry about the rant.
Cheers,
Will
William Deakin wrote:
> Josef Eschgfaeller wrote:
>
> > Not so sure. Read Kant or Cicero or Defoe, and you will find quite
> I would advice you to read something a bit more upto date like Witgenstein
Yo, guys! Don't make me feel like a dummy! I still have 2000 pages of the
Norton Shakespeare to go! ;-)
OK. Time for Vassil to talk about Dostoievsky or something like that ;-)