Thanks to people posting here, I've read the "Gentle Introduction" and even coded up a few interesting programs in LISP.
What I think I need now is what I needed at a comparable point in my Java journey -- a simple, on-line, indexed, HTML version of all the functions
described.
Something very much like Javadoc does.
I don't really want another book (I have a couple more, but nowadays, books are awkward and I flit around several computers and between home and
work). As much as I admire Knuth, I don't want stuff in tex format (which I don't yet have any way of handling, especially a whole directory's
worth).
If it isn't HTML, it does have to be in a format that isn't Unix-specific and one which will work on a variety of platforms readily without me
learning another damn tool.
In short, I need a place to go to "find out" what I don't know about COMMON Lisp, function-by-function as I need it.
Larry
Larry Loen wrote:
> Thanks to people posting here, I've read the "Gentle Introduction" and even coded up a few interesting programs in LISP.
>
> What I think I need now is what I needed at a comparable point in my Java journey -- a simple, on-line, indexed, HTML version of all the functions
> described.
>
> Something very much like Javadoc does.
And, just after that, saw this in another post.
http://www.xanalys.com/software_tools/reference/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/Chapter-Index.html
Looks like it will serve very well. Is there anything better (he asks greedily)?
Larry
Larry Loen <······@rchland.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
> Larry Loen wrote:
>
> > Thanks to people posting here, I've read the "Gentle Introduction" and even coded up a few interesting programs in LISP.
> >
> > What I think I need now is what I needed at a comparable point in my Java journey -- a simple, on-line, indexed, HTML version of all the functions
> > described.
> >
> > Something very much like Javadoc does.
>
> And, just after that, saw this in another post.
>
> http://www.xanalys.com/software_tools/reference/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/Chapter-Index.html
>
> Looks like it will serve very well. Is there anything better (he asks greedily)?
Better than the spec itself? Once you start to get the hang of the
language (which is what an intro book should give you), there's
nothing better.
On Tue, 17 Jul 2001 10:56:33 -0500, Larry Loen
<······@rchland.vnet.ibm.com> wrote:
> http://www.xanalys.com/software_tools/reference/HyperSpec/FrontMatter/Chapter-Index.html
>
> Looks like it will serve very well. Is there anything better (he asks greedily)?
What do you mean by "better"?
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://cvs2.cons.org:8000/cmucl/doc/EncyCMUCLopedia/
Larry Loen <······@rchland.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
> Thanks to people posting here, I've read the "Gentle Introduction" and
> even coded up a few interesting programs in LISP.
[...]
> In short, I need a place to go to "find out" what I don't know about
> COMMON Lisp, function-by-function as I need it.
You are describing the Common Lisp HyperSpec.
<http://www.xanalys.com/software_tools/reference/HyperSpec/>. The
HyperSpec can be browsed online or downloaded. You really should be
using Ilisp <http://ilisp.cons.org/> to do your lisp editing. Ilisp
has a command to view (in a browser) the HyperSpec entry for the
function under the cursor. Ilisp can be customized to use a locally
stored copy of the HyperSpec.
--
H�kon Alstadheim, Montreal, Quebec, Canada
From: Tord Kallqvist Romstad
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <gqkvgkrimqd.fsf@janus.uio.no>
Larry Loen <······@rchland.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
> In short, I need a place to go to "find out" what I don't know about
> COMMON Lisp, function-by-function as I need it.
The Common Lisp HyperSpec could be precisely what you are looking for:
http://www.xanalys.com/software_tools/reference/HyperSpec/
--
Tord Romstad
Actually, how powerful is the document string feature? (I'll go read about
it later)? Has anyone found the need to build something more like javadoc
(or Doxygen)? (I do mean javadoc, not api documentation).
"Marcin Tustin" <·······@GUeswhatthisbitisfor.mindless.com> writes:
> Actually, how powerful is the document string feature? (I'll go read about
> it later)? Has anyone found the need to build something more like javadoc
> (or Doxygen)? (I do mean javadoc, not api documentation).
All of those "lets generate reams of documentation automatically from
the code and mixed-in comments" tools I've ever encountered just
produce thousands of pages (either hard-copy, electronic or hyper-text)
of documentation for even smallish programs, that no-one in their right
mind would want to read.
In other words: Those tools are great for appeasing management that
insists on stacks of documentation (instead of focusing on quality
documentation), and/or for those that are somehow psychologically
incapable of reading source code, but other than that they are an
incredible waste of space.
A useful Lisp programming environment is going to beat any of those
systems hands-down:
- Most of the stuff those tools produce are implementation details,
which are only relevant when you are changing/working with that
unit's implementation, i.e. when you have the source-code those
documents were generated from in front of you anyway. No need to
look at the same things in HTML/DOC/PDF at all.
- Those things which define interfaces, i.e. stuff you might want to
reference while working on other files, are accessible much more
directly in the Lisp environment, via symbol-completion/apropos,
describe, doc-strings, argument lists, and if really necessary
commands like edit-definition, find-callers, etc.
- In fact most Lisp environments offers much better cross-referencing
tools than the simple-minded cross-linking most of the automatic
documentation generation tools provide.
So, IMHO, put all of the low-level stuff into comments, doc-strings
and the source code, but let them stay there. And then write some
high-level design documents, _BY HAND_, because those are documents
that will actually get read, because they answer questions which can
not be gotten more quickly from the source-code, and because they were
written by a human being, and are therefore at least half-way readable
and well-structured (in theory ;).
Regs, Pierre.
--
Pierre R. Mai <····@acm.org> http://www.pmsf.de/pmai/
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
We cause accidents. -- Nathaniel Borenstein
"Pierre R. Mai" wrote:
> All of those "lets generate reams of documentation automatically from
> the code and mixed-in comments" tools I've ever encountered just
> produce thousands of pages (either hard-copy, electronic or hyper-text)
> of documentation for even smallish programs, that no-one in their right
> mind would want to read.
>
> In other words: Those tools are great for appeasing management that
> insists on stacks of documentation (instead of focusing on quality
> documentation), and/or for those that are somehow psychologically
> incapable of reading source code, but other than that they are an
> incredible waste of space.
>
Man, do we live in different worlds. I personally am very tired of this attitude of "go read my 100,000 line of code application to understand it."
I'm sorry, I just don't have that kind of time in my job.
I'm very capable of reading source code in a great many languages; I hope to include LISP in that set. But, if I had to routinely look at nothing but
source code, my job (performance analysis) would be entirely impractical (at least if practical is defined as getting more than one thing done a
year). My job is aptly defined in many cases as finding the right needle in the right haystack. Sometimes, that requries code reading, but I need
something more than the root directory of a multi-million line of code OS to know where to start. Good design doc is often a godsend. We do seem to
agree on that.
I do take your point that automatic documentation generators (from code) have limits. You'll note I said "good". A forklift full of detail comments
is, I presume you agree, nonesense.
But, I've been pretty happy with Javadoc. The tool is no more capable than the several I've used before and doubless earned the ire of us both. It
must have something to do with the culture -- most of it is a pretty good predictor of how to use the widget, which is what I normally need. And yet,
in theory, it is no better than any of the other "embed this in source code stuff" I've seen before.
Larry
From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <ey366cpx0ok.fsf@cley.com>
* Larry Loen wrote:
> Man, do we live in different worlds. I personally am very tired of
> this attitude of "go read my 100,000 line of code application to
> understand it." I'm sorry, I just don't have that kind of time in
> my job.
I don't think anyone is suggesting that. I think they're suggesting
you load the system into your introspective environment and start
asking questions about it.
--tim
Larry Loen <······@rchland.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
> "Pierre R. Mai" wrote:
>
> > All of those "lets generate reams of documentation automatically from
> > the code and mixed-in comments" tools I've ever encountered just
> > produce thousands of pages (either hard-copy, electronic or hyper-text)
> > of documentation for even smallish programs, that no-one in their right
> > mind would want to read.
> >
> > In other words: Those tools are great for appeasing management that
> > insists on stacks of documentation (instead of focusing on quality
> > documentation), and/or for those that are somehow psychologically
> > incapable of reading source code, but other than that they are an
> > incredible waste of space.
> >
>
> Man, do we live in different worlds. I personally am very tired of
> this attitude of "go read my 100,000 line of code application to
> understand it." I'm sorry, I just don't have that kind of time in
> my job.
You also don't seem to have the time to read usenet postings
thoroughly, it seems to me. While there are certainly things I could
have better expressed in my posting, I'm quite certain that even the
text you quoted should have given you enough of a hint that I don't
propagate the "lets have no documentation, because the source is the
whole documentation" position at all (note for example my reference to
_quality_ documentation). In fact I accuse automatic documentation
generators (ADGs for short) of propagating that view in only a
slightly modified form.
Given that I've done a fair share of maintenance programming of other
foreign and own systems in my live, I think I have a fairly solid
grasp of what I've found to be useful (i.e. quality) documentation,
and what not. And I have never found automatically generated
documentation to be any substitute for quality documentation. What
automatically generated documentation is, is a statically restricted
and automatically cross-referenced view onto the source code. This
doesn't constitute documentation, it is just a poor substitute for
interactive development systems that let me get at exactly the same
information (and often more of it) in a much more automated,
integrated and selective way.
> I'm very capable of reading source code in a great many languages; I
> hope to include LISP in that set. But, if I had to routinely look
> at nothing but source code, my job (performance analysis) would be
> entirely impractical (at least if practical is defined as getting
> more than one thing done a year). My job is aptly defined in many
> cases as finding the right needle in the right haystack. Sometimes,
> that requries code reading, but I need something more than the root
> directory of a multi-million line of code OS to know where to start.
> Good design doc is often a godsend. We do seem to agree on that.
Exactly. ADGs don't produce that kind of documentation, because
thousands of comments in the source code is not the kind of place to
put high- and mid-level design information. And when I want
information on the high- or mid-level design of a system, I don't
normally care about myriad of method signatures at the same time.
As I (perhaps with less than the required clarity) stated in my
original posting, I see at least three-four different kinds of
information I might be interested in, when working on/with a system:
A) High- and medium-level requirements, analysis, design
documentation. This is completely independent of source code
layout or information. It should be written in a well-structured,
prose style, possibly with relevant (pseudo-)formal notation thrown
in for good measure (if you believe in formalisms at that level).
See Erik Naggum's posting <················@naggum.net> for more on
this topic.
Automatic documentation generators don't have a place at this level
at all, IMNSHO, but sadly I've often found that their use in
projects lowered the effort put into this kind of documentation,
because it is easier to just dump all your knowledge into
unstructured comments, than take the time to create a structured
and polished presentation.
B) Public interface documentation, which includes signatures and short
functional descriptions of said entities. This is where automatic
documentation generators shine, _in languages which don't offer
environments that give you advanced interactive introspection and
documentation capabilites, which will provide you with all of the
information e.g. javadoc/doxygen give you, and some more, but in a
much more directly useful way[1]. Again, take a look at any
half-decent Lisp environment, and you will find all of this
available at the touch of a button/key.
For example, in my working environment, C-c d will give me the
doc-string for any entity in the system, C-c i will describe it,
C-c I will inspect it, C-c a will give me the argument list for any
function (it will also automatically flash the arg-list in the
minibuffer while I type), C-c h will give me the HyperSpec entry
for any standard-mandated entity, M-. will take me to the
definition(s) of a given entity, C-c ^ will take me to the callers
of a given function, etc. There's also tons of per-project
customized stuff, so that I can get at specifications for certain
functions, etc. with a simple command, etc.
B+) For high-quality libraries or semi-autonomous subsystems, there
should be low-level API documentation that includes the
information in B, but should include relevant information from A,
and tie the whole API together in a well structured, presentation
that combines tutorial and reference, specification and design
in one. The ("library part" of the) ANSI CL standard is an
example of such high-quality documentation, IMHO, and I've only
seen a couple of other projects that achieved that level of
documentation. Ideally, all units/subsystems of any project
should achieve such a high level of quality of presentation, but
realistically, this is very expensive, and very seldomly achieved
in my experience. It is though one of the necessary ingredients
for succesful inter-project or even inter-team reuse, IMHO (which
might explain the relatively low levels of reuse achieved by most
companies).
C) Source-code unit-level implementation documentation. Since you
should by definition only need that kind of information when you
are working at the unit in question (if that's not the case, then
you already have even more urgent problems than documentation),
the source for the unit should already be at your fingertips (in
your editor). So everything that javadoc-style systems will have
generated from such a file will already be in plain view then. No
need for a separate, static, non-up-to-date view of the same,
then.
In combination with A and B (and B+), this should be pretty much
all you need to work with the implementation. And again, any
half-way decent environment will give you even better access than
javadoc-style documentation, by e.g. giving you interactive and
batch regexp-search capabilities across whole projects,
advanced cross-referencing, etc.
> I do take your point that automatic documentation generators (from
> code) have limits. You'll note I said "good". A forklift full of
> detail comments is, I presume you agree, nonesense.
But that's the kind of stuff I've seen most often included in such
systems. If I was lucky, then I found the stuff that is included in
decent doc-strings as part of the API documentation, but that was
all. And that included the documentation entries I wrote myself.
So while I think that javadoc-style ADGs might be an improvement in
languages that provide impoverished environments and language support
for introspection and documentation, I fail to see the advantage they
would bring to CL. And I see the dangers that they inherently create,
since by incentivizing keeping documentation and source-code together,
they dis-incentivize the proper maintenance of separate documentation
(which is already suffering from enough pressures that it is often
sorely neglected), in my experience.
CL environments are guilty of that to some degree, too, since there is
no standard for integrating stand-alone documentation with the
environment, so that e.g. accessing CMU CL documentation is more
painful than e.g. accessing the HyperSpec, and that's a tiny bit more
painful than asking the system about some arglist or doc-string.
Dito for maintenance: It's simpler to adjust the doc-string of a
function (or rewrite a comment), when something changes, than
adjusting the out-of-line documentation. That's where management
processes and project-guidelines must step in, to reverse the
inevitable trend...
> But, I've been pretty happy with Javadoc. The tool is no more
> capable than the several I've used before and doubless earned the
> ire of us both. It must have something to do with the culture --
> most of it is a pretty good predictor of how to use the widget,
> which is what I normally need. And yet, in theory, it is no better
> than any of the other "embed this in source code stuff" I've seen
> before.
There's the possibility that either our experiences or our standards
just differ, of course. But last time I seriously looked at the state
of e.g. publically available Java libraries, I was not impressed by
by the quality of the documentation.
In any case, I hope my current posting has cleared up any
mis-impressions of my position.
Regs, Pierre.
Footnotes:
[1] If you are a developer. There is a case for generating static
snapshots of some of that information in order to pass it to
e.g. QA people in order for them to write test-cases, etc. It is
no problem to write tools that generate that kind of snapshot
from the stuff that is available in a good Lisp environment.
That still doesn't mean that everyone should be restricted to
that kind of interface, though.
--
Pierre R. Mai <····@acm.org> http://www.pmsf.de/pmai/
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
We cause accidents. -- Nathaniel Borenstein
>>>>> "Pierre" == Pierre R Mai <····@acm.org> writes:
Pierre> CL environments are guilty of that to some degree, too, since there is
Pierre> no standard for integrating stand-alone documentation with the
Pierre> environment, so that e.g. accessing CMU CL documentation is more
Pierre> painful than e.g. accessing the HyperSpec, and that's a tiny bit more
Pierre> painful than asking the system about some arglist or doc-string.
Pierre> Dito for maintenance: It's simpler to adjust the doc-string of a
Pierre> function (or rewrite a comment), when something changes, than
Pierre> adjusting the out-of-line documentation. That's where management
Pierre> processes and project-guidelines must step in, to reverse the
Pierre> inevitable trend...
What do you think of gcl's approach where the doc-strings are really
held in an info file that describe and friends look through? Granted,
the current info file basically looks something like what an ADG would
generate, it at least has the potential of being something more,
perhaps even like the Hyperspec.
Ray
Several years ago, I downloaded a system named LISPDOCU written by
Johannes Beck (····@ki-server.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de) that inhaled
CL and emitted documentation in HTML, TeX, or rtf. It worked pretty
well, but you could fool it with code of the form:
(macrolet
((dm (real-name arg1 ...)
`(defmacro ,real-name (,arg1 ...)
... )))
(dm boiler-plate1 ... ))
because it didn't actually define/macroexpand the code it analyzed
(which would have made it interesting when it was used to generate its
own documentation, I suppose). I remember hacking it to handle the few
odd top-level cases like the above that I occasionally do.
The links for it at www.alu.org have gone stale, and I can't locate the
author. I have my copy, and I don't see any licensing text in it, so I
suppose I could put it up for FTP, but I would feel better about doing
so if the author said it was OK to do so. Anyone know how to contact
him?
--
Remove obvious stuff to e-mail me.
Bob Bane
Hello Bob, Hello c.l.l
I don't read c.l.l very often these days but I got this forwarded.
> Several years ago, I downloaded a system named LISPDOCU written by
> Johannes Beck (····@ki-server.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de) that inhaled
> CL and emitted documentation in HTML, TeX, or rtf. It worked pretty
> well, but you could fool it with code of the form:
>
> (macrolet
> ((dm (real-name arg1 ...)
> `(defmacro ,real-name (,arg1 ...)
> ... )))
>
> (dm boiler-plate1 ... ))
>
> because it didn't actually define/macroexpand the code it analyzed
> (which would have made it interesting when it was used to generate its
> own documentation, I suppose). I remember hacking it to handle the few
> odd top-level cases like the above that I occasionally do.
The first version had indeed a parser which used
read/macroexpand/read-table stuff and it always crashed horribly because
this only works if you scan files in the wrong order. So I had to make
this (horrible, I agree) text-based scanner and parser where LISP could
be so fine when it comes to treating source code as a structured data.
I did this as a student job for some university project with tons of
source files with very strange loaders. And read or some functions using
it will be unhappy if they find a symbol 'somepackage:myfun before you
have an export definition for this. I was not happy with the solution
myself and I had no knowlegde of how to write a decent parser so it's a
hack. If anybody wants to do it right, here's the solution (just code
it):
1) use defsystem to define modules, load them
2) let the documentation tool go through the defsystem definitions and
scan the files with read/macroexpand/etc (the files are all loaded and
let's say well-defined)
> The links for it at www.alu.org have gone stale, and I can't locate the
> author. I have my copy, and I don't see any licensing text in it, so I
> suppose I could put it up for FTP, but I would feel better about doing
> so if the author said it was OK to do so. Anyone know how to contact
> him?
I remember there was a disk failure and the web pages were gone without
backup.
You can find it at (how to point ALU to this?):
http://home.arcor-online.de/johannes.beck/lispdocu/
And if there's additional code I would collect them and publish them
here. Maybe I find the time on a rainy evening and even integrate
changes.
And well, there's no licence at all in this, so feel free to do what you
want with it.
Bye
Johannes
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3204451328338331@naggum.net>
* Marcin Tustin
> Actually, how powerful is the document string feature? (I'll go read about
> it later)? Has anyone found the need to build something more like javadoc
> (or Doxygen)? (I do mean javadoc, not api documentation).
In this day and age with "web browsers" used for everything, I think it
would have been a better idea than my hyperspec.el thing (which others
have also done) to keep URLs in the documentation strings of standard
symbols and of symbols exported from implementation-specific packages.
The generic function documentation does not necessarily need to return a
constant URL, but could build it from on-site or off-site base URLs,
possibly even build it from the symbol name and documentation type. The
Lisp system would interact with the browser with the established remote
control features, at least available in Netscape under Unix and Linux.
#:Erik
--
There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <sfw4rsafhe5.fsf@world.std.com>
Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
> * Marcin Tustin
> > Actually, how powerful is the document string feature? (I'll go read about
> > it later)? Has anyone found the need to build something more like javadoc
> > (or Doxygen)? (I do mean javadoc, not api documentation).
>
> In this day and age with "web browsers" used for everything, I think it
> would have been a better idea than my hyperspec.el thing (which others
> have also done) to keep URLs in the documentation strings of standard
> symbols and of symbols exported from implementation-specific packages.
(Why just those and not even user-defined symbols?) I think this is a
great idea. Is there any reason we couldn't just start doing this?
It's pretty easy to write a URL-P predicate, and so it's even
compatible with other uses of the doc string...
> The generic function documentation does not necessarily need to return a
> constant URL, but could build it from on-site or off-site base URLs,
> possibly even build it from the symbol name and documentation type. The
> Lisp system would interact with the browser with the established remote
> control features, at least available in Netscape under Unix and Linux.
Good idea, too.
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
>
> > * Marcin Tustin
> > > Actually, how powerful is the document string feature? (I'll go read about
> > > it later)? Has anyone found the need to build something more like javadoc
> > > (or Doxygen)? (I do mean javadoc, not api documentation).
> >
> > In this day and age with "web browsers" used for everything, I think it
> > would have been a better idea than my hyperspec.el thing (which others
> > have also done) to keep URLs in the documentation strings of standard
> > symbols and of symbols exported from implementation-specific packages.
>
> (Why just those and not even user-defined symbols?) I think this is a
> great idea. Is there any reason we couldn't just start doing this?
> It's pretty easy to write a URL-P predicate,
Not so fast.... Have you looked at the UR[LI] spec?
Anyway there is the CommonURI package at www.dataheaven.de.
> and so it's even
> compatible with other uses of the doc string...
>
> > The generic function documentation does not necessarily need to return a
> > constant URL, but could build it from on-site or off-site base URLs,
> > possibly even build it from the symbol name and documentation type. The
> > Lisp system would interact with the browser with the established remote
> > control features, at least available in Netscape under Unix and Linux.
>
> Good idea, too.
Yep. Very good indeed. However, I would not discard the idea of a
Document Generator. I like to have "clean" doc strings in lieu of
comments.
Cheers
--
Marco Antoniotti ========================================================
NYU Courant Bioinformatics Group tel. +1 - 212 - 998 3488
719 Broadway 12th Floor fax +1 - 212 - 995 4122
New York, NY 10003, USA http://bioinformatics.cat.nyu.edu
"Hello New York! We'll do what we can!"
Bill Murray in `Ghostbusters'.
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3204459709990624@naggum.net>
* Kent M Pitman
> (Why just those and not even user-defined symbols?)
Primarily because they would be in "sealed" packages with their external
specification and documentation, anyway. It would be a waste to keep a
watered-down version in documentation strings.
* Marco Antoniotti <·······@cs.nyu.edu>
> However, I would not discard the idea of a Document Generator. I like to
> have "clean" doc strings in lieu of comments.
I think there is something to be said for a low-cost documentation like a
simple string. As I expect more from the specification in the HyperSpec
and I expect more from vendor documentation, I expect that documentation
for code in development _not_ be polished and indexed and everything web
pages, but rather something that is so easy to write well and maintain at
a high quality that it does not seem like the drag that documentation so
often is considered to be. I also personally prefer to leave the quality
publication job to people who are good at it, instead of me trying to to
something I both dislike and feel inept at. One of the reasons I do not
write a lot of web pages is that I have tremendous respect for typography
and nearly everything I do with that abominable HTML thing really sucks
-- much less than most of what is out there on the "web", but it still
looks mostly awful and screams incompetence. Although not only and not
necessarily mine, I still get blamed for how it looks. I would much
rather publish something in PDF than that hot toy markup language.
#:Erik
--
There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwitgqutmg.fsf@world.std.com>
Marco Antoniotti <·······@cs.nyu.edu> writes:
> Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
>
> > Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
> >
> > > * Marcin Tustin
> > > > Actually, how powerful is the document string feature? (I'll go read about
> > > > it later)? Has anyone found the need to build something more like javadoc
> > > > (or Doxygen)? (I do mean javadoc, not api documentation).
> > >
> > > In this day and age with "web browsers" used for everything, I think it
> > > would have been a better idea than my hyperspec.el thing (which others
> > > have also done) to keep URLs in the documentation strings of standard
> > > symbols and of symbols exported from implementation-specific packages.
> >
> > (Why just those and not even user-defined symbols?) I think this is a
> > great idea. Is there any reason we couldn't just start doing this?
> > It's pretty easy to write a URL-P predicate,
>
> Not so fast.... Have you looked at the UR[LI] spec?
> Anyway there is the CommonURI package at www.dataheaven.de.
Admittedly, I was thinking of something that would only work
99.9999999999% of the time, like
(string-equal doc-string "http:/" :end1 (min (length doc-string) 6))
And I wasn't worried about parsing it--just recognizing it. You can just
hand it straight to a browser and let it do the parsing.
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3204466420985118@naggum.net>
* Kent M Pitman
> Admittedly, I was thinking of something that would only work
> 99.9999999999% of the time, like
> (string-equal doc-string "http:/" :end1 (min (length doc-string) 6))
There are a number of possible "schemes", or whatever they are called,
besides "http", but the general syntax is still supposed to be preserved.
It is almost like namestrings for pathnames, only far less intelligently
done (regardless of what anyone might think of pathnames), due to the
near-fatal case of standard-optionitis.
I do _not_ propose that the URL should be (in) the documentation string.
What I really wanted was a way to link the _real_ documentation to the
symbol and documentation type through that function. I think it would be
ideal if that function launched the browser in a friendly way, and if it
returned nil to the caller, that would not be a problem.
Since documentation strings are routinely discarded by most CL systems,
the best way to do this would be to use an interface that could take a
package name, a symbol name, and the documentation type. This would be a
lot easier to implement on top of the generic function documentation than
interfacing with magic values of the documentation string.
#:Erik
--
There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
On Wed, 18 Jul 2001 17:33:43 GMT, Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
> I do _not_ propose that the URL should be (in) the documentation string.
What about a symbol property?
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://cvs2.cons.org:8000/cmucl/doc/EncyCMUCLopedia/
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3204559306178592@naggum.net>
* Paolo Amoroso <·······@mclink.it>
> What about a symbol property?
That would also work, but in essence, the mapping from package plus
symbol name and documentation type is nearly an ideal match for the way
URLs may contain queries. This way, we can outboard the mapping and use
it from other places, too, instead of making all that enormous amount of
data hang around in the Lisp image. After all, part of the reason
documentation strings are usually discarded from delivered images is that
they take up a significant amount of space, although many would argue
that this is not a valid reason in our time. Another issue is that some
people may prefer to translate the specification to their favorite
non-English language, which would either mean a lot of new properties and
string values in the name of "localization" and "internationalization",
or simply a language-sensitive server that returned the appropriate
language version if available. Finally, the reason I want documentation
for "stable" packages to be available in hypertext is that some people
may need to go back to a tutorial if they are still confused or need
examples and the like. If the WWW had actually _been_ hypertext <insert
long and pained sigh>, it would have been possible for a user to add
links between disjoint documents, but we need to figure out a way to do
that outside of that immensely retarded _tragedy_ called HTML.
#:Erik
--
There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
On Thu, 19 Jul 2001 19:21:49 GMT, Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
> That would also work, but in essence, the mapping from package plus
> symbol name and documentation type is nearly an ideal match for the way
> URLs may contain queries. This way, we can outboard the mapping and use
> it from other places, too, instead of making all that enormous amount of
> data hang around in the Lisp image. After all, part of the reason
I had missed the idea of a _mapping_ in your original posting. Now I
understand it, and I realize about the resource usage implications of my
suggestion of storing the information in a symbol property.
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://cvs2.cons.org:8000/cmucl/doc/EncyCMUCLopedia/
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwd76vtklk.fsf@world.std.com>
Paolo Amoroso <·······@mclink.it> writes:
>
> On Thu, 19 Jul 2001 19:21:49 GMT, Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
>
> > That would also work, but in essence, the mapping from package plus
> > symbol name and documentation type is nearly an ideal match for the way
> > URLs may contain queries. This way, we can outboard the mapping and use
> > it from other places, too, instead of making all that enormous amount of
> > data hang around in the Lisp image. After all, part of the reason
>
> I had missed the idea of a _mapping_ in your original posting. Now I
> understand it, and I realize about the resource usage implications of my
> suggestion of storing the information in a symbol property.
Doing it with a tuple mapping has the advantage, too, that you can make
different documentation for the selfsame (i.e., eq) symbol based on which
package it's exported from, since even though its actual implementation
and function might not vary, its "intentional" use might in some cases.
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3204654939180446@naggum.net>
* Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com>
> Doing it with a tuple mapping has the advantage, too, that you can make
> different documentation for the selfsame (i.e., eq) symbol based on which
> package it's exported from, since even though its actual implementation
> and function might not vary, its "intentional" use might in some cases.
But how would you know which package that would be? Packages being a
reader concept, it is quite hard to figure out which package you mean
after the fact, other than the symbol's home package. So although I
appreciate the idea, I am not sure how you think it could be implemented.
I thought one would take the package from (symbol-package symbol) and
the symbol name from (symbol-name symbol), since the generic function
documentation does not receive the package separately from the symbol.
#:Erik
--
There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwvgkn8c3q.fsf@world.std.com>
Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
>
> * Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com>
> > Doing it with a tuple mapping has the advantage, too, that you can make
> > different documentation for the selfsame (i.e., eq) symbol based on which
> > package it's exported from, since even though its actual implementation
> > and function might not vary, its "intentional" use might in some cases.
>
> But how would you know which package that would be? Packages being a
> reader concept, it is quite hard to figure out which package you mean
> after the fact, other than the symbol's home package. So although I
> appreciate the idea, I am not sure how you think it could be implemented.
> I thought one would take the package from (symbol-package symbol) and
> the symbol name from (symbol-name symbol), since the generic function
> documentation does not receive the package separately from the symbol.
Sorry, I was assuming a parser that was either grabbing a string name
and could see the prefix the user typed, or that had hyperlinks
intra-document from one intentional name to another. I do agree if
you have a symbol, you have this problem.
But you also have this problem already anyway in reverse if someone
asks for doc on foo::car from outside of package FOO and really has no
right to know that CAR has any meaning internal to FOO at all, yet
MIGHT find the documentation for COMMON-LISP:CAR as a result...
So, for example:
http://localhost/lookup-symbol?package=foo&name=car&type=function
=> 404 Symbol FOO::CAR is not exported and no documentation
of a function FOO::CAR was found.
This won't happen, obviously, if you just use the symbol's home package,
but that doesn't mean it's not a useful error message to get when you do
have the intentional package name.
Any ideas for implementing this functionality in the XML world, a direction
that
much of the sofware world seems to be heading?
Erik Naggum wrote:
> * Paolo Amoroso <·······@mclink.it>
> > What about a symbol property?
>
> If the WWW had actually _been_ hypertext <insert
> long and pained sigh>, it would have been possible for a user to add
> links between disjoint documents, but we need to figure out a way to do
> that outside of that immensely retarded _tragedy_ called HTML.
>
> #:Erik
> --
> There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
> cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
> one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3204808398598543@naggum.net>
* Steve Long <·········@isomedia.com>
> Any ideas for implementing this functionality in the XML world, a
> direction that much of the sofware world seems to be heading?
What on _earth_ can XML possibly have to offer people who are not already
completely out of their mind? The interesting thing is to use Common
Lisp to deal with that abomination so that some people can see how dumb
SGML and HTML and XML really are and how it should have been done. There
is _zero_ point in moving from Common Lisp to XML. Making a connection
from CL to XML that is not pure kindness to the losers is _dangerous_.
Even as a data notation, CL is already at least a decade ahead of XML.
SGML and XML are good ideas if you were comatose when you designed your
software to begin with, but _only_ then. We should approach XML people
with a "good, good, you figured out that a uniform syntax has benefits --
how many _more_ years of pain and suffering and agonizing over lost data
before you figure out that types, read-write consistencey, _intelligent_
in-memory representation, programmable syntax, and macros have benefits,
too?" Sigh! These folks are coming from a third-world country as far as
software goes, and absolutely anything that carries symptoms of IQ above
freezing (Fahrenheit, just like the room temperature), is better than
their astonishingly retarded data formats. That _includes_ most of the
dreadfully "look, ma, I can also reinvent the wheel, with no hands!" Unix
"configuration file" syntaxes, log file formats, etc, etc. My God, it is
so amazingly mindless! Speaking of which, if anyone needs evidence that
there is _no_ god, that whatever god was here has _left_ the planet, etc,
take a look at the fantastic mess that people arrange for themselves in
data formats and what they actually consider improvements! Clearly, this
could not have taken place if anyone, I mean _anyone_, had had a grand
plan. Even a god who were responsible for the platypus would have done
better than XML.
Now, what did you have in mind?
#:Erik
--
There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
Erik Naggum wrote:
> * Steve Long <·········@isomedia.com>
> > Any ideas for implementing this functionality in the XML world, a
> > direction that much of the sofware world seems to be heading?
>
<snipped>
>
> The interesting thing is to use Common
> Lisp to deal with that abomination so that some people can see how dumb
> SGML and HTML and XML really are and how it should have been done. There
> is _zero_ point in moving from Common Lisp to XML. Making a connection
> from CL to XML that is not pure kindness to the losers is _dangerous_.
>
>
> Now, what did you have in mind?
I have no personal opinion nor direction in mind, but thanks for the colorful
analysis.
I don't need much arm twisting to avoid the alphabet soup of other languages
and
"standards" out there that I have no objective basis with which to evaluate.
SLong
Erik Naggum wrote:
> * Steve Long <·········@isomedia.com>
> > Any ideas for implementing this functionality in the XML world, a
> > direction that much of the sofware world seems to be heading?
>
> ....catatonic drivel deleted...
> so amazingly mindless! Speaking of which, if anyone needs evidence that
> there is _no_ god, that whatever god was here has _left_ the planet, etc,
> take a look at the fantastic mess that people arrange for themselves in
> data formats and what they actually consider improvements! Clearly, this
> could not have taken place if anyone, I mean _anyone_, had had a grand
> plan. Even a god who were responsible for the platypus would have done
> better than XML.
I take it you do not believe in God?
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3205299690782494@naggum.net>
* Robert Gonzalez <·······@austin.rr.com>
> > ....catatonic drivel deleted...
I take it that you do, to answer the other amazingly relevant comment you made.
#:Erik
--
There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
Erik Naggum wrote:
> * Robert Gonzalez <·······@austin.rr.com>
> > > ....catatonic drivel deleted...
> > data formats and what they actually consider improvements! Clearly, this
> > could not have taken place if anyone, I mean _anyone_, had had a grand
> > plan. Even a god who were responsible for the platypus would have done
> > better than XML.
> I take it that you do, to answer the other amazingly relevant comment you made.
>
I think the relevancy issue is in your court. What does God have to do with the
design of XML? Are'nt your rants getting a little ignominious?
>
> #:Erik
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3205387369352876@naggum.net>
* Robert Gonzalez <·······@austin.rr.com>
> I think the relevancy issue is in your court. What does God have to do
> with the design of XML? Are'nt your rants getting a little ignominious?
It seems that you have been offended. This was not intended on my part.
I consider the various versions of religions to be interesting fairy
tales and consider the fact that they collectively agree on absolutely
nothing to be evidence of their status as fairy tales created by people.
If you feel that your religion is under threat from someone who considers
it silly, you need to talk to someone to get over your hypersensitivity.
There are, for any given religion, literally _billions_ of people who
consider it not just silly, but wrong, evil, heresy, a danger to mankind,
etc. I think you should be more worried about your real enemies than the
people who have fun with something that is both tragic _and_ funny in the
development of human societies and belief systems. If you do wish to
discuss your religious hypersensitivity, do it somwehere appropriate. If
you want to get respect for your religious views, have respect for mine
first. So far, you appear to attack me for no reason whatsoever. For
that reason alone, I think your religion is bad, for your information.
Your need to continue to talk about this is not a very good sign, either.
#:Erik
--
There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
On Sun, 29 Jul 2001 09:22:50 GMT, Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
> *
* ( bizarre drivel deleted .... )
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3205404165885876@naggum.net>
* raj <········@optushome.com.au>
> * ( bizarre drivel deleted .... )
Wow, a self-referential news-article!
#:Erik
--
There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
Erik Naggum wrote:
> * Robert Gonzalez <·······@austin.rr.com>
> > I think the relevancy issue is in your court. What does God have to do
> > with the design of XML? Are'nt your rants getting a little ignominious?
>
> It seems that you have been offended. This was not intended on my part.
Actually, no offense taken Erik, I simply questioned the tangled thread you
were weaving, I'm not sure anyone else understood either. You need to re-read
the original to see how irrelevant that whole paragraph was. It appeared more
to be a statement of your religious beliefs more that it was a statement about
the subject matter. People simply want a means of documenting code, and its
very valuable to a newbie starting out in a development project, that should be
the intended target audience for such a tool, not necessarily the end user.
>
> I consider the various versions of religions to be interesting fairy
> tales and consider the fact that they collectively agree on absolutely
> nothing to be evidence of their status as fairy tales created by people.
That's fine also. I do not have any religion whatsoever. Your powers of
observation are not as keen as you think. Religion is man's invention. I
agree with you 100% on that. It has nothing to do with God, except that they
make reference to God. And they can totally contradict or disagree with each
other, but this does not prove or disprove the existence of an omnipotent,
and/or omniscient being. Neither does the opposite. If all religions agreed
with each other, that still would not prove anything. Especially not with a
God who does not show himself freely.
>
> If you feel that your religion is under threat from someone who considers
> it silly, you need to talk to someone to get over your hypersensitivity.
Again, there is no threat to something that does exist on my end. I have just
been following this line of discussion, and the obtuse turns it took. You seem
to think you are very smart, and apparently enjoy putting people down who you
judge infererior to yourself, but this type of behaviour only exposes ones own
moral and intellectual inferiority. You may want to seek counseling on that,
it could cause problems for you in society. Are you having trouble on a
professional or personal front? I don't mean to be intrusive, but I have read
many of your posts, and was amazed by the vituperativeness of many of them.
Why are you so acrimonious towards so many of the posters? Some of them simply
need someone to help them.
>
> There are, for any given religion, literally _billions_ of people who
> consider it not just silly, but wrong, evil, heresy, a danger to mankind,
> etc. I think you should be more worried about your real enemies than the
That is absolutely true, religion does set itself up that way, how tragic. But
are you a person of principle or a pragmatist? If you are a person of
principle, then you should either just shoot yourself, for the future is
meaningless, either everything ends up in a collapsing inferno of which there
is no escape, or (as the current theory goes) the universe goes cold and there
is nothing we can do about it, or the flip side of a person of principle is you
believe in God and stick with that principle to the end, which now has some
meaning attached to it. If you are a pragmatist, then the practical thing
would be to believe in God, for the sheer probablistic imbalance of 80 years vs
infinity, i.e. if you are a betting man, you should bet on infinity and get
over any objections you have, otherwise that makes you a man of principle. I'm
with you, religion does not have anything to offer, but there are alternatives,
did you know that?
>
> people who have fun with something that is both tragic _and_ funny in the
> development of human societies and belief systems. If you do wish to
> discuss your religious hypersensitivity, do it somwehere appropriate. If
> you want to get respect for your religious views, have respect for mine
> first. So far, you appear to attack me for no reason whatsoever. For
You never answered my question, you simply made an assumption about my
question. So no one knows your religious views, therefore I made no assumption
about them. It seems that you may be the one who is hypersensitive about this
issue. It appears that maybe you have an internal conflict that makes you
defensive in this area. If you want respect for your views, you need to state
them. What are they Erik?
>
> that reason alone, I think your religion is bad, for your information.
> Your need to continue to talk about this is not a very good sign, either.
>
But you also continue to want to talk about it. You also appear to need to
want to talk about this further. The proof is in your answers. I don't mind
either way. I love stimulating intellectual conversation about just about
anything. And don't worry about getting me upset, I find that getting upset
about anything is a waste of time, I'm way past that juvenile stage of my life.
>
> #:Erik
> --
> There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
> cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
> one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3205475740741845@naggum.net>
* Robert Gonzalez <·······@austin.rr.com>
> You need to re-read the original to see how irrelevant that whole
> paragraph was.
I would need to be you to see how irrelevant that whole paragraph was. I
am not you. I do not have your hypersensitivity to this issue. In my
eyes, it was a joke. To you, it is getting closer and closer to a master
thesis on the relevance of indinvidual paragraphs in USENET articles.
I have not read the rest of your article. It did not appear relevant to
either XML or Common Lisp, but rather extremely relevant only to yourself.
However, if relevance was such an issue, you would not have talked about
this here. Ergo, relevance is _not_ your issue. In other words, you
need to examine your whole article to see how irrelevant it is here.
Drop it and move on.
#:Erik
--
There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
It seems I touched a raw nerve, I was only trying to strike an interesting
thread along philosophical lines, but you're right, this is the wrong place for
that. I don't want to offend you, so lets move on... This is the lisp
newsgroup after all.
Erik Naggum wrote:
> * Robert Gonzalez <·······@austin.rr.com>
> > You need to re-read the original to see how irrelevant that whole
> > paragraph was.
>
> I would need to be you to see how irrelevant that whole paragraph was. I
> am not you. I do not have your hypersensitivity to this issue. In my
> eyes, it was a joke. To you, it is getting closer and closer to a master
> thesis on the relevance of indinvidual paragraphs in USENET articles.
>
> I have not read the rest of your article. It did not appear relevant to
> either XML or Common Lisp, but rather extremely relevant only to yourself.
> However, if relevance was such an issue, you would not have talked about
> this here. Ergo, relevance is _not_ your issue. In other words, you
> need to examine your whole article to see how irrelevant it is here.
>
> Drop it and move on.
>
> #:Erik
> --
> There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
> cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
> one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote in message
·····················@naggum.net...
> * Steve Long <·········@isomedia.com>
> > Any ideas for implementing this functionality in the XML world, a
> > direction that much of the sofware world seems to be heading?
>
> What on _earth_ can XML possibly have to offer people who are not
already
> completely out of their mind? The interesting thing is to use Common
> Lisp to deal with that abomination so that some people can see how dumb
> SGML and HTML and XML really are and how it should have been done.
There
> is _zero_ point in moving from Common Lisp to XML
[snip]
> Now, what did you have in mind?
Well, the only thing that I can see in XML is that it is simple: (It
seems to me) It is just the idea of describing data as lists of other data
using the <entity> list </entity> <symbol/> syntax. Not exciting, not too
pernicious.
Marcin Tustin wrote:
>
> Well, the only thing that I can see in XML is that it is simple: (It
> seems to me) It is just the idea of describing data as lists of other data
> using the <entity> list </entity> <symbol/> syntax. Not exciting, not too
> pernicious.
The problem is that they didn't even get the simplicity part right. Go
look at the XML spec:
http://www.w3.org/TR/2000/REC-xml-20001006
It's huge, introducing needless syntax and complexity for no real gain
in expressive power or clarity. Mimimal XML looks simple, but once you
add in N**2 attribute types, and entities, and a seperate syntax for
DTDs, you end up with parsers as big as the one Franz wrote.
In particular look at the design goals, section 1.1:
----------------------
1.XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
2.XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
3.XML shall be compatible with SGML.
4.It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.
5.The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute
minimum, ideally zero.
6.XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
7.The XML design should be prepared quickly.
8.The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
9.XML documents shall be easy to create.
10.Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.
----------------------
I would say that they completely missed goals 6-8, goals 4 and 9 are
iffy, and I don't know enough to judge goal 3.
--
Remove obvious stuff to e-mail me.
Bob Bane
In article <················@removeme.gst.com> Bob Bane <····@removeme.gst.com> writes:
<snip/> ----------------------
1.XML shall be straightforwardly usable over the Internet.
2.XML shall support a wide variety of applications.
3.XML shall be compatible with SGML.
4.It shall be easy to write programs which process XML documents.
5.The number of optional features in XML is to be kept to the absolute
minimum, ideally zero.
6.XML documents should be human-legible and reasonably clear.
7.The XML design should be prepared quickly.
8.The design of XML shall be formal and concise.
9.XML documents shall be easy to create.
10.Terseness in XML markup is of minimal importance.
----------------------
I would say that they completely missed goals 6-8, goals 4 and 9 are
iffy, and I don't know enough to judge goal 3.
I'm not sure just what experiences make you think that goals 6 and 8
have failed but remember that they have failed only for *some*subsets*
of XML and not the conceptual framework of how to create new markup.
Schemas and DTD's are some of the more wartish aspects, but unless i'm
mistaken meta-programming is difficult to do cleanly even in lisp.
Also some people point out that standards associated with certain
vendors (a certain vendor) are more verbose and complex than they
absolutely have to be. And this mostly so that they can move an
opening into the standard on which they can hook their propietary
code.
Advogato had some discussion of a lisp-like method of handling
XML called Virgule.
http://virgule.sourceforge.net
which i'm thinking of trying out, i'm not sure how much like the lisp
parser it is (it seems to rely heavily on the SAX api which is
event-driven). But it gives me the means to use or define a </lambda>
tag i'll take it. and the syntax looks pretty natural to me, specially
all the < tag-body >
I guess what i'm starting to see is that XML is always a tree and that
whatever is between the tags is either a sub-tree or terminal.
On a totally other topic has anyone else experimented with trying to
import lisp code into python. I've got a rather tatty version of
lisp.py that doesn't seem to do very well in parsing code that clisp
considers acceptable. I'd also like to go the other way and take
python--->clisp bytecode or is that just too ambitious.
Also and the main reason lisp appeals to me is the possibility of
using it to define my own language that solves the problem at hand,
what are the best ways of doing this?
Oh yeah, how do i parse a buffer in lisp? er how do i define a
grammar? er how do i translate the parse-tree into a turing-computable
function??(ok that last term, (turing-computable function) I sort of
know what i meant, but am not sure if i'm using the same language
pointing to the same referent as everyone else here.
ps. Confidential to mr. N*gg*m I've been trying to figure out whether
you're a genius or just a loudmouth, i see much heat and little light
coming from your direction, much rant and little code, some of the
other regulars are published and fairly well regarded academics, some
of whom i'd actually heard of in other venues. You on the other hand
appear only on usenet and don't seem to participate in the
trust-pool in quite the same way.
Please in the future if responding to my posts
1.answer my questions
2.don't flame me for not having been a lisp hacker since age fourteen,
i've done other things with my life which didn't involve computers,
and i started up with html and c++ 2yrs ago at the local community college
and am arriving at lisp by way of python in which i as yet am still
working on achieving journeyman level (in my eyes) code.
3.yes you do scare off the newbies.
--
·@ _________
ae premise 1: The Truth Makes No Sense ( )__
pf ____( )
rn premise 2: Beauty Is Truth ( )
i. / / / / / / / / / /
co conclusion: Beauty Is Unconscious / / / / / / / / / /
er ·@/ http://www.efn.org/~laprice
g |
__________________________/_\_________________________________________________
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3205577951683378@naggum.net>
* ·······@garcia.efn.org (larry a price)
> Schemas and DTD's are some of the more wartish aspects, but unless i'm
> mistaken meta-programming is difficult to do cleanly even in lisp.
What kind of meta-programming are they doing with XML?
A DTD is a structured document which contains information about elements.
If SGML/XML were any good, this would have been written with exactly the
same syntax that is used to describe other data. However, because they
were ignorant of the "code is data" concept, they, too, made the mistake
that "what we think must be good enough for everbody else sure ain't good
enough for us", and invented their very own syntax for their own needs.
> I guess what i'm starting to see is that XML is always a tree and that
> whatever is between the tags is either a sub-tree or terminal.
This is actually _desperately_ wrong. One of the first things you should
realize when you start to delve into SGML (or its ancestors) is that very
few things in real life are _only_ trees. The power of a description of
something tree-like is how well it can deal with non-tree-like aspects of
the same object structure. This is where SGML made its most egregious
mistakes. Look at how inhumanly, mind-bogglingly complex HyTime got
before they managed to take care of this problem reasonably well, and I
am not talking about the very complex concepts it tries to represent --
those are the easy part, once you realize that the syntax is the worst
possible barrier to grasp them.
> ps. Confidential to mr. N*gg*m
Really? Which four-letter word followed by which three-letter word do
you think I am really trying to communicate to such a friendly person as
yourself right now? Take a wild guess.
#:Erik
--
There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Erik Naggum wrote:
[snip]
> A DTD is a structured document which contains information about elements.
> If SGML/XML were any good, this would have been written with exactly the
> same syntax that is used to describe other data. However, because they
> were ignorant of the "code is data" concept, they, too, made the mistake
> that "what we think must be good enough for everbody else sure ain't good
> enough for us", and invented their very own syntax for their own needs.
[snip]
I wonder if they were ignorant or just savvy enough to recognize how
desperately awful a SGML/XML like syntax is for representing SGML/XML
code. I mean, working with XSLT makes me *long* for a nicer syntax
(<xsl:variable name="foo" value="bar"/> to bind "foo" to
*bar*???!!! Yikes!) Alas, if only they'd fix the object language syntax
instead of stretching their evil-syntax generation powers yet again.
That DTD syntax can make me, in weak moments, think, "yeah,
this would be better if it were just XML...) is tribute to the mind
corrupting power that angle brackets exhibit. Shades of "Snow Crash".
Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3205753760303213@naggum.net>
* Bijan Parsia <·······@email.unc.edu>
> I wonder if they were ignorant or just savvy enough to recognize how
> desperately awful a SGML/XML like syntax is for representing SGML/XML
> code. I mean, working with XSLT makes me *long* for a nicer syntax
> (<xsl:variable name="foo" value="bar"/> to bind "foo" to *bar*???!!!
> Yikes!) Alas, if only they'd fix the object language syntax instead of
> stretching their evil-syntax generation powers yet again.
I think it is a symptom of "it is good enough for them, but not good
enough for me"-syndrome of almost all programming language designers.
Lisp is _really_ different in this regard, also from Scheme. In fact,
this may be _the_ most undervalued value of the Lisp tradition. ///
Bijan Parsia <·······@email.unc.edu> writes:
> On Tue, 31 Jul 2001, Erik Naggum wrote:
> [snip]
>> A DTD is a structured document which contains information about
>> elements. If SGML/XML were any good, this would have been written
>> with exactly the same syntax that is used to describe other data.
>> However, because they were ignorant of the "code is data" concept,
>> they, too, made the mistake that "what we think must be good enough
>> for everbody else sure ain't good enough for us", and invented
>> their very own syntax for their own needs.
> [snip]
> I wonder if they were ignorant or just savvy enough to recognize how
> desperately awful a SGML/XML like syntax is for representing
> SGML/XML code. I mean, working with XSLT makes me *long* for a nicer
> syntax (<xsl:variable name="foo" value="bar"/> to bind "foo" to
> *bar*???!!! Yikes!) Alas, if only they'd fix the object language
> syntax instead of stretching their evil-syntax generation powers yet
> again.
> That DTD syntax can make me, in weak moments, think, "yeah, this
> would be better if it were just XML...) is tribute to the mind
> corrupting power that angle brackets exhibit. Shades of "Snow
> Crash".
Well, it _is_ a fairly savvy thing that they did when they recognized
that having "code is data" might be a good idea.
The unfortunate thing is that they didn't work to pare down the
isomorphism a bit more, because they would have gotten something even
more like Lisp.
Furthermore, angle brackets _do_ seem quite mind-corrupting...
<itemizedlist>
<listitem><Para> whatever </para> </listitem>
<listitem><Para> whatever </para> </listitem>
<listitem><Para> whatever </para> </listitem>
</itemizedlist>
would be a fair bit nicer as:
(itemizedlist
(listitem (para "whatever"))
(listitem (para "whatever"))
(listitem (para "whatever")))
and the whole parsing problem would virtually disappear.
(I am consciously ignoring the symbol versus namespace versus string
versus readtable issues; an "XML" based on this would be nicer than
SGML almost regardless of the policy choices...)
And
<xsl:variable name="foo" value="bar"/>
would be a whole lot nicer as:
(xsl:let (foo "bar"))
[of course, that lets open an issue of scoping of such a binding! ;-)]
--
(concatenate 'string "aa454" ·@freenet.carleton.ca")
http://vip.hyperusa.com/~cbbrowne/oses.html
DSK: STAN.K; ML EXIT -- FILE NOT FOUND
From: Tim Bradshaw
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <ey34rrtq9u6.fsf@cley.com>
* frr wrote:
> I don't think so. This situation is rather common, and every ng has his own
> share of lunatics. We're a small community, so we only have one: not
> bad.
No this is incorrect. Erik is sanest person here, it's the rest of us
who are mad.
This is not an ironic comment.
--tim
Tim Bradshaw <···@cley.com> writes:
> * frr wrote:
>> I don't think so. This situation is rather common, and every ng has
>> his own share of lunatics. We're a small community, so we only have
>> one: not bad.
> No this is incorrect. Erik is sanest person here, it's the rest of
> us who are mad.
> This is not an ironic comment.
Well, I'm not greatly impressed with #Erik's "diplomacy;" that may
perhaps be the best way of putting that.
But there is _definitely_ a _vast_ difference between him and the
_definite lunaticks_ that operate in a vast number of newsgroups. He
may say things that are quite spectacularly insulting; this is,
however, _not_ then backed up by saying things that are [from a
technical perspective] spectacularly STUPID.
There are some almost certifiably insane people on can.taxes
[discussing Canadian taxation matters]; they have effectively driven
away almost anyone that is actually credible, unfortunately including
a true luminary in the area, David Sherman, who edits research notes
on both the Canadian Income Tax Act and the Goods & Services Tax. [If
there exist people who know more about Canadian taxation than he does,
they are likely countable on one hand, most likely without resorting
to use of a thumb...]
Comp.lang.lisp is fairly _fortunate_ to have the participation of
reasonably public luminaries like Kent Pitman, and (arguably with
somewhat lesser "fame") Barry Margolin; #Erik isn't as known "as
luminary," but is _definitely_ exceedingly bright, and is valuable to
have around.
When the flames burn high, that value tends to get obscured; it is
clearer when the questions are amenable to seeing valuable answers as
opposed to being personality clashes where, in the immortal words...
"It's the sort of mail you should wear a welding helmet while
reading...." -- Dave Moon
Note that there are a number of notable characters out there that are
somewhat "prickly." #Erik is certainly one; David Moon apparently is
another; other notable "prickly" characters include Theo de Raadt
(main OpenBSD guy), John Dysan (a FreeBSD guy), RMS... Linus Torvalds
is known to swear fairly viciously at people, on occasion, but with
his accent, only BSD folk seem to take it seriously...
Aside/Ob-Lisp-musing: I keep wondering what David Moon is up to these
days; he had been with Apple, but the Dylan project is dead, so he
surely must be on to something else...
--
(reverse (concatenate 'string ········@" "enworbbc"))
http://vip.hyperusa.com/~cbbrowne/lisp.html
Never knock on Death's door; ring the doorbell and run (he hates
that).
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3205648180557105@naggum.net>
* ········@hex.net
> Well, I'm not greatly impressed with #Erik's "diplomacy;" that may
> perhaps be the best way of putting that.
I am, for the obvious reasons, a little more interested in what passes
for diplomacy towards me. Here I am, speaking my mind about something,
and some little turd gets up in the middle of the crowd and shouts the
most bizarre insults at me. Not only do I have to say something that I
think makes sense, I need to prove my worth by a carreer path so that he
can judge me as genius or loudmouth. For some bizarre reason, this is
_not_ a transgression of diplomacy or good netiquette. Quite the
contrary, this little wet turd of a "newbie" has been strongly encouraged
by other residents here that it is in fact entierely legitimate to take
pot-shots at _me_, completely unprovoked. I had never said a harsh word
to this little turd before he stepped up and served us his filthy crap.
Why is that acceptable to you guys? The moralistic bunch of hypocrites
who think of themselves as protectors of good behavior have _none_ of
their own, when push comes to shove. They accept everything that hurts
me. They in fact go out of their way to hurt me with slander and a truly
amazing amount of "insight" into my personality. Have you ever stopped
to think about your own behavior for a change? What makes _you_ tick?
What kind of horrible personality disorder caused that little turd to
believe that he could actually do what he did?
As long as the moralistic bunch of hypocrites tell people that it is OK
to lambast me for just about anything out of the blue, they perpetuate
the _myth_ to "newbies" and others that I am somehow harsh to people.
They forget the _massive_ abuse they have levied on me. Why do they have
such a morality that they can gang up someone and behave the way they do?
It is manifestly not something I do. Several people have in the past
crawled out of the woodwork and initiated a witch hunt and an exorcism of
something that I have never even done, let alone could have done. It is
not something I do _to_ them. It is obviously something _they_ feel, and
since they are of the moralistic bent, they turn off their ethics and
commit the most unspeakable evils against whoever think "deserve" it.
Now, how would you deal with people who are massively irrational and in a
moral frenzy about killing that which made them feel less than they think
they should feel, for whatever reason, and it happened to be _yourself_?
In a technical forum, I expect people to write precisely, to think before
they post, to know of what they speak, and to listen to technical
arguments. I consider a person who enters such a forum under false
premises, including lack of will to be precise, lack of will to think,
lack of will to learn, and/or lack of will to listen, to be a _fraud_.
There is nothing that can be said, on-topic, to such a person to make him
stop defrauding people. People do not stop being frauds in real life if
you give them _more_ money. They may stop if you give them _no_ money
and additionally beat them over the head. The problem, if any, is that
some people think they have a right to participate in a technical forum
with no knowledge or valuable contributions to others at _all_. They
think of themselvse as "newbies" and think they have the _right_ to waste
other people's time when they ask vague questions that have no answer, do
not think about the answers they do get, assume so much that you have no
idea what they know, what they have just guessed, or what they made up,
do not actually listen to what anybody say but try to match it to their
massive set of mostly unconscious assumptions, and refuse to learn
because they think they have a _right_ to be told correct "answers" to
their "questions". In a real physical forum, such people shut up,
because they actually manage to sense the antipathy they receive from
people areound them. On the Net, there is no sense of antipathy. You
have to realize that it is there from something you read consciously. In
other words, a fraud can set up shop on the Net and nobody will come and
hit him if they think he is a bastard. This safetey from reaction causes
people to behave in counter-productive ways. It also causes people to
fire up their righteousness and hurt people much more than they would
have if they had sensed that people would fight back. As long as nobody
can actually be _hurt_ on the Net, this will always continue. The people
who keep it up are the frauds, because they are the only people who
_gain_ by abusing the public trust in the purpose of a technical forum.
Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you find a big enough
rock to kill it with. I skip the "nice doggie" part. So sue me. ///
On Wed, 01 Aug 2001 09:49:44 GMT, Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
( much meaningless invective deleted)
> ....... On the Net, there is no sense of antipathy. .....
.....
> Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you find a big enough
> rock to kill it with. I skip the "nice doggie" part.
Yeah , right....
No antipathy at all.
(Shaking head wonderingly...)
Israel Raj Thomas
---------------------------------------------------
VI VI XIII
Roman Neighbour of the Beast
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3205655741745842@naggum.net>
* raj <········@optushome.com.au>
> (much meaningless invective deleted)
This is the kind of fraud I am talking about. Why is that criminal
allowed to believe he is contributing to the forum and that _his_
behavior is appropriate? ///
On Wed, 01 Aug 2001 11:55:42 GMT, Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
>* raj <········@optushome.com.au>
>> (much meaningless invective deleted)
>
> This is the kind of fraud I am talking about. Why is that criminal
> allowed to believe he is contributing to the forum and that _his_
> behavior is appropriate?
The same reason that the Naggum criminal is....
Israel Raj Thomas
---------------------------------------------------
VI VI XIII
Roman Neighbour of the Beast
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwhevrn64j.fsf@world.std.com>
raj <········@optushome.com.au> writes:
> On Wed, 01 Aug 2001 11:55:42 GMT, Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
>
> >* raj <········@optushome.com.au>
> >> (much meaningless invective deleted)
> >
> > This is the kind of fraud I am talking about. Why is that criminal
> > allowed to believe he is contributing to the forum and that _his_
> > behavior is appropriate?
>
> The same reason that the Naggum criminal is....
Modulo the confusing use of the word criminal in both cases, I beleive
raj has you on a technicality Erik. People are allowed here because
they cannot be excluded. People are allowed to believe things because
most of us (probably yourself included) think it is immoral to try to
control others' minds.
Erik, I've often defended some of your more colorful language as harmless
when others have claimed it similarly not contributing. That didn't
mean I didn't understand how someone's feelings could get hurt; just
that I think at some point we have to rely on the good sense of those
involved to sort out the difference between "statements" and "truth", etc.
I think similarly here, I can understand why you are upset, but I also
think your sparring partner is engaging in "colorful language" and I think
people watching can tell the difference.
I even think it's fine for you to cite the fact that you take exception
to the form of what he said. I just hope neither of you will dwell on it.
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3205670829774502@naggum.net>
* Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com>
> People are allowed to believe things because most of us (probably
> yourself included) think it is immoral to try to control others' minds.
Not so. Several people here think it is entirely moral, even their
goddamn _duty_, to control _my_ mind, and not only that, they make a huge
stink about telling people what my intentions are, because they _want_
others to think I am as bad as their nightmares. Now, I could not care
less what people think I want to do, but I do in fact care when _many_
people systematically portray _everything_ I do as bad, no matter what I
have done, in fact _whether_ I have done anything at all. _Those_ are
the lunatics of comp.lang.lisp. Somehow, they are tolerated much more
than I am. That actually _puzzles_ me.
> Erik, I've often defended some of your more colorful language as harmless
> when others have claimed it similarly not contributing. That didn't mean
> I didn't understand how someone's feelings could get hurt; just that I
> think at some point we have to rely on the good sense of those involved
> to sort out the difference between "statements" and "truth", etc. I
> think similarly here, I can understand why you are upset, but I also
> think your sparring partner is engaging in "colorful language" and I
> think people watching can tell the difference.
That was not the point of referring to said bastard that way. It is
impossible for me to say _anything_ without that kind of fraud coming to
tear it down for reasons of his own personal agenda, completely unrelated
to either form of contents of what I have said. There is _nothing_ in
what I do that controls people's reactions to it, anymore. They are
self-propelled lunatics by now. Whether I am nice to people or bomb them
has absolutely no bearing on the reactions of those people. When that
wet little turds like that insulting newbie thought he had the right to
do what he did, he had absorbed that impression from other people here.
One of the worst current perpetrators is Barry Margolin, whom people I
have talked to on other topics have spontaneously mentioned is obviously
unable to read anything I write at all without going ballistic. And he
says he is afraid of me. How does anyone expect people to react to such
lunacy? There is so much irrationality in a few people on this newsgroup
that it is hard for "newbies" not to be scared away, but then they blame
_me_ for it because that the is consensus among the lunatics. I do not
believe in the Christian and Jewish concept of scape goats, but there is
no doubt that if the people who behave incredibly destructively here did
not have me to blame for their very own evil behavior, somebody would
have shot _all_ of them instead of just trying to get me.
> I even think it's fine for you to cite the fact that you take exception
> to the form of what he said. I just hope neither of you will dwell on it.
I take exception to the fact that he portrays _everything_ I do as bad,
not the form in which he said it. How could I possibly care about form?
I have never _dwelled_ on the disturbed reactions of lunatics. That does
not mean they do not annoy me when they insist on not going away. ///
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwwv4n3ah5.fsf@world.std.com>
Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
> * Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com>
> > People are allowed to believe things because most of us (probably
> > yourself included) think it is immoral to try to control others' minds.
>
> Not so. Several people here think it is entirely moral, even their
> goddamn _duty_, to control _my_ mind,
They may. But they don't end up doing it, do they? They are allowed to
believe they are able to control you because in fact they cannot; and to
the extent that they only think they can, they are confused. Which they,
like anyone, are allowed to be.
> Somehow, they are tolerated much more than I am.
> That actually _puzzles_ me.
The world is a strange place. Many things puzzle me but few surprise me.
> That was not the point of referring to said bastard that way. It is
> impossible for me to say _anything_ without that kind of fraud coming to
> tear it down for reasons of his own personal agenda,
Well, having surveyed the logs of this in detail one time, I have to agree
with you that the pattern of people "attacking you for attacking" was more
statistically prevalent than your "attacking others". You do have a short
temper with some issues, but I agree with your analysis that there is a clash
of styles here, and that your style gets beaten up perhaps unfairly by some.
I might commend to all concerned the works of Deborah Tannen (and perhaps
it would be cool if she'd do a book on newsgroup discussion :-) about
differences in style and dialect leading naturally to clashes like this.
I don't think there's much to be done in such cases but to go calmly meta
and shrug it off.
> ... There is so much irrationality in a few people on this newsgroup
> that it is hard for "newbies" not to be scared away,
I think most people know what newsgroups are and I doubt this scares
off that many. All in all, people don't tend to jump on newbies and I bet
newbies read mostly the responses to their own posts. Many have commented
at how friendly this newsgroup is compared to some. I tend to
agree.
A quote I picked up from somewhere in my distant past seems near relevant:
"people who worry what others think of them probably overestimate the
frequency with which they do". Yes, there are things said on this newsgroup
tha,k if read, might scare people off. In most cases, I bet those same
scare-able people are long gone due to sheer length of post, or irrelevance
of topic, and never survive to the offensive part. But even so, flamage
is a part of modern life and people need to learn just to skim past it.
> > I even think it's fine for you to cite the fact that you take exception
> > to the form of what he said. I just hope neither of you will dwell on it.
>
> I take exception to the fact that he portrays _everything_ I do as bad,
Me, too, fwiw.
> not the form in which he said it.
Ah, sorry. The sentiment of my remark stands even if you strike "the
form of".
> How could I possibly care about form?
Heh. My error.
> I have never _dwelled_ on the disturbed reactions of lunatics. That does
> not mean they do not annoy me when they insist on not going away. ///
Well, without prejudice as to who is a lunatic and who is not, let me
just say that given that I often believe it the sane thing to go away
when things are not to one's liking (and I often take time off from
the newsgroup when I feel people are attacking me), I would find it
little difficult to believe that anyone not sane would not go
away. ;-)
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
...
> I might commend to all concerned the works of Deborah Tannen (and perhaps
> it would be cool if she'd do a book on newsgroup discussion :-) about
> differences in style and dialect leading naturally to clashes like
> this.
"You Just Don't Understand!" or: "is that really what you meant?" :)
Cheers
--
Marco Antoniotti ========================================================
NYU Courant Bioinformatics Group tel. +1 - 212 - 998 3488
719 Broadway 12th Floor fax +1 - 212 - 995 4122
New York, NY 10003, USA http://bioinformatics.cat.nyu.edu
"Hello New York! We'll do what we can!"
Bill Murray in `Ghostbusters'.
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3205669512221211@naggum.net>
* Fernando <···@wanadoo.es>
> Do you think that sig file you used until yesterday helped to perpetuate
> this 'myth'?
No. That myth has been perpeatued by people like yourself for the
longest time. You just need excuses not to stpp, and they have nothing
to do with what I do, either. You are perfactly capable of inventing
such excsues entirely on your own. As you have proven time and again.
> BTW, it was a very 'clever' ass-covering technique to remove it, now that
> you want to make yourself look as a victim of some kind of conspiracy.
See, you impute evil intentions to me that you have way of knowing
anything about at all. This is not a conspiracy, of course, it is a set
of ethical guidelines that make evil people pretend they have the right
to do exactly whatever they want towards me because they think of me as
the aggressor no matter what I actually do, whether I have actually done
anything, or whether I even intended to do anything. You prove that.
Every once in a while, I change something in the way things appear around
me and what I write. Midnight of August 1, 2001, I started using a new
"signoff" and no signatures. I will predict that you somehow magically
"know" the reason and rationale for this, too, and that it has to do with
the timing of other news articles. After all, you are the conspiracy
buff around here who can intuit people's intentions: Nothing I say or do
will turn you away from your "knowledge" of what I did and why. ///
"Erik Naggum" <····@naggum.net> wrote in message
·····················@naggum.net...
> * ········@hex.net
> > Well, I'm not greatly impressed with #Erik's "diplomacy;" that may
> > perhaps be the best way of putting that.
>
> I am, for the obvious reasons, a little more interested in what passes
> for diplomacy towards me. Here I am, speaking my mind about something,
> and some little turd gets up in the middle of the crowd and shouts the
> most bizarre insults at me. Not only do I have to say something that I
> think makes sense, I need to prove my worth by a carreer path so that he
> can judge me as genius or loudmouth. For some bizarre reason, this is
> _not_ a transgression of diplomacy or good netiquette. Quite the
> contrary, this little wet turd of a "newbie" has been strongly
encouraged
> by other residents here that it is in fact entierely legitimate to take
> pot-shots at _me_, completely unprovoked. I had never said a harsh word
> to this little turd before he stepped up and served us his filthy crap.
> Why is that acceptable to you guys? The moralistic bunch of hypocrites
> who think of themselves as protectors of good behavior have _none_ of
> their own, when push comes to shove. They accept everything that hurts
> me. They in fact go out of their way to hurt me with slander and a
truly
> amazing amount of "insight" into my personality. Have you ever stopped
> to think about your own behavior for a change? What makes _you_ tick?
> What kind of horrible personality disorder caused that little turd to
> believe that he could actually do what he did?
>
> As long as the moralistic bunch of hypocrites tell people that it is OK
> to lambast me for just about anything out of the blue, they perpetuate
> the _myth_ to "newbies" and others that I am somehow harsh to people.
> They forget the _massive_ abuse they have levied on me. Why do they
have
> such a morality that they can gang up someone and behave the way they
do?
>
> It is manifestly not something I do. Several people have in the past
> crawled out of the woodwork and initiated a witch hunt and an exorcism
of
> something that I have never even done, let alone could have done. It is
> not something I do _to_ them. It is obviously something _they_ feel,
and
> since they are of the moralistic bent, they turn off their ethics and
> commit the most unspeakable evils against whoever think "deserve" it.
>
> Now, how would you deal with people who are massively irrational and in
a
> moral frenzy about killing that which made them feel less than they
think
> they should feel, for whatever reason, and it happened to be _yourself_?
>
> In a technical forum, I expect people to write precisely, to think
before
> they post, to know of what they speak, and to listen to technical
> arguments. I consider a person who enters such a forum under false
> premises, including lack of will to be precise, lack of will to think,
> lack of will to learn, and/or lack of will to listen, to be a _fraud_.
> There is nothing that can be said, on-topic, to such a person to make
him
> stop defrauding people. People do not stop being frauds in real life if
> you give them _more_ money. They may stop if you give them _no_ money
> and additionally beat them over the head. The problem, if any, is that
> some people think they have a right to participate in a technical forum
> with no knowledge or valuable contributions to others at _all_. They
> think of themselvse as "newbies" and think they have the _right_ to
waste
> other people's time when they ask vague questions that have no answer,
do
> not think about the answers they do get, assume so much that you have no
> idea what they know, what they have just guessed, or what they made up,
> do not actually listen to what anybody say but try to match it to their
> massive set of mostly unconscious assumptions, and refuse to learn
> because they think they have a _right_ to be told correct "answers" to
> their "questions". In a real physical forum, such people shut up,
> because they actually manage to sense the antipathy they receive from
> people areound them. On the Net, there is no sense of antipathy. You
> have to realize that it is there from something you read consciously.
In
> other words, a fraud can set up shop on the Net and nobody will come and
> hit him if they think he is a bastard. This safetey from reaction
causes
> people to behave in counter-productive ways. It also causes people to
> fire up their righteousness and hurt people much more than they would
> have if they had sensed that people would fight back. As long as nobody
> can actually be _hurt_ on the Net, this will always continue. The
people
> who keep it up are the frauds, because they are the only people who
> _gain_ by abusing the public trust in the purpose of a technical forum.
>
> Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you find a big enough
> rock to kill it with. I skip the "nice doggie" part. So sue me. ///
>
Erik,
I'm responding to this because I have no doubt you consider me one of the
"moralistic bunch of hypocrites" you are referring to above and because you
have asked specific and aparently non-rhetorical questions. (If I am
mistaken, then I regret contributing to this thread) I also believe that
you misrepresent what you are discussing so I will put forth a different
perspective.
I apologize for contributing to off-topic bandwidth and hope that at least
changing the subject line will enable those annoyed by these kinds of
discussions to avoid it.
> contrary, this little wet turd of a "newbie" has been strongly
encouraged
> by other residents here that it is in fact entierely legitimate to take
> pot-shots at _me_, completely unprovoked. I had never said a harsh word
> to this little turd before he stepped up and served us his filthy crap.
> Why is that acceptable to you guys?
I didn't think the "confidential to Erik:" part of "larry a price's" post
was useful or called for. Other people responded with their defensive of
your technical expertise. I'm not interested in calling more attention to
these kinds of things. But you seem to want to know why I have protested a
small fraction of your inappropriate postings and not this one, so I will
explain:
The odd one-time post by someone unknown to the group is a very different
matter than consistent behaviour from a regular. Like it or not Erik, your
stature here brings with it responsibility. Meaning no slight to other
informed and interesting contributers, your posts carry more weight than any
other regular with the exception of Kent Pitman and Barry Margolin. I may
be basing this on some unconcious personal bias, but to me these three names
more than any others represent the deepest knowledge of lisp in this group.
When you write, you represent the lisp community much, much more than some
random visitor or some long-time lurker. You can blast the human nature
that needs to revere and emulate perceived experts all you want, but it is a
fact that you will never change by belittling and insulting this "moronic"
behaviour. People are not computers, you should not deal with them as
though they should be as logical and unemotional as the languages we invent
to program them. Given these facts, it is your responsibility to behave
more maturely.
You chose not to, I can't change that. I do however, try to undo some of
the damage you cause. larry a price did very little damage to the group's
dynamic.
> As long as the moralistic bunch of hypocrites tell people that it is OK
> to lambast me for just about anything out of the blue, they perpetuate
> the _myth_ to "newbies" and others that I am somehow harsh to people.
> They forget the _massive_ abuse they have levied on me. Why do they
have
> such a morality that they can gang up someone and behave the way they
do?
Thse lines are exactly why I harbor no hopes of you ever understanding your
own behaviour in any terms shared by human society.
Please show me any post telling any one what you claim, if it is mine I will
apologise. If you are meaning an implicit encouragement by silence, I hope
I have explained above my own perspective. By the way, the best way to
refute any attack on your behaviour is to respond maturely or not at all.
> Diplomacy is the art of saying "nice doggie" until you find a big enough
> rock to kill it with. I skip the "nice doggie" part. So sue me. ///
This is only true if your goal is, in fact, to kill somebody. There are
other ways to disagree. There are other ways be right.
Coby
--
(remove #\space "coby . beck @ opentechgroup . com")
From: Thomas F. Burdick
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <xcvpuaftxu5.fsf@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU>
"Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
> I apologize for contributing to off-topic bandwidth and hope that at least
> changing the subject line will enable those annoyed by these kinds of
> discussions to avoid it.
In general c.l.l is one of the nicer newsgroups around, with usually
only one flame war going on, sometimes none. However, I find the
propensity to mark the flamewars as "discussions of Erik Naggum"
*really* creepy. And it's completely dishonest of you to change the
subject line like that. If you were *really* just interested in
providing the public service of marking the thread as having descended
into the furnace, you'd have changed it to "[Flame] So, where's the
'Javadoc' for COMMON Lisp?", or some such. Instead of moving personal
attacks into the subject line.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <sfw3d7btwvd.fsf@world.std.com>
···@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
>
> "Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
>
> > I apologize for contributing to off-topic bandwidth and hope that at least
> > changing the subject line will enable those annoyed by these kinds of
> > discussions to avoid it.
>
> In general c.l.l is one of the nicer newsgroups around, with usually
> only one flame war going on, sometimes none. However, I find the
> propensity to mark the flamewars as "discussions of Erik Naggum"
> *really* creepy. And it's completely dishonest of you to change the
> subject line like that. If you were *really* just interested in
> providing the public service of marking the thread as having descended
> into the furnace, you'd have changed it to "[Flame] So, where's the
> 'Javadoc' for COMMON Lisp?", or some such. Instead of moving personal
> attacks into the subject line.
I concur with Thomas here. The cure here is far worse than the
problem. I tried to send Coby private mail exprssing my disapproval
of this thread, but the mail bounced.
Threads of this kind appear to offer their subject line as a premise
and create an inappropriate bias to otherwise neutral participants
that is hard to address fairly other than by responding in kind (i.e.,
escalating). It should not be done.
It also raises what would be an obscure corner of the newsgroup
invisible to most newbie posters to a level of visibility that anyone
sees in the summary of "what we talk about". I think it's bad in that
regard.
I've really gone back and looked at the logs, and the number of "witch
hunt" posts against erik far outnumber the number of offensive posts
by Erik, especially if you only count the initial posts from Erik and
not the ones that occur after an all-out flamefest on both sides has
been engendered. And in nearly all cases that I saw where Erik might
be regarded as "attacking first", there is a pretty clear instance of
someone straying from the technical into the a controversial social
observation which any reasonable person thinking ahead could expect
might push someone's buttons. In the cases where people stick to
technical topics, they pretty much get very high quality technical
responses from Erik and in the case where they drift, Erik "drifts"...
Maybe Erik shouldn't jump on people as quickly as he does in some cases;
that's a subjective judgment some might reasonably have.. But speaking
as objectively as one can in here, merely by counting message posts
and observing the flow, the oil people put on that flame seems to hugely
magnify the problem, and seems to me objectively (to the extent anything
can be objective here) to be worse than the original problem in the sense
of being more visible, more long-running, more painful, more full of
insults than I imagine would likely occur if the incident were simply
ignored.
This is not a forum in which one can coerce the behavior of another. It
is foolish on all sides to try. Anyone, however well meaning (including
myself here), who even tries is contributing to the problem.
"Kent M Pitman" <······@world.std.com> wrote in message
····················@world.std.com...
> ···@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
>
> >
> > "Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
> >
> > > I apologize for contributing to off-topic bandwidth and hope that at
least
> > > changing the subject line will enable those annoyed by these kinds of
> > > discussions to avoid it.
> >
> > In general c.l.l is one of the nicer newsgroups around, with usually
> > only one flame war going on, sometimes none. However, I find the
> > propensity to mark the flamewars as "discussions of Erik Naggum"
> > *really* creepy. And it's completely dishonest of you to change the
> > subject line like that. If you were *really* just interested in
> > providing the public service of marking the thread as having descended
> > into the furnace, you'd have changed it to "[Flame] So, where's the
> > 'Javadoc' for COMMON Lisp?", or some such. Instead of moving personal
> > attacks into the subject line.
>
> I concur with Thomas here. The cure here is far worse than the
> problem. I tried to send Coby private mail exprssing my disapproval
> of this thread, but the mail bounced.
>
Please feel free to use the address in my sig.
> Threads of this kind appear to offer their subject line as a premise
> and create an inappropriate bias to otherwise neutral participants
> that is hard to address fairly other than by responding in kind (i.e.,
> escalating). It should not be done.
>
> It also raises what would be an obscure corner of the newsgroup
> invisible to most newbie posters to a level of visibility that anyone
> sees in the summary of "what we talk about". I think it's bad in that
> regard.
>
These are good points. On reflection I regret having altered the subject.
I will insist however that my motives were not insincere, I really thought
that given my choice to write such a post, that was the proper thing to do.
I apologize for raising the profile of this branch of this thread.
Coby
--
(remove #\space "coby . beck @ opentechgroup . com")
"Thomas F. Burdick" <···@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU> wrote in message
····················@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU...
> "Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
>
> > I apologize for contributing to off-topic bandwidth and hope that at
least
> > changing the subject line will enable those annoyed by these kinds of
> > discussions to avoid it.
>
> In general c.l.l is one of the nicer newsgroups around, with usually
> only one flame war going on, sometimes none. However, I find the
> propensity to mark the flamewars as "discussions of Erik Naggum"
> *really* creepy. And it's completely dishonest of you to change the
> subject line like that.
That's what the post was about. That is what the post it replied to was
about. You can object to my even making it but how can that be
characterized as dishonest?
> If you were *really* just interested in
> providing the public service of marking the thread as having descended
> into the furnace, you'd have changed it to "[Flame] So, where's the
> 'Javadoc' for COMMON Lisp?", or some such.
That *really* was my intention so there must be a flaw in your deduction.
And, as it was not a flame, I wouldn't have labeled it as such. From
Google's usenet glossary:
Flame:
1.. vi To post a message intended to insult and provoke.
2.. vi To speak incessantly and/or rabidly on some relatively
uninteresting subject or with a patently ridiculous attitude.
You can not seriously characterize my writing that way though you are more
than welcome to disagree with my statements.
> Instead of moving personal
> attacks into the subject line.
>
There is no attack in that subject line. Please....
Coby
From: Thomas F. Burdick
Subject: [Flamewar] So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp? (was: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum)
Date:
Message-ID: <xcvn15jtw0w.fsf_-_@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU>
"Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
> "Thomas F. Burdick" <···@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU> wrote in message
[ ... ]
> > If you were *really* just interested in
> > providing the public service of marking the thread as having descended
> > into the furnace, you'd have changed it to "[Flame] So, where's the
> > 'Javadoc' for COMMON Lisp?", or some such.
>
> That *really* was my intention so there must be a flaw in your deduction.
> And, as it was not a flame, I wouldn't have labeled it as such. From
> Google's usenet glossary:
>
> Flame:
> 1.. vi To post a message intended to insult and provoke.
And what, exactly, is it to, in a public forum, "analyze" in
pseudo-objective phraseology, the (percieved) personal shortcomings of
someone with whom you're not on great terms? I'm assuming you're not
actually so naive.
From: Alain Picard
Subject: Re: [Flamewar] So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp? (was: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum)
Date:
Message-ID: <86g0bau6q7.fsf@optushome.com.au>
···@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> "Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
> >
> > Flame:
> > 1.. vi To post a message intended to insult and provoke.
>
> And what, exactly, is it to, in a public forum, "analyze" in
> pseudo-objective phraseology, the (percieved) personal shortcomings of
> someone with whom you're not on great terms? I'm assuming you're not
> actually so naive.
A level-headed attempt to cool things down. If you think Coby's
message was a flame, it is you who is naive, or else you've never
seen what a real flame looks like.
Gee, now I'm reminded the the old days on rec.audio, when the
vinyl types would argue that Nyquist's theorem couldn't be true...
now, _those_ were flamewars! :-)
--
It would be difficult to construe Me, in this article.
this as an attack on anyone.
From: Wade Humeniuk
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <9k9rmd$kpa$1@news3.cadvision.com>
> The odd one-time post by someone unknown to the group is a very different
> matter than consistent behaviour from a regular. Like it or not Erik,
your
> stature here brings with it responsibility. Meaning no slight to other
> informed and interesting contributers, your posts carry more weight than
any
> other regular with the exception of Kent Pitman and Barry Margolin. I may
> be basing this on some unconcious personal bias, but to me these three
names
> more than any others represent the deepest knowledge of lisp in this
group.
>
> When you write, you represent the lisp community much, much more than some
> random visitor or some long-time lurker. You can blast the human nature
> that needs to revere and emulate perceived experts all you want, but it is
a
> fact that you will never change by belittling and insulting this "moronic"
> behaviour. People are not computers, you should not deal with them as
> though they should be as logical and unemotional as the languages we
invent
> to program them. Given these facts, it is your responsibility to behave
> more maturely.
Facts??
Are you blasting Erik's behavior or supporting it?
Stature, responsibility, deepest knowledge, maturity....
Its too bad that people do not behave as you expect. Perhaps you should
take them off the pedestal that you have created.
Wade
From: Gareth McCaughan
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <slrn9mh2u3.2l7.Gareth.McCaughan@g.local>
Wade Humeniuk wrote:
[SNIP: quotation from someone else saying that Erik
should behave more maturely because his posts carry
much weight in c.l.l]
> Facts??
I think it's pretty incontrovertible that Erik is one of the
N most expert Lispers here, for fairly small N. (I make no
comment on the exact position assigned him by the previous
poster.)
I think it's pretty incontrovertible that there would be
less flamage on c.l.l if Erik had a longer fuse. (But there
might also be more drivel. And, as Kent observes, Erik gets
picked on and it's hardly a surprise if he gets annoyed.)
> Are you blasting Erik's behavior or supporting it?
He's praising Erik's technical expertise and criticising
Erik's behaviour. Is that hard to understand, or something?
> Stature, responsibility, deepest knowledge, maturity....
You appear to think that these are all compliments paid
to Erik by the previous poster. Only the first and third
are. (In particular, he was complaining that Erik ought
to behave more maturely than he does, not admiring Erik's
maturity.)
> Its too bad that people do not behave as you expect. Perhaps you should
> take them off the pedestal that you have created.
I saw no pedestal. The article you describe praised Erik's
technical expertise and criticised his behaviour. Calling
someone an expert on Lisp is not putting them on a pedestal.
Please note that I pass no comment on the views expressed
in the grandparent of this article, beyond what I've explicitly
said above. In particular, I should not be assumed to agree
with everything in it merely because I think Wade is attacking
it on unreasonable grounds.
--
Gareth McCaughan ················@pobox.com
.sig under construc
From: Bulent Murtezaoglu
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <87snfbicne.fsf@nkapi.internal>
>>>>> "GM" == Gareth McCaughan <················@pobox.com> writes:
[well thought out bits deleted]
GM> Please note that I pass no comment on the views expressed in
GM> the grandparent of this article, beyond what I've explicitly
GM> said above. In particular, I should not be assumed to agree
GM> with everything in it merely because I think Wade is attacking
GM> it on unreasonable grounds.
But by saying this you are insulting all of us by insinuating that we
would make such an assumption.
Please note this is a an attempt at humour. I should not be assumed
to make references to anything else that might have happened here
before. Please also note that the above attempt to cover my behind
is a poor substitute for not writing anything in the first place.
Please also...
cheers,
BM
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <3205688233618724@naggum.net>
* "Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca>
> Thse lines are exactly why I harbor no hopes of you ever understanding your
> own behaviour in any terms shared by human society.
The people who engage in the unceasing vilification of everything I do
are quite few in number, but _very_ vocal. The two most recently active
specimens are "Fernando" and "raj", more or less anonymous as one would
expect. You are a vocal and annoyingly persistent critic, but at least
you abstain from senseless vilification. If you think I have a greater
responsibility because my articles carry more weight, the people I refer
to who have made it their purpose to destroy any and all value in what I
write. _That_ is the incredibly unfair part. That is what I *hate* that
people do. If I do something bad, tell me, flame me, yell at me, but try
to make something I do that is _not_ bad, even good, into something bad,
and you will not doubt that you would be dead if it were only up to me.
Now, unlike what everybody tells others about me, I do not consider it
_good_ to flame people who resort to vilification. It is a _necessary_
evil, but evil nonetheless. Some of the people who spend an enormous
amount of energy vilifying me from here to the end of the world, have
made it clear that they think it is _good_ to attack me, that they do it
because they believe they are morally _justified_ in doing it. This is a
huge difference. There is no stopping someone who is morally justified.
The interesting thing about real life is that people realize very quickly
how much evil they can get away with towards somebody else. This means
that by signalling to others what you will not accept, they refrain from
doing it in the first place. Rational self-interest makes people think
twice about hurting someone if they sense that they can get hurt back.
This unreduced will to hurt anyone who attacks you is the reason people
form peaceful societies and human advances such as trust and justice --
without it, bad people can get away with absolustely anything they want.
This is the case on the Net and the reasons there are so many bad people
who abuse it -- take all the worms and viruses and denial-of-service
attacks with all the bad USENET and WWW cultures. Ignorants blame the
absence of real faces and empathy and all kinds of gobbledygook, but the
_real_ reason is that you can laugh at somebody's fist instead of getting
hurt by it if _you_ do something bad to somebody else and they hit you
back. The absence of a credible threat of violent response fosters evil,
because those who have evil intentions are in fact only stopped by force.
The same applies to how people react to corrections. I may be getting
worked up at times, but I make a point of not insulting people first, I
do not think people are stupid, I do not consider or call them morons --
I simply state what I consider to be true, on technical or philosophical
matters. Still, some morons _are_ insulted, because in real life, _they_
would have signalled a violent response to the prospect of having ideas
or opinions of that kind presented to them, or particularly the fact that
they might be wrong. To some people, a minority of perhaps 5%, it is
_much_ more important to defend their inflated ego than anything that
could make their ego _recover_ (such as actually listening to the critics
and fix what they do wrong) and they will not back down until their ego
is vindicated. Obviously, some people will think this applies to me, but
look carefully at how these vilifiers jump at every opportunity to make
things much, much worse. It is impossible for me to make these insane
guys stop their attacks. _That_ is the core of the problem. It has
nothing to do with what _I_ do, anymore.
> Please show me any post telling any one what you claim, if it is mine I will
> apologise.
I cannot recall that it has been in your articles. Take a look at what
"Fernando" and "raj" do.
> By the way, the best way to refute any attack on your behaviour is to
> respond maturely or not at all.
Not any more. Not with these guys around. Not with silent acceptance of
their behavior and an enormous outburst of hatred when I respond in any
way at all, which is what _really_ tells me that even you think this is
my fault, and that "Fernando" and "raj" are innocent little fucks who
should be allowed to get away with it. ///
From: Christophe Rhodes
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <sqwv4mhnh0.fsf@lambda.jesus.cam.ac.uk>
Fernando <···@wanadoo.es> writes:
> On Wed, 01 Aug 2001 20:57:17 GMT, Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
>
> >* "Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca>
> >> Thse lines are exactly why I harbor no hopes of you ever understanding your
> >> own behaviour in any terms shared by human society.
> >
> > The people who engage in the unceasing vilification of everything I do
> > are quite few in number, but _very_ vocal. The two most recently active
> > specimens are "Fernando" and "raj", more or less anonymous as one would
> > expect.
>
> No Erik, there's nothing anonymous about me. I'm no "G I Gunmaker".
>
> For those with a bad memory:
> http://groups.google.com/groups?hl=en&safe=off&th=6a61e62639b668f,10&rnum=1&selm=94s8ju%24ubp%241%40nnrp1.deja.com
And of course, anyone who follows that link should really read all the
surrounding context, including Erik's explanation, and not just the
one message. Incidentally, and forgive me if this is totally obvious
to everyone, I'm fairly convinced that if Erik had wanted to be
anonymous he'd have done rather better than posting with an address
with his name in the whois database...
I'm amazed at the amount of time people have to spend on senseless
discussion; time that surely could be better spent elsewhere.
Christophe
--
Jesus College, Cambridge, CB5 8BL +44 1223 510 299
http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~csr21/ (defun pling-dollar
(str schar arg) (first (last +))) (make-dispatch-macro-character #\! t)
(set-dispatch-macro-character #\! #\$ #'pling-dollar)
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <3205739350599555@naggum.net>
* Christophe Rhodes <·····@cam.ac.uk>
> I'm amazed at the amount of time people have to spend on senseless
> discussion; time that surely could be better spent elsewhere.
You know, I happen not to think so. I get quite worked up because I am
under attack a lot, but the people who revel in attacking me? I do not
think they could have spent their time better elsewhere. In the end,
that is a _more_ generous view than what you ascribe to them. ///
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <3205738953563540@naggum.net>
* Fernando <···@wanadoo.es>
> You are the _only_ one who repeteadly insults people, as well as the only one
> dishonest enough to post anonymous flames.
Have a caring doctor look into that psychosis, will you? Get well soon. ///
In article <··································@4ax.com>, Fernando wrote:
>On Wed, 01 Aug 2001 20:57:17 GMT, Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
>No Erik, there's nothing anonymous about me. I'm no "G I Gunmaker".
Note that G. I. Gunmaker is an anagram for Eric Naggum. That is hardly
anonymous.
In article <··································@4ax.com>, Fernando wrote:
>On Wed, 01 Aug 2001 20:57:17 GMT, Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
>No Erik, there's nothing anonymous about me. I'm no "G I Gunmaker".
Note that G. I. Gunmaker is an anagram of Eric Naggum. That is hardly
anonymous.
From: Marc Spitzer
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <slrn9mjunu.n5j.marc@oscar.eng.cv.net>
In article <·····················@news1.rdc1.bc.home.com>, Kaz Kylheku wrote:
> In article <··································@4ax.com>, Fernando wrote:
>>On Wed, 01 Aug 2001 20:57:17 GMT, Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
>>No Erik, there's nothing anonymous about me. I'm no "G I Gunmaker".
>
> Note that G. I. Gunmaker is an anagram of Eric Naggum. That is hardly
> anonymous.
From what I have seen in this news group the anagram is probably
someones attempt to set Erik up, if it is anything at all. If Erik
did do that, I do not think he did, he would be suffering from evil
geniousites. It is the thing that gets the villian killed in every
Bond movie, leaving clues that no one but me is BRILIANT enough to
figure out. Erik strikes me as entirly too practical to do something
so self absorbed. And too smart to do something so easily traced.
With that said I only know Erik from what I have read in c.l.l and his
web site.
marc
From: Geoffrey Summerhayes
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <kBqa7.58592$uH4.4084915@news20.bellglobal.com>
"Marc Spitzer" <····@oscar.eng.cv.net> wrote in message
························@oscar.eng.cv.net...
>
> From what I have seen in this news group the anagram is probably
> someones attempt to set Erik up, if it is anything at all. If Erik
> did do that, I do not think he did, he would be suffering from evil
> geniousites.
He did, it was a joke, a good portion of the NG got it,
a few didn't. I suspect some people won't be happy until
the alt.complaints.erik.naggum NG takes off. No, now that
I think about it, I won't be happy till then either. Then
I can get back to lurking and reading postings about Lisp
instead of the drivel in this thread. (<-self-referential
and inclusive! Tail recursive too, wrong NG, *sigh*)
Geoff
"Geoffrey Summerhayes" <·············@hNoOtSmPAaMil.com> wrote in message
····························@news20.bellglobal.com...
>
> "Marc Spitzer" <····@oscar.eng.cv.net> wrote in message
> ························@oscar.eng.cv.net...
> >
> > From what I have seen in this news group the anagram is probably
> > someones attempt to set Erik up, if it is anything at all. If Erik
> > did do that, I do not think he did, he would be suffering from evil
> > geniousites.
>
> He did, it was a joke, a good portion of the NG got it,
> a few didn't. I suspect some people won't be happy until
> the alt.complaints.erik.naggum NG takes off. No, now that
> I think about it, I won't be happy till then either. Then
> I can get back to lurking and reading postings about Lisp
> instead of the drivel in this thread. (<-self-referential
> and inclusive! Tail recursive too, wrong NG, *sigh*)
>
> Geoff
I suspected that his last name was not real as soon as I saw it in
the documentation. You can tell that he has seen that "Lord Of The
Rings" movie with the gollum critter trying to get his ring back.
Of course a few of us are well read and caught the reference.
--
Excellence at chess is one mark of a Scheming mind,
Stephen
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <3205828437765830@naggum.net>
* ····@oscar.eng.cv.net (Marc Spitzer)
> From what I have seen in this news group the anagram is probably someones
> attempt to set Erik up, if it is anything at all. If Erik did do that, I
> do not think he did, he would be suffering from evil geniousites. It is
> the thing that gets the villian killed in every Bond movie, leaving clues
> that no one but me is BRILIANT enough to figure out. Erik strikes me as
> entirly too practical to do something so self absorbed. And too smart to
> do something so easily traced.
You are taking Rainer Joswig's reaction at face value, instead of mine.
I have _fun_ with such things. Other people may do it for gain and to
manipulate. I have never had any need to do either, and I find it much
more insulting that you suddenly impute such things to me than all the
other nonsense that _follows_ from such a personal need.
I do in fact have pretty high expectations for how smart people should be
and what I expect them to figure out. It is _one_ of the reason I get so
pissed at all the morons who populate the world. If nobody would have
figured out the anagram, I would have been _disappointed_. If somebody
thought it was _fun_, I would have achieved what I had wanted.
> With that said I only know Erik from what I have read in c.l.l and his
> web site.
I fail to see how you could find evidence of the "evil-geniusitis" here,
and I would be disappointed if you _did_ find evidence of it. ///
From: ········@hex.net
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <ZAza7.32946$D55.2976007@news20.bellglobal.com>
Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
> * ····@oscar.eng.cv.net (Marc Spitzer)
>>From what I have seen in this news group the anagram is probably
>>someones attempt to set Erik up, if it is anything at all. If Erik
>>did do that, I do not think he did, he would be suffering from evil
>>geniousites. It is the thing that gets the villian killed in every
>>Bond movie, leaving clues that no one but me is BRILIANT enough to
>>figure out. Erik strikes me as entirly too practical to do
>>something so self absorbed. And too smart to do something so easily
>>traced.
>You are taking Rainer Joswig's reaction at face value, instead of
>mine.
Ah! That brings back some recollection. [And unfortunately DejaNews
is not there for it to be easy to pull back the original with
context...]
>I have _fun_ with such things. Other people may do it for gain and
>to manipulate. I have never had any need to do either, and I find it
>much more insulting that you suddenly impute such things to me than
>all the other nonsense that _follows_ from such a personal need.
>I do in fact have pretty high expectations for how smart people
>should be and what I expect them to figure out. It is _one_ of the
>reason I get so pissed at all the morons who populate the world. If
>nobody would have figured out the anagram, I would have been
>_disappointed_. If somebody thought it was _fun_, I would have
>achieved what I had wanted.
Rainer nicely derailed that by going ballistic over the "gun" thing;
it's certainly something that _I'd_ consider tremendously funny.
Of course, one of the ongoing family jokes has to do with unexpected
people walking around with machine guns, and a brother wrote a column
for a while in one of the really _serious_ gun magazines (e.g. - not
the _Soldier of Fortune_ nonsense of "I prefer knives with
diamond-plated edges because they are more intimidating than a gun to
a Gurkha" or with specials on "Bikini Camo Gear"...)
On the other hand, Brad put up a jokey web page about the
Thompson/Center submachine gun, a "Tommy gun" purportedly having
interchangeable barrels, and has gotten a lot of correspondence from
idiots that didn't "get it," either indignant at him posting incorrect
information (DUH!), or, altogether funnier, asking where they can get
one! :-)
>>With that said I only know Erik from what I have read in c.l.l and
>>his web site.
>I fail to see how you could find evidence of the "evil-geniusitis" here,
>and I would be disappointed if you _did_ find evidence of it. ///
Oh, but a _true_ Evil Overlord <http://www.eviloverlord.com/> doesn't
brag about being an Evil Overlord, so that if you were planning to
take over comp.lang.lisp as a stepping stone to Bigger and Better
Things [probably taking over the whole comp.lang.* hierarchy :-)], it
wouldn't do for you to leave evidence.
--
(reverse (concatenate 'string ····················@" "454aa"))
http://vip.hex.net/~cbbrowne/xwindows.html
"The main reason for open-source gets developed is need. If the need
is there, then the software will get written. If it isn't really
needed, then the lack of software is hardly a problem, right?"
-- Almost Brian Hurt's Words <·····@visi.com>
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <3205844821517547@naggum.net>
* ········@hex.net
> Oh, but a _true_ Evil Overlord <http://www.eviloverlord.com/> doesn't
> brag about being an Evil Overlord, so that if you were planning to
> take over comp.lang.lisp as a stepping stone to Bigger and Better
> Things [probably taking over the whole comp.lang.* hierarchy :-)], it
> wouldn't do for you to leave evidence.
Interesting. Let me see. I want world dominance. I tried with GNU
stuff, but right before Linux hit the proverbial fan, I decided against
spending more energy on it. Now Linux is taking over the world. Then I
tried with SGML, but I quit that a few years before the tags hit the
proverbial fan. Now everybody are talking abot XML. Then I tried Lisp.
So, if I quit now, Lisp should gain world dominance shortly. What better
Evil Overlord than he who controls the world without knowing? This also
implies that a few years from now, when I tire of target shooting, it
should become the next _major_ world-wide sports interest, and football
and baseball are all gone. Yeah, I kind of like this, especially if we
get shoot-outs on grass fields as a spectator sport. It will do wonders
for world overpopulation, too, and I can dominate the world. Alone.
This could actually work. ///
From: Eric Dahlman
Subject: OT: Google Groups (was: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?))
Date:
Message-ID: <tz43d6qeitj.fsf_-_@flatt.cs.colostate.edu>
········@hex.net writes:
[snipped stuff]
> Ah! That brings back some recollection. [And unfortunately DejaNews
> is not there for it to be easy to pull back the original with
> context...]
Deja is dead but google picked em up. Try http://groups.google.com/
for all you old Deja needs.
-Eric
From: Marc Spitzer
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <slrn9mlmi9.o8g.marc@oscar.eng.cv.net>
In article <················@naggum.net>, Erik Naggum wrote:
> * ····@oscar.eng.cv.net (Marc Spitzer)
>> From what I have seen in this news group the anagram is probably someones
>> attempt to set Erik up, if it is anything at all. If Erik did do that, I
>> do not think he did, he would be suffering from evil geniousites. It is
>> the thing that gets the villian killed in every Bond movie, leaving clues
>> that no one but me is BRILIANT enough to figure out. Erik strikes me as
>> entirly too practical to do something so self absorbed. And too smart to
>> do something so easily traced.
>
> You are taking Rainer Joswig's reaction at face value, instead of mine.
> I have _fun_ with such things. Other people may do it for gain and to
> manipulate. I have never had any need to do either, and I find it much
> more insulting that you suddenly impute such things to me than all the
> other nonsense that _follows_ from such a personal need.
You are correct and I apologize for not checking out the details befor
opening my mouth.
The reason I wrote this post was that you raised a good point in a
previous post about how you are constantly attacked in this group by a
few people with the implied consent of the group because no one will
say this is wrong. So I got involved and I did a less then perfect
job of it. My previous attatude is that you did a much better job
defending your self then I could do defending you so I realy could not
do much good.
I have no reason to insult you Erik and I did try to support you when
you asked for it. It looks like I did a bad job but the reason I got
involved at all was becaused you said that the silence in this group
about the abuse that is directed at you incourages and perpetuates
that behavior in this group.
>
> I do in fact have pretty high expectations for how smart people should be
> and what I expect them to figure out. It is _one_ of the reason I get so
> pissed at all the morons who populate the world. If nobody would have
> figured out the anagram, I would have been _disappointed_. If somebody
> thought it was _fun_, I would have achieved what I had wanted.
>
>> With that said I only know Erik from what I have read in c.l.l and his
>> web site.
>
> I fail to see how you could find evidence of the "evil-geniusitis" here,
> and I would be disappointed if you _did_ find evidence of it. ///
I did not find any evidence of "evil-geniusites" in your posts was my
point, I must not have made it clear enough.
marc
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <3205864756795681@naggum.net>
* ····@oscar.eng.cv.net (Marc Spitzer)
> You are correct and I apologize for not checking out the details befor
> opening my mouth.
Well, this is certainly getting moderately difficult. When I implied
that people tacitly approve of the abuse, I did not mean that people
should defend _me_. I do not like defense speeches for people in the
first place. I would have been happy if a few people had just asked, in
a moderately hostile voice, the lunatics to can it.
Part of the problem is that people have this counter-productive notion of
"taking sides". Getting involved all too often means taking a particular
side, but by so doing, you cut yourself off from the most rational course
of action: To _understand_ what is going on. It also makes it harder for
you to respond to actions as opposed to people, which is simply wrong.
It is a good thing to form alliances with people, but it is not a good
thing to form them on such a fickle basis as USENET fights.
> My previous attatude is that you did a much better job defending your
> self then I could do defending you so I realy could not do much good.
Well, thank you, sort of. I try not to defend _myself_, though. This is
not always an easy task, but what I do object to is the unfairness in
misdirected and false accusations and the idiocy of people who think they
can speak for other people's intentions without that bothersome _doubt_
that would have held them back.
> I have no reason to insult you Erik and I did try to support you when
> you asked for it.
OK, I see that you wanted me well, and I still took it negatively, but it
was because by implying that I could not have done it myself unless it
was yet another reflection of my purportedly bad character, you made it
just that much harder to say I did.
> It looks like I did a bad job but the reason I got involved at all was
> becaused you said that the silence in this group about the abuse that is
> directed at you incourages and perpetuates that behavior in this group.
Cool, but the reason it failed was again connected to the will to see my
intentions. It is just as false to think I have only good intentions as
to think I have only bad intentions, because you cannot know. However,
you can _sometimes_ see how some people have bad intentions by their
choice of reaction to being criticized. If they get on their high horse
and proclaim their right to commit evil in the name of some irrelevant
but self-serving good, you know they have bad intentions all the way down.
> I did not find any evidence of "evil-geniusites" in your posts was my
> point, I must not have made it clear enough.
It is clear now, and I do appreciate it. ///
From: Marc Spitzer
Subject: Re: Yet another discussion of Erik Naggum (was: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?)
Date:
Message-ID: <slrn9mmjhd.olp.marc@oscar.eng.cv.net>
In article <················@naggum.net>, Erik Naggum wrote:
> * ····@oscar.eng.cv.net (Marc Spitzer)
>> You are correct and I apologize for not checking out the details befor
>> opening my mouth.
>
> Well, this is certainly getting moderately difficult. When I implied
> that people tacitly approve of the abuse, I did not mean that people
> should defend _me_. I do not like defense speeches for people in the
> first place. I would have been happy if a few people had just asked, in
> a moderately hostile voice, the lunatics to can it.
>
> Part of the problem is that people have this counter-productive notion of
> "taking sides". Getting involved all too often means taking a particular
> side, but by so doing, you cut yourself off from the most rational course
> of action: To _understand_ what is going on. It also makes it harder for
> you to respond to actions as opposed to people, which is simply wrong.
> It is a good thing to form alliances with people, but it is not a good
> thing to form them on such a fickle basis as USENET fights.
I was not actualy taking sides you vs them but abuse vs not abuse, you
just happened to be on the not abuse side.
>
>> My previous attatude is that you did a much better job defending your
>> self then I could do defending you so I realy could not do much good.
>
> Well, thank you, sort of. I try not to defend _myself_, though. This is
> not always an easy task, but what I do object to is the unfairness in
> misdirected and false accusations and the idiocy of people who think they
> can speak for other people's intentions without that bothersome _doubt_
> that would have held them back.
>
>> I have no reason to insult you Erik and I did try to support you when
>> you asked for it.
>
> OK, I see that you wanted me well, and I still took it negatively, but it
> was because by implying that I could not have done it myself unless it
> was yet another reflection of my purportedly bad character, you made it
> just that much harder to say I did.
>
Well anyone who has read your reply's would have a VERY hard time
stating, with some proof, that you can not defend your self. You are
quite expert in it. It is a sad waste of your time that you have to
do it, but I enjoy reading them. They are well thought out and
sometimes I see ways to improve my writing by reading yours. And my
writing needs improvement.
>> It looks like I did a bad job but the reason I got involved at all was
>> becaused you said that the silence in this group about the abuse that is
>> directed at you incourages and perpetuates that behavior in this group.
>
> Cool, but the reason it failed was again connected to the will to see my
> intentions. It is just as false to think I have only good intentions as
> to think I have only bad intentions, because you cannot know. However,
> you can _sometimes_ see how some people have bad intentions by their
> choice of reaction to being criticized. If they get on their high horse
> and proclaim their right to commit evil in the name of some irrelevant
> but self-serving good, you know they have bad intentions all the way down.
>
Well I am wrong a lot, I just try not to be wrong the same way twice.
>> I did not find any evidence of "evil-geniusites" in your posts was my
>> point, I must not have made it clear enough.
>
> It is clear now, and I do appreciate it. ///
no problem
marc
>Well, I'm not greatly impressed with #Erik's "diplomacy;" that may
>perhaps be the best way of putting that.
>
>But there is _definitely_ a _vast_ difference between him and the
>_definite lunaticks_ that operate in a vast number of newsgroups. He
>may say things that are quite spectacularly insulting;
Is Erik still around ?
I had killfiled him a while ago.
I must "unkill" him.
His posts are bizarrely funny in a strange sort of way.....
Israel Raj Thomas
---------------------------------------------------
VI VI XIII
Roman Neighbour of the Beast
In article <··································@4ax.com> raj <········@optushome.com.au> writes:
>Well, I'm not greatly impressed with #Erik's "diplomacy;" that may
>perhaps be the best way of putting that.
>
Ok, as the voluntary recipient of mr. Naggum's latest round of
diplomacy. I feel somewhat bound to explain myself.
Erik, if you think that i had or have by now made a permanent judgment
of your mental capacities or your tact, you are wrong. Of the two
alternatives i mentioned (genius|loudmouth) it is an unfortunate fact
that evidence of the latter has overwhelmed evidence of the former at
least in the time that i have been reading this newsgroup.
Kent Pitman mentioned a book that i also recommend
Deborah Tannen's "You Just Don't Understand" ISBN:0345372050
which explores the multifarious ways that language as often interferes
with understanding as it enables.
To which I might add another book recommendation
Suzette Haden Elgin's "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense" ISBN:0688137865
which provides practical insight on as she puts it "disagreeing
without being disagreeable" -- a worthy goal we should probably all
strive for.
Oddly enough these books touch upon one of the main reasons i am
seeking to learn lisp, the fact that though we each carry around
multiple, often conflicting definitions of words and everyone's
mental dictionary is different, we still manage, occasionally, to
communicate.
I'm interested in what for lack of a better term might be called
'negotiated semantics', that is the process by which relevant
definitions are adjusted by the participant's in a conversation,
during that conversation.
I'm interested in modelling some aspects of that process and lisp
looks like it would be a fairly good tool for that job.
Is Erik still around ?
I had killfiled him a while ago.
I must "unkill" him.
His posts are bizarrely funny in a strange sort of way.....
Israel Raj Thomas
---------------------------------------------------
I'm actually somewhat ideologically opposed to the concept of always
editing one's reality to suit one's prejudices. I'd rather not need a
kf at all.
--
·@ _________
ae premise 1: The Truth Makes No Sense ( )__
pf ____( )
rn premise 2: Beauty Is Truth ( )
i. / / / / / / / / / /
co conclusion: Beauty Is Unconscious / / / / / / / / / /
er ·@/ http://www.efn.org/~laprice
g |
__________________________/_\_________________________________________________
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3205738606676216@naggum.net>
* ·······@garcia.efn.org (larry a price)
> Erik, if you think that i had or have by now made a permanent judgment
> of your mental capacities or your tact, you are wrong.
Please. I am not dead, yet. Some people believe a reaction to an
observed action, like "idiot!", is just that, which puzzles me, because
all anyone can ever see and actually judge is people's actions and all
anyone ever reacts to is observed action. That, however, does not mean
some people refuse to accept the existence of counter-evidence to their
conclusions, but it is not the judgment that is the problem, it is the
lack of new judgment in the face of new data.
> Of the two alternatives i mentioned (genius|loudmouth) it is an
> unfortunate fact that evidence of the latter has overwhelmed evidence of
> the former at least in the time that i have been reading this newsgroup.
Yeah, I know. A lot of people would _prefer_ I were a loudmouth.
> Kent Pitman mentioned a book that i also recommend Deborah Tannen's "You
> Just Don't Understand" ISBN:0345372050 which explores the multifarious
> ways that language as often interferes with understanding as it enables.
Another useful book in this regard is David Kerisey: Please Understand Me
II (ISBN 1-885705-02-6), which explores how people differ in what they
wish to understand and how they go about it, due to personality types.
Some people insist on telling people how the world should be, others are
much more interested in learning what it is like. Some people introspect
and think most, others sense and feel most, and some are introverted
about what they most, while others are extraverted about it. This makes
for an interesting blend of personality types. (There are other models.)
> To which I might add another book recommendation Suzette Haden Elgin's
> "The Gentle Art of Verbal Self-Defense" ISBN:0688137865 which provides
> practical insight on as she puts it "disagreeing without being
> disagreeable" -- a worthy goal we should probably all strive for.
Some people see agremeent on one or more levels as a primary value.
Others consider the focus on agreement to be a disaster. Simply put:
Some people want to be liked. Others want to understand. When a person
who wants to be liked is confronted with a person who wants to
understand, the former is likely to feel under serious pressure, and
indeed often feel physically threatened, because many people do not think
people like eachother because they understand each other, but because
they simply make an effort to be polite to all the people they do not
like, but that would stop if they understood them.
> Oddly enough these books touch upon one of the main reasons i am seeking
> to learn lisp, the fact that though we each carry around multiple, often
> conflicting definitions of words and everyone's mental dictionary is
> different, we still manage, occasionally, to communicate.
You will find that a lot of people who like Lisp have a philosophical
bent and appreciate such fundamental puzzles. You did not exactly look
like one who would from your extremely judgmental, anti-introspective,
extraverted feelings.
> I'm interested in what for lack of a better term might be called
> 'negotiated semantics', that is the process by which relevant definitions
> are adjusted by the participant's in a conversation, during that
> conversation.
Looks like Habermas has thought up something you could benefit from.
> I'm actually somewhat ideologically opposed to the concept of always
> editing one's reality to suit one's prejudices.
In regard to the person you quoted, he is a _typical_ judgmental type.
It is the mark of the judgmental type to want to edit reality. ///
larry a price <·······@garcia.efn.org> wrote:
: 3.yes you do scare off the newbies.
no. honestly said, erik amuses a lot of newbies. ranting is a lot of fun,
esp. in block mode. he's harsh, but always right. I'd rather fear kent's
occasional anti-free software rants might turn them off.
--
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/acadwiki/AutoLispFaq
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <sfw4rrnh0ed.fsf@world.std.com>
Reini Urban <······@x-ray.at> writes:
> larry a price <·······@garcia.efn.org> wrote:
> : 3.yes you do scare off the newbies.
>
> no. honestly said, erik amuses a lot of newbies. ranting is a lot of fun,
> esp. in block mode. he's harsh, but always right. I'd rather fear kent's
> occasional anti-free software rants might turn them off.
Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest.
Sounds like motivation enough for people to stop advocating free software
so I won't have to scare people off by adding balance. :-)
"There are no political answers, only political questions."
Translation: If one answer to a question is political, then all are.
There is no such thing as a neutral position on a political matter,
there are only positions that people hope will not be spotted as
equally political.
So, maybe what scares people off isn't that I'm ranting, but that I'm
ranting in a way that doesn't suit them. Reini's comment might not
have been intended to suggest a change in my behavior, but if it did
mean to, it was unclear as to whether I would be better to not speak
on the topic that others speak freely but differently on, or whether I
would be better to merely change my beliefs to others that I don't
believe.
All this offered in a friendly light. Not meaning to light another flame
war. Just trying to expand on how difficult it is to know what is
politically the right thing to do or say sometimes...
Reini Urban <······@x-ray.at> writes:
> larry a price <·······@garcia.efn.org> wrote:
> : 3.yes you do scare off the newbies.
>
> no. honestly said, erik amuses a lot of newbies. ranting is a lot of fun,
> esp. in block mode. he's harsh, but always right. I'd rather fear kent's
> occasional anti-free software rants might turn them off.
> --
> Reini Urban
> http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/acadwiki/AutoLispFaq
If someone is genuinely interested in learning about Lisp, enduring
kmp's anti-software diatribes is a small price to pay for his
technical advice.
That said, this touches on some speculations I have about the
transmission of values and 'apprenticeship'.
Assuming that when Lisp was 'born' society was generally more
conservative[1], perhaps this has contributed to a slightly more
conservative Lisp community today. On the face of it, 'Lisp' is a
technical subject, devoid of political attitudes, so learning it ought
not to perpetuate the (non-technical) attitudes of the teachers.
Perhaps the 'face of it' is wrong. In the Eastern 'guru' traditions,
a disciple must accept *everything* the guru says, and this is
believed to improve the learning process. Maybe the Eastern way just
formalises the principle that learning is imitation (in the
beginning). Perhaps the more conservative[1] attitudes of the
original Lispers have filtered down to today's (yesterday's ? ;-) )
lispers.
If the above is true[2] (even if only in part) it would help to explain
the *relative* lack of support for the principles of Free software in
the lisp community. I have no idea about the numbers, but I think
it's a safe bet that there is a relationship between the year(s) of
origin of a language and the present day level of support for Free
software in that language's community.
Regards,
Peter
[1] Conservative in a general sense. Not necessarily 'how you vote'.
[2] And I'm not sure it is. I'm speculating. And not suggesting that
its the only factor.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwbslulns7.fsf@world.std.com>
Peter Wood <··········@worldonline.dk> writes:
> If someone is genuinely interested in learning about Lisp, enduring
> kmp's anti-software diatribes is a small price to pay for his technical
> advice.
I think you left out the word "free" here. :-)
Btw, just to be clear: I'm not really anti-free-software. I'm
pro-careful-thought-before-releasing-software-in-some-particular-mode.
It's fair to say I'm anti-panacea. I've never taken an opinion on free
software here one way or another until lately when people have entered
the forum with "the thing that's wrong with lisp is it's not free" pitches.
I think things like that require balance.
I have on other occasions in the distant past been known to say that I
think a Stallman is at least inevitable and perhaps necessary, and even
that if he had not come along, I might have felt a need to do what he
is doing myself (though, as with all things manmade, it would have had
my character instead of his). I have given to the ACLU, too, and lately
I don't for various reasons. But whether I approve or disapprove of them
locally, I think they serve a valuable role in a critical debate.
I'm sorry about the occasional degree to which I go off topic on this, but
there are certain topics that I think are best learned "in context". I think
the only people who read ethics books are ethicists, who may show up on talk
radio or talk TV, but who otherwise don't contribute to actual decisionmaking.
I think the only way to teach ethics is to once in a while stop what you are
doing in any actual activity and say "here is where you apply ethics". Or,
if you prefer, more generally, "here is something that may appear to be done
by rote but which is actually a choice point that we have merely done in
X or Y or Z way for a very long time". So, paradoxically, or perhaps not,
it is not off topic ... because if what we do has no ethical core nor sense
of individual thought, and we are mere cogs in a larger program, doing
without choosing, there seems little point to the activity at all.
> That said, this touches on some speculations I have about the
> transmission of values and 'apprenticeship'.
An excellent metaphor. This is how I learned Lisp and, at some point,
programming generally. (The actual history of how I learned programming
originally was in near-total isolation, in an environment where personally
owning a computer was literally illegal, so I was happy to come to MIT
where computers were allowed and where other people existed to help you
figure out how to use them.)
> Assuming that when Lisp was 'born' society was generally more
> conservative[1],
I'd be extremely curious to know, in spite of your footnote, what
characterizes such conservatism. I understand conservatism in the US
political system to mean "adhering to a strict reading of the constitution",
but in the absence of a constitution-analog to read strictly, I'm less sure
what it might mean. I don't mean to suggest that you mean nothing, only
that I'm baffled by what you might mean.
> perhaps this has contributed to a slightly more
> conservative Lisp community today. On the face of it, 'Lisp' is a
> technical subject, devoid of political attitudes, so learning it ought
> not to perpetuate the (non-technical) attitudes of the teachers.
I think it's fair to say that languages carry with them the baggage of
how they are created and rise to success. Lisp, having been
long-lived enough to have achieved success and to some degree also
having seen a backslide since that success (which I'll decline to
characterize as failure or even a motion toward it, though surely others
might), carries with it the baggage of those who either remember what it
should be or who hold it back from what it might be. That's the puzzle.
We could be either. We might be both. Society changes. In doing so,
it sometimes kills good ideas and sometimes kills bad ones. Perhaps we
were doing things all wrong, and needed to change. But perhaps we were
doing things mostly right and only lost out, as do moths of the wrong
color, because we failed to change our skin color--having nothing
structurally wrong at all.
> Perhaps the 'face of it' is wrong. In the Eastern 'guru' traditions,
> a disciple must accept *everything* the guru says, and this is
> believed to improve the learning process. Maybe the Eastern way just
> formalises the principle that learning is imitation (in the
> beginning). Perhaps the more conservative[1] attitudes of the
> original Lispers have filtered down to today's (yesterday's ? ;-) )
> lispers.
It wasn't obvious to me if the guru thing was an example of conservatism
or nonconservatism, or if it was orthogonal (which I think it is).
I tend to largely reject the term "guru" for myself and anyone I respect;
I sometimes use it in cocktail party conversation for want of a more pithy
term, but in serious discussion I find it means "imitate without
understanding", and my anti-panacea campaign says it's fine to imitate,
but you must understand.
There's an "AI koan" (one of several teaching riddles written by Danny Hillis
at the MIT AI Lab long ago) that relates to this:
| A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the
| power off and on.
|
| Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: "You
| cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding
| of what is going wrong."
|
| Knight turned the machine off and on.
|
| The machine worked.
> If the above is true[2] (even if only in part) it would help to explain
> the *relative* lack of support for the principles of Free software in
> the lisp community. I have no idea about the numbers, but I think
> it's a safe bet that there is a relationship between the year(s) of
> origin of a language and the present day level of support for Free
> software in that language's community.
I found this a very interesting observation, and have several remakrs to
offer.
One is that political orientation is relative. Clinton, a very conservative
Liberal, was regarded as merely "overly Liberal" by the Republicans, but not
so by the Democrats. Free software people probably see me as
"anti-free-software" only because on some axis, I am farther to the right
than they are. How far to the right is another question.
But also, there's a point I've been making in talks I give about Lisp
for the last few years, and this gets away from Conservative/Liberal but
toward a different framing that I personally find more apt:
Lisp grew up in a kind of Socialist era, when The State (the lisp vendors,
i.e., the folks from whom all light and life flowed) was the power source
and The People awaited handouts from the state. Even today, we often see
users waiting eagerly for "what the vendors will give us next", which I
regard as a holdover from that earlier time, and a dangerous one (one I
think big enough to account for some piece of the decline in Lisp use,
actually).
I think Java, more than anything, represented a shift toward a kind of
democratization of the programming landscape. This in the sense that yes,
the language came with lots of goodies, but it also finally acknowledged
that users would provide goodies, too. It's the subtle but important
integration of the com.foo.frobs.fun notion of package naming, which gave
to the Java namespacing the same egalitarianism that Lisp's use of parens
for primitive operators gives to the use of operators. In Lisp, no one
fights over the * in x*y like they do in infix; and in the special forms
we do have, like (if x y z), someone else can build a (when x y) or
(usually-when x y) that is syntactically alike. Java did this for
contributed packages. And I think that although a lot of the packages
came from Sun, others still came out of w3 and other places such that
it was plain that Sun was not identifying itself as "the source of all good".
This charged a citizenry to "go forth and its own packages" in a way
we need to do for Lisp.
The reason the Java model is right, by the way, is that it doesn't
require a central committee to progress. The problem with waiting for
vendors to produce new goodies is that vendors work on their own
clock, and they hold back everyone else. A necessary aspect of the
Java system is that competing versions of the same functionality will
arise, and perhaps will even be linked into the same application.
Lisp used to try to avoid such redundancy, and I think some value came
of the head start this avoidance offered in getting people going. But
it doesn't scale. Society is a large parallel processor and it cannot
afford to wait for everyone to agree when to go "ahead", and so
"ahead" is a multi-dimensional space in what I call the democratized
universe where it used to be a single-dimensional space in what I call
the fallen socialist state.
I think the free/open software movement is captivated by this same
democratization, and I definitely support that aspect. But free software
is only one possible form of that good thing, and I think it achieves
some success due to that and some due to other aspects of it. But each
of those aspects functions independently, and there are other forms of
democratized software which differ on the other points (inspectability
from outside, ownership, etc.) The democratization element is a place
where society was held back by a paradigm (the software release cycle of
vendors) that really no one owned, and so it hurts no one (not even the
vendors, off of whom it takes considerable pressure to produce the next
good thing) to fix that ... and most people benefit. The free part,
however, is really a more personal choice with some purported good
sides to it and some purported bad sides. (You can remove the word
purported from that sentence if it offends you, just be sure to remove it
from both branches of the sentence, not just the side you support.)
I think to move forward, Lisp must necessarily confront that there are
(or should be) more Lisp users than vendors. If not due to a rise of
users, then a fall in vendors and/or vendor dollars achieves the same
effect. The users must move it forward. But they can do this in a variety
of ways, "free software" being only one of many. I personally am a fan
of economic empowerment, and I don't mind if sometimes money piles up on
one person because I think even the chance that that one person has vision
is worth it. Having been involved in standards organizations before,
which I regard as "optimizing the worst case", as do all democracies,
I prefer the occasional risk of dictatorships because, when benevolent,
they optimize the best case. I do think there needs to be safeguards
to assure one doesn't have malevolent dictators, and I have established
these criteria: a dictatorship must be voluntary to enter or leave and
must not harm a person or their possessions while inside it. Companies
are such, and on the whole, most companies function well this way.
Some companies get too big and so either can harm people or can keep
their employees or even their customers from leaving; that requires
safeguards. But it is not a condemnation of the idea of caring about the best
case.
I often said in the design of CL that I thought most of the people in
the room could have, given appropriate resource, designed a more
coherent spec than the committee ended up designing. Democracies and
group consensus are not good at design, I think. That's why I favor
individual autonomy. And some people say free software maximizes
that. But the one thing it doesn't maximize is the resource needed to
carry out complex tasks. I need there to be millionaires. Maybe so
I'll be one and can implement my world vision. Maybe so I can aspire
to be one. Maybe just so I'll work for one with his own clear vision.
But to do that, I must be able to accumulate wealth, and I'd prefer to
do it by doing the activity I'm best at, not by doing some other
activity which is "all that is left" after my best activity has denied
me the ability to make money. If we're all just peasants working in
the field with the ability to go home from our day job and program in
the evening, that will not suit me.
Whether I'm a millionaire or I work through free software, I think the
thing society has learned is that we need a world model that doesn't
assume any of us has a global lock on the market. We're each
scrambling for our stake in a complex MIMD, not SIMD, world now.
I might be right or wrong, or like in most things that aren't black
and white, maybe I get part credit. But just to bring it back home to
the local topic of Peter's very interesting message, this issue of
conservatism either is or ought to be not about "sticking with the old
ways" vs "using the new ways" but rather "sifting through the old
ways, figuring out which were working and which weren't, discarding
what was not working, adopting new ideas, and being careful, as they
say, not to throw out the baby with the bathwater."
I come back to my central anti-panacea pitch: the world is about tradeoffs.
As long as you see them and make them thoughtfully, you're probably
doing ok. As long as you think the tradeoff has been decided and eliminated
and need no longer be thought about it, you should know you're entering
dangerous turf.
From: Craig Brozefsky
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <8766c2z6ne.fsf@piracy.red-bean.com>
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> Lisp grew up in a kind of Socialist era, when The State (the lisp
> vendors, i.e., the folks from whom all light and life flowed) was
> the power source and The People awaited handouts from the state.
My understanding is that a significant amount of the development of
Lisp was literally State funded, either directly, or thru the funding
of projects which used Lisp and dedicated resources to improving their
tools. Then there was a privatization of the resources that were
publically funded, and the burden shifted from the State to private
investors. The transfer was reportedly done so that the private
investors could take the technology the last few steps from raw techne
to commodity, and then provide a finished, useful product.
This understanding is based on second-hand accounts and various
histories of the period, as I was not born at the time and could not
directly observe this process. The narrative thread running thru this
historical account appears to be repeated for various post-war
technologies, including the Internet.
> application. Lisp used to try to avoid such redundancy, and I think
> some value came of the head start this avoidance offered in getting
> people going. But it doesn't scale. Society is a large parallel
> processor and it cannot afford to wait for everyone to agree when to
> go "ahead", and so "ahead" is a multi-dimensional space in what I
> call the democratized universe where it used to be a
> single-dimensional space in what I call the fallen socialist state.
Marx and others refered to this democratization as the
socialization of the production process, and believed it to be an
inevitable trend that laid the foundation for a true international
socialism, as opposed to Stalinism, or totalitarian State Socialism.
What you are calling "Socialism" is more correctly called Stalinism,
which attempted to bypass this socialization of the production process
by establishing totalitarian controls over production and
distribution.
My issues with your terminology aside, this issue is of central
importance for the lisp community and find your characterization of it
very useful. Licenses, committees and the like are tools the community
can use to deal with the socialization of it's development process
such that it can compete with Java and it's ilk.
> I come back to my central anti-panacea pitch: the world is about
> tradeoffs. As long as you see them and make them thoughtfully,
> you're probably doing ok. As long as you think the tradeoff has
> been decided and eliminated and need no longer be thought about it,
> you should know you're entering dangerous turf.
Yes. That is called "not thinking".
--
Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com>
http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
The outer space which me wears it has sexual intercourse. - opus
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwu1zm2tsz.fsf@world.std.com>
Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com> writes:
> Marx and others refered to this democratization as the
> socialization of the production process, and believed it to be an
> inevitable trend that laid the foundation for a true international
> socialism, as opposed to Stalinism, or totalitarian State Socialism.
> What you are calling "Socialism" is more correctly called Stalinism,
> which attempted to bypass this socialization of the production process
> by establishing totalitarian controls over production and
> distribution.
Sorry for the sloppy terminology and thanks for the clarification of
this area of history, which I've never delved heavily into, mostly
for lack of time rather than lack of interest.
(I say this while at the same time lamenting that correct usage
probably obfuscates the point in the face of a population who
probably, like me, is equally uninformed. I have a similar problem
with the term "schizo(phrenic)", which is used by so many people
informally to mean "multiple personality" that I think the scientific
community ought to, like Kleenex and Xerox, give up the hopeless quest
of correcting people's determined misuse of certain now-common names
and instead make a new and different term to be newly precise.)
> My issues with your terminology aside, this issue is of central
> importance for the lisp community and find your characterization of it
> very useful. Licenses, committees and the like are tools the community
> can use to deal with the socialization of it's development process
> such that it can compete with Java and it's ilk.
"its ilk" (sorry, couldn't resist the humor in pursuing a hopeless
quest to correct determined misuse of a now-common spelling :-)
If you wanted to expand a little more on the last sentence (using the
spelling of your choice), I'd be interested for an elaboration of what
you were getting at. I personally see committees (by which I hear
standards committees, for obvious reasons of my background, though maybe
you mean some other kind) as synchronization tools and suitable only for
elective groups, not for the society as a whole. Licenses I see not as
tools of policy but tools of implementation. So to me committees and
licenses are of different ilk and are uncomfortable bonded by "and" without
exposition as to what they are doing hand in hand. Hence my request
for elaboration.
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> (I say this while at the same time lamenting that correct usage
> probably obfuscates the point in the face of a population who
> probably, like me, is equally uninformed. I have a similar problem
> with the term "schizo(phrenic)", which is used by so many people
> informally to mean "multiple personality" that I think the scientific
> community ought to, like Kleenex and Xerox, give up the hopeless quest
> of correcting people's determined misuse of certain now-common names
> and instead make a new and different term to be newly precise.)
No way, uh-uh. As a science student, I'd be horrified if biologists
decided to give up on the terms "Darwinism", "Natural Selection", and,
most poignantly, "Survival of the Fittest", just because of the
sloppy, and often 180-degree wrong use of these terms in the vulgar
language. Once we start heading down this path, it will make it
impossible to talk about anything that's generally misunderstood. And
if it's a concept that the vast population knows about, or thinks they
do, and completely misunderstands, it's probably a very important one
for scientists to be able to talk about clearly, precisely, and
exactly.
In fact, didn't you just recently cite a paper of your own defending
Lisp terminology from perverted usage in other programming communities
:)? (I think that's what you were saying in it, I read it a couple
years ago). Better to keep the misunderstood terms, and to be aware
of whom you're talking to so as to understand what they're trying to
convey when they use them. And when you want to use the misunderstood
term, accompany it with a brief explanatory caveat.
(Hey, I'm pretty pleased with myself for managing to wander that back
on-topic ;)
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwelqq9pna.fsf@world.std.com>
···@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> In fact, didn't you just recently cite a paper of your own defending
> Lisp terminology from perverted usage in other programming communities
> :)?
Well, the paper didn't make the point that what the others were doing
would not succeed. The paper made the point that if Lisp people
didn't work hard to keep the terminology changes from happening, they
would succeed. In human language, at least, the meaning of language
goes to the speakers, not to the dictinoarymakers. They just write
down what people are saying, so they say.
> (I think that's what you were saying in it, I read it a couple
> years ago). Better to keep the misunderstood terms, and to be aware
> of whom you're talking to so as to understand what they're trying to
> convey when they use them. And when you want to use the misunderstood
> term, accompany it with a brief explanatory caveat.
Oh, ok. I admit I was being a bit flippant. This may be more practical.
From: Don Geddis
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <m33d7090vl.fsf@jedi.tesserae.com>
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> In human language, at least, the meaning of language
> goes to the speakers, not to the dictinoarymakers. They just write
> down what people are saying, so they say.
I recall this being a cultural thing. A couple hundred years ago (and
still with pieces remaining today) the French, for example, had a "correct"
way to speak French, which was dictated from above.
One of the insights of Webster's original dictionary of the English
language was supposed to be a "mere" recording of the actual use of
the language by native speakers, rather than any statement of what
proper English "should" be.
-- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis www.goto.com ······@goto.com
What would annoy me if a space visitor ever came to our planet would be if he
kept talking about things in "his world." Your world? We don't give a flying
hoot about your world.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey [1999]
Don Geddis <······@goto.com> writes:
> Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> > In human language, at least, the meaning of language
> > goes to the speakers, not to the dictinoarymakers. They just write
> > down what people are saying, so they say.
>
> I recall this being a cultural thing. A couple hundred years ago (and
> still with pieces remaining today) the French, for example, had a "correct"
> way to speak French, which was dictated from above.
Yes, well, you're confusing the _attempt_ to control language with the
fact of controlling language. "Educated" speakers of most language
have tried (and still do) to prescribe correct usage, and they never
succeed. IIRC, the French still have their prescriptive language body,
but the language still evolves "in the gutter," as one of my
Linguistics profs used to say.
Thom
--
Thom Goodsell ···@cra.com
Scientist (617) 491-3474 x574
Charles River Analytics http://www.cra.com/
I wrote:
> > I recall this being a cultural thing. A couple hundred years ago (and
> > still with pieces remaining today) the French, for example, had a "correct"
> > way to speak French, which was dictated from above.
Thom Goodsell <···@cra.com> writes:
> Yes, well, you're confusing the _attempt_ to control language with the
> fact of controlling language. "Educated" speakers of most language
> have tried (and still do) to prescribe correct usage, and they never
> succeed.
Yes, good point. Just because the authorities try, doesn't mean they
succeed.
> IIRC, the French still have their prescriptive language body,
> but the language still evolves "in the gutter," as one of my
> Linguistics profs used to say.
Still, I recall the French go out of their way to deliberately construct
new French words, in order to name concepts that arose in other language.
E.g. new tech-speak, perhaps like "laptop", "LCD panel", "computer", etc.
Vs., say, Japanese, which happily adopts the original word and merely gives
it Japanese pronunciation. French authorities invent some brand new French
word and request that French people use that one instead to name the foreign
concept.
Now, whether they actually succeed, or whether the French public just
pronounced the original word with a French accent and ignores the authorities,
I'm not sure.
-- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis www.goto.com ······@goto.com
In view of all the deadly computer viruses that have been spreading lately,
Weekend Update would like to remind you: when you link up to another computer,
you're linking up to every computer that that computer has ever linked up to.
-- Dennis Miller, SNL Weekend Update
Thom Goodsell <···@cra.com> writes:
> Yes, well, you're confusing the _attempt_ to control language with the
> fact of controlling language. "Educated" speakers of most language
> have tried (and still do) to prescribe correct usage, and they never
> succeed. IIRC, the French still have their prescriptive language body,
> but the language still evolves "in the gutter," as one of my
> Linguistics profs used to say.
Prescriptive grammar can be quite influential though. The infamous
split infinitive in English is a good example. Why are you not
allowed to freely split infinitives in `good English'? Because you
can't do it in Latin. English doesn't have much in common with Latin,
of course, but a lot of people who prescribed English grammar regarded
all languages as cheap versions of Latin (and English grammar was
still taught this way 30 years ago, at least in the schools I went
to), hence a lot of random rules like this which are now passed down
through the generations.
--tim
In article <···············@omega.tardis.ed.ac.uk>, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
>Thom Goodsell <···@cra.com> writes:
>
>> Yes, well, you're confusing the _attempt_ to control language with the
>> fact of controlling language. "Educated" speakers of most language
>> have tried (and still do) to prescribe correct usage, and they never
>> succeed. IIRC, the French still have their prescriptive language body,
>> but the language still evolves "in the gutter," as one of my
>> Linguistics profs used to say.
>
>Prescriptive grammar can be quite influential though. The infamous
>split infinitive in English is a good example.
It's a good example of how prescriptive grammar fails to be influential,
because people split these all the time. Famous opening line from
Star Trek:
``To boldly go where no man has gone before''.
There are are what my linguistics professor called ``socio-economically
preferred dialects''. :) But it's not all that clear that these languages
are the products of rule prescribers; I think they exist naturally.
The rule-prescribers have failed to banish the split infinitive from
preferred dialects of English, dialects which exist in spite of them,
not thanks to them. They also failed to banish other constructs, like
prepositions at the ends of sentences. This suggests that perhaps they
do not have as much influence as they might think. Pardon me, *so* much
influence as they might think. ;)
It's not clear what the rule-prescribers want; they seem to want to create
a language that is even more exclusive than the one already spoken by the
economic elite.
···@ashi.footprints.net (Kaz Kylheku) writes:
> The rule-prescribers have failed to banish the split infinitive from
> preferred dialects of English, dialects which exist in spite of them,
> not thanks to them. They also failed to banish other constructs, like
> prepositions at the ends of sentences. This suggests that perhaps they
> do not have as much influence as they might think. Pardon me, *so* much
> influence as they might think. ;)
As I seem to recall in the past couple of years the the grey old men
in Oxford have actually rescinded the prohibition on split infinitives
in English. Alas my google search only turned up definitive
references from this side of the pond. Our heathen grammar tome[1] has
this to say:
The split infinitive has been present in English ever since the
14th century, but it was not until the 19th century that
grammarians labeled and condemned the usage. The only rationale
for condemning the construction is based on a false analogy with
Latin. The thinking is that because the Latin infinitive is a
single word, the equivalent English construction should be
treated as if it were a single unit. But English is not Latin,
and distinguished writers have split infinitives without giving
it a thought. Noteworthy splitters include John Donne, Daniel
Defoe, George Eliot, Benjamin Franklin, Abraham Lincoln, William
Wordsworth, and Willa Cather.
Personally, I like the descriptive linguists. Since they validate all
of the hickisms I have such a difficult time exorcizing from my
speech.
Y'al have fun now ;-)
-Eric
P.S. Kaz sorry for the email, I hit reply instead of followup the
first time.
Footnotes:
[1] The American Heritage� Dictionary of the English Language: Fourth
Edition. 2000.
···@ashi.footprints.net (Kaz Kylheku) writes:
>
> It's a good example of how prescriptive grammar fails to be influential,
> because people split these all the time. Famous opening line from
> Star Trek:
>
> ``To boldly go where no man has gone before''.
Yeah, I know. But there are quite a lot of people in the UK at least
who wince at that. The whole thing is tangled up in curious ways with
the class system in the UK (by `curious ways' I mean that it
definitely is not the case that higher social class implies closer
adherence to the rules: it's more complex than that). It's not at all
clear that the prescriptive grammarians are without influence,
although the influence is clearly less than it is often thought to be.
>
> It's not clear what the rule-prescribers want; they seem to want to create
> a language that is even more exclusive than the one already spoken by the
> economic elite.
I think they just want everything to be governed by rules. This is
quite common for a lot of people I think - you have only to look at
the various SW engineering methodologies and bogus SW metrics and so
on to see this: it's really quite pervasive. People need rules
because it frees them from having to think too hard, perhaps. One of
CL's great attractions to me is that it's remarkably free from this -
all the rules can be broken, when it's convenient or necessary, and
nothing is quite pure or rigid.
--tim
Tim Bradshaw <···@tfeb.org> writes:
> People need rules because it frees them from having to think too
> hard, perhaps. One of CL's great attractions to me is that it's
> remarkably free from this - all the rules can be broken, when it's
> convenient or necessary, and nothing is quite pure or rigid.
Forgive me for putting in my $0.02. I don't really know lisp. I've
only started lurking here because I'm trying to learn elisp better.
However, I had heard that the language specification was quite large
for CL. Granted, the lang. specs. aren't really "rules". Still, this
statement seems ironic to me.
Also, your comment about being able to break all the rules when it's
convenient or necessary is reminiscent of perl (although I expect that
to fall on un-friendly ears).
--
(__) Doug Alcorn (···········@lathi.net http://www.lathi.net)
oo / PGP 02B3 1E26 BCF2 9AAF 93F1 61D7 450C B264 3E63 D543
|_/ If you're a capitalist and you have the best goods and they're
free, you don't have to proselytize, you just have to wait.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Control of Human Language [was: Apprenticeship]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwae13om4l.fsf@world.std.com>
Doug Alcorn <····@lathi.net> writes:
> Tim Bradshaw <···@tfeb.org> writes:
>
> > People need rules because it frees them from having to think too
> > hard, perhaps. One of CL's great attractions to me is that it's
> > remarkably free from this - all the rules can be broken, when it's
> > convenient or necessary, and nothing is quite pure or rigid.
>
> Forgive me for putting in my $0.02. I don't really know lisp. I've
> only started lurking here because I'm trying to learn elisp better.
> However, I had heard that the language specification was quite large
> for CL. Granted, the lang. specs. aren't really "rules". Still, this
> statement seems ironic to me.
A description of English-without-rules is probably larger than a description
of English-with-rules. The rules only serve to shorten. The question is
whether the shortening is worthwhile. One learns/implements a language
only once. The size of the language is of little concern therefore. One
writes programs all the time--the availability of flexible expressive power
to say and focus what you have to express is of considerable concern. To
the extent that you have fewer options, expression can come only in longer
utterances. People are so bad with language to begin with, why complicate
the difficulty of them expressing themselves with arbitrary problems?
In the case of CL, one thing that makes its spec bigger than Scheme's is
that it tries to help bridge the gap between legitimate implementational
variations, rather than as in Scheme, merely saying "it's undefined".
The "bottom" character from math is quite concise, but not ultimately
very expressive. It is less like a garden of meaning and more like a black
hole of meaning.
So probably it only _seems_ ironic, but on closer inspection you'll realize,
perhaps even ironically, that it is not.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Control of Human Language [was: Apprenticeship]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfw7kw8kk85.fsf@world.std.com>
Tim Bradshaw <···@tfeb.org> writes:
> I think they just want everything to be governed by rules.
It's too bad they're so anal about this, because I find it far more
fascinating to observe the rulesets people learn spontaneously through
observed use. There is an amazing degree of regularity to it once you
get past the fact that such regularity does vary by class and region.
My favorite among the odd rules is the one that says you can say:
Bill picked John up.
Bill picked him up.
Bill picked up John.
but not
Bill picked up him.
Actually, there exist dialects where you can say this last one, and they
make a lot more sense to me since it's a perfectly fine generalization.
But imagine the weirdness in the brainmatter of people like me who can't
abide this 4th case that without the helip of a grammar teacher and only
working from "lack of apparent use" we consistently figure out that this
last case must be disallowed.
It's a pity that some teachers don't put all those "rules" in better
context. Thank god for the acceptance of e.e. cummings in normal English
classes as a way of shaking people out of their stupor and saying it's ok
to have a brain of your own.
> This is
> quite common for a lot of people I think - you have only to look at
> the various SW engineering methodologies and bogus SW metrics and so
> on to see this: it's really quite pervasive.
Fortunately for CS, any advanced algorithms class will generally
delight in teaching you some horrid violation of rigidly taught style
in order to get some silly speed bum.
> People need rules because it frees them from having to think too
> hard, perhaps. One of CL's great attractions to me is that it's
> remarkably free from this - all the rules can be broken, when it's
> convenient or necessary, and nothing is quite pure or rigid.
Some have gone so far as to say the freedom Lisp offers is related to
its infrequent use. I tend to reject that, but I carry the thought
with me anyway and appeal to it from time to time in hope of making
sure it doesn't become so. The claim, as offered, though, is that
highly restrictive languages don't give you lots of ways to get lost.
By contrast, languages like Lisp that give you a billion ways to do
something can leave people who don't like to think for themselves adrift
without guidance and allow strange tangles in design and code. As such,
it is claimed, Lisp is a good language for experts and not for novices.
I've seen well-taught Lisp be much easier for novices than other languages,
so I mostly don't believe this as a wholesale observation. But it never
hurts to beware. And maybe the difference in what I've seen is that
the well-taught stuff was not someone bumbling on their own. People need
guidance through the critical parts. Maybe it's part of why I and others
spend a lot of time here chatting with newbies--because we've seen people
get lost (sometimes on their own, sometimes with the help of other lost
folks) and develop weird feelings about Lisp that are hard to undo.
I would hope that no one helping someone with English as a second language
beats the person up for using split infinitives, yet I think some English
teachers live for that. I have little doubt that some teachers of
programming language survey courses stop by at Lisp just so they can do
some similarly bizarre hand-slapping of their students over equally
pointless issues (e.g., telling them never to use iteration, and only
to use recursion, or telling them always to use one namespace, ... as if
Lisp had never evolved, and probably as if the thing it had never evolved
from, if you'll pardon my trailng preposition, was Scheme).
In article <···············@world.std.com>, Kent M Pitman wrote:
>Tim Bradshaw <···@tfeb.org> writes:
>
>> I think they just want everything to be governed by rules.
>
>It's too bad they're so anal about this, because I find it far more
>fascinating to observe the rulesets people learn spontaneously through
>observed use. There is an amazing degree of regularity to it once you
>get past the fact that such regularity does vary by class and region.
>
>My favorite among the odd rules is the one that says you can say:
>
> Bill picked John up.
> Bill picked him up.
> Bill picked up John.
>
>but not
>
> Bill picked up him.
According to my intuition this is a borderline case. It feels ungrammatical,
but then I can come up with instances where it doesn't, involving
the same preposition as well as others.
Emphasis:
Bill picked up *him*, and Joe picked up *her*.
Topicalization shows independent movement of ``him'' object:
Him, Bill picked up. Him, he did not pick up.
Other prepositions:
Bill went with him.
Bill talked to him.
But these differ in the semantic role played by ``him'', and also the
verbs do not categorize for a required preposition phrase. You can have
``Bill went'' and ``Bill talked'', but not ``bill picked''.
I suspect that the difficulty with ``Bill picked up him'' may be that
the brain is seeing the interpretation ``Bill picked [PP: up him]''
which works in ``Bill went [PP: with him]'' and other instances.
But for some reason the interpretation ``Bill picked [PP: up John]''
does not seem to arise, we proceed straight to ``Bill [VP: picked up]
[NP: John]''.
I can see it as ``Bill [VP: picked up] [NP: him]'', if it is pronounced
the right way. A certain accent has to be phonologically realized. If
you say it as ``Bill picked up' him'' with emphasis on up, and a falling
voice on him, then it sounds like the incorrect [PP: up him], but
if this emphasis is avoided then it's more acceptable.
>Actually, there exist dialects where you can say this last one, and they
>make a lot more sense to me since it's a perfectly fine generalization.
>But imagine the weirdness in the brainmatter of people like me who can't
>abide this 4th case that without the helip of a grammar teacher and only
>working from "lack of apparent use" we consistently figure out that this
>last case must be disallowed.
That can't be it, because if we depended on lack of apparent use, we'd
rule out a whole lot more grammatical sentences. The theory says that
we acquire grammar by ``customizing'' a Universal Grammar that is part of
our brain, but concsciously inaccessible. This explains the observation
that children are able to acquire their language from an impoverished
set of examples that includes far too few examples to cover what they
are able to generate, and that has a lot of ungrammatical ``noise'' in
it too. Kids are exposed to performance anomalies such as incomplete
sentences, false starts, corrections in mid sentence, stutters, what
have you.
>It's a pity that some teachers don't put all those "rules" in better
>context. Thank god for the acceptance of e.e. cummings in normal English
>classes as a way of shaking people out of their stupor and saying it's ok
>to have a brain of your own.
Capitalization is just orthography. Orthography is a set of prescribed
rules. It's easy to flaunt a prescribed rule, but not so easy to flaunt
an actual rule of the unconscious grammar understood by native speakers
of the language. Ironically, all that e. e. cummings succeeded in doing
was introducing his own special case orthography, which is now part of the
prescriptive rules. It used to be ``capitalize all proper nouns''
and now it is ``capitalize all proper nouns, unless they are the name
of poet e e. cummings''. ;)
From: Dorai Sitaram
Subject: Re: Control of Human Language [was: Apprenticeship]
Date:
Message-ID: <9l9agm$e6$1@news.gte.com>
In article <·······················@news1.rdc1.bc.home.com>,
Kaz Kylheku <···@ashi.footprints.net> wrote:
>It's easy to flaunt a prescribed rule, but not so easy to flaunt
>an actual rule of the unconscious grammar understood by native speakers
>of the language.
One of the rules people like to boldly flout is the
rule that says don't use _flaunt_ when you mean
_flout_. Or maybe they are actually flaunting the
inverse of that rule. Or...
I guess I better flee while I'm still floating.
--d
····@goldshoe.gte.com (Dorai Sitaram) writes:
> In article <·······················@news1.rdc1.bc.home.com>,
> Kaz Kylheku <···@ashi.footprints.net> wrote:
> >It's easy to flaunt a prescribed rule, but not so easy to flaunt
> >an actual rule of the unconscious grammar understood by native speakers
> >of the language.
>
> One of the rules people like to boldly flout is the
> rule that says don't use _flaunt_ when you mean
> _flout_. Or maybe they are actually flaunting the
> inverse of that rule. Or...
>
> I guess I better flee while I'm still floating.
>
> --d
Are you trying to make a floating point here?
Peter
In article <···············@omega.tardis.ed.ac.uk>, Tim Bradshaw wrote:
>> It's not clear what the rule-prescribers want; they seem to want to create
>> a language that is even more exclusive than the one already spoken by the
>> economic elite.
>
>I think they just want everything to be governed by rules. This is
>quite common for a lot of people I think - you have only to look at
>the various SW engineering methodologies and bogus SW metrics and so
>on to see this: it's really quite pervasive. People need rules
>because it frees them from having to think too hard, perhaps. One of
>CL's great attractions to me is that it's remarkably free from this -
>all the rules can be broken, when it's convenient or necessary, and
>nothing is quite pure or rigid.
In programming languages, there definitely are prescriptive rules, so
the prescriptive thinking applies. If you aren't precise, the machine
will misunderstand you.
I'm not attracted to CL because of rule breaking; rather, I'm attracted
by what you can do *within* the rules, compared to some other programming
languages, whose rules exclude useful programming ideas.
But then you know a heck of a lot more about CL; can you provide examples
of what rules it is occasionally useful to break?
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Control of Human Language [was: Apprenticeship]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfw8zgnol8u.fsf@world.std.com>
···@ashi.footprints.net (Kaz Kylheku) writes:
> But then you know a heck of a lot more about CL; can you provide examples
> of what rules it is occasionally useful to break?
Uusally style rules, not grammar rules.
Style rules are about normative behavior. They help alert you to something
odd going on when they are violated.
If you don't have overlapping variables, you can use LET or LET* to
bind them, but most people use LET unless they need LET*. (A few use
it the other way around.) The important thing isn't the choice of
style rule, but the knowledge of which was chosen, so you can be
alerted to the fact that serial binding was needed when LET* is chosen
instead of LET, or in the converse case, for people who defaultly use
LET*, so you can be alerted that parallel binding was needed when LET
was chosen. If you just use them haphazardly, you get no such information
from deviation.
In information theory, you hear that the true information content of a
bit is "a surprise". (e.g., truly random data is always a surprise
per bit, so fewer bits cannot be squeezed out by compression. But
repetitive data like HTML has many non-surprises so many chances to
compress out bits, yielding a MUCH smaller compressed file that approaches
surprise-free as it approaches optimal compression.) Use of style rules
convey "no surprise here" (no hidden bit) and judicious use of style rule
breakage may convey "extra information to be had".
So if you're careful about the use of #'foo to denote a function, but you
know 'foo can denote one, too, then the use of 'foo will alert you to
something interesting going on. And so on.
But every now and then you break a grammar rule of portable CL because you
know the risk/cost of non-portability is less than the cost of finding a
conforming way to accomplish a certain action in a particular implementation.
One learns to do this carefully, and to document the points where it's done
with comments and sometimes even active conditionals that keep it from
doing the wrong thing in other places or if the implementaiton-in-question
is ever changed. But the key to whether one may break a rule comes from
knowing why the rule is there.
In Maclisp we used to compile CAR and CDR and CXR (which could see the
car/cdr of subsequent words) so they wouldn't have error checking and we
could poke into structures we didn't belong in. That wasn't elegant, but
it helped us work around limitations of the environment so that we could
build programs that illustrated the power of operators we wished we had
but didn't... sometimes we got that power later in the language, sometimes
not. The ability to rplacd fixnums or to cdr down bignums never made it
into the mainstream language, for example. Pity. ;-) Then again, not
having those abilities gave implementors more freedom, so we learned to
control our urges.
Personally, I usually think portability is more important than all other
things, even speed, because it leads to robust applications that outlive their
original use. Still, the world is not always as idealistic as we want it
to be and people do sometimes make reasonable concessions to reality.
···@ashi.footprints.net (Kaz Kylheku) writes:
> But then you know a heck of a lot more about CL; can you provide examples
> of what rules it is occasionally useful to break?
I was thinking at kind of a meta level. Obviously in some mundane
sense the language is goverened by rules, because programming
languages are. But at a slightly higher level, CL's naming
conventions have a number of exceptions and variations (ATOM not
ATOMP, NULL not NULLP) as well as duplication of functionality (NULL
and NOT, COND, WHEN, UNLESS, IF and so on). All these smell to me of
a certain pragmatism about things rather than a slavish following of
rules. At a yet higher level, CL programs and programmers tend to be
fairly open about what sorts of things it's OK to put in programs. We
have LOOP, for example, and some of us use it. We have iteration and
conditional constructs in format strings, and some of us use them. We
have GO.
Really, to me, CL is a language which is about trying to write down a
solution to a problem in a way that it can be efficiently understood
both by a human and a machine. Rules which attempt to prescribe what
a program should look like are rightly secondary to that goal. This
is not always the case in programming language cultures.
A rather similar statement applies to natural languages, I think.
--tim
(Hmm, should that be 'be understood efficiently'?)
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Control of Human Language [was: Apprenticeship]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwitfsj6rw.fsf@world.std.com>
Tim Bradshaw <···@tfeb.org> writes:
> Prescriptive grammar can be quite influential though. The infamous
> split infinitive in English is a good example. Why are you not
> allowed to freely split infinitives in `good English'?
> Because you can't do it in Latin.
I never bought into this concern. I figured "to boldly go" was a compound
verb and "to go boldly" was a simple verb, modified. Neither was split.
One was just constructed, a la German, and happened to have spaces in it. ;-)
(Thanks for the explanation of why people care, though.)
> Tim Bradshaw <···@tfeb.org> writes:
> > Prescriptive grammar can be quite influential though. The infamous
> > split infinitive in English is a good example. Why are you not
> > allowed to freely split infinitives in `good English'?
> > Because you can't do it in Latin.
Shouldn't that be "to split freely" : )
(i assume you did that on purpose but have seen no one pick it up)
Coby
--
(remove #\space "coby . beck @ opentechgroup . com")
In article <·······················@typhoon.tampabay.rr.com>, Coby Beck wrote:
>> Tim Bradshaw <···@tfeb.org> writes:
>> > Prescriptive grammar can be quite influential though. The infamous
>> > split infinitive in English is a good example. Why are you not
>> > allowed to freely split infinitives in `good English'?
>> > Because you can't do it in Latin.
>
>Shouldn't that be "to split freely" : )
>(i assume you did that on purpose but have seen no one pick it up)
No, he most likely did that unconsciously, based on his understanding
understanding of his native language. Note that had he written
to split freely infinitives in `good English'
that would be borderline grammatical at best. You *must* split the
infinitive to make this sentence be understood by native speakers.
Otherwise it looks ambigous, as though you may be trying to use ``freely''
as an adjective, giving rise to some kind of ``freely infinitives''
which are the object of splitting. Upon hearing that sentence being
pronounced, I would be led to suspect that it might be talking about
some special types of infinitives discovered by some linguist
named Freely. :) Indeed, Freely is a surname, as a web search for
``John Freely'' readily reveals.
An unnatural pause or emphasis would be required to clarify
the meaning:
allowed to split freely (pause) infinitives in good english
No such pause is required in the grammatical version.
Kaz Kylheku writes:
| Coby Beck wrote:
|
| > Shouldn't that be "to split freely" : )
| > (i assume you did that on purpose but have seen no one pick it up)
|
| No, he most likely did that unconsciously, based on his understanding
| understanding of his native language. Note that had he written
|
| to split freely infinitives in `good English'
|
| that would be borderline grammatical at best. You *must* split the
| infinitive to make this sentence be understood by native speakers.
I am not a native English speaker, but wouldn't the opponents of split
infinitives say that the sentence should be:
Why are you not allowed to split infinitives freely in `good English'?
In my ears that sounds as correct as the version with the split
infinitive. The `to split freely infinitives ...' version sounds
horrible ... in my ears that is.
Boris
--
·····@uncommon-sense.net - <http://www.uncommon-sense.net/>
Confucius say too much.
-- Recent Chinese Proverb
Boris Schaefer <·····@uncommon-sense.net> writes:
> I am not a native English speaker, but wouldn't the opponents of split
> infinitives say that the sentence should be:
>
> Why are you not allowed to split infinitives freely in `good English'?
>
> In my ears that sounds as correct as the version with the split
> infinitive. The `to split freely infinitives ...' version sounds
> horrible ... in my ears that is.
>
Yes that is fine. 'To split freely infinitives' is ambiguous and
sounds bad. the other alternative is probably 'freely to split' which
is not ambiguous but sounds really pretentious to me, like something
you'd use in a bad speech ('We demand the right, Freely to live, one
with another ...' ick)
--tim
"Boris Schaefer" <·····@uncommon-sense.net> wrote in message
···················@qiwi.uncommon-sense.net...
> Kaz Kylheku writes:
>
> | Coby Beck wrote:
> |
> | > Shouldn't that be "to split freely" : )
> | > (i assume you did that on purpose but have seen no one pick it up)
> |
> | No, he most likely did that unconsciously, based on his understanding
> | understanding of his native language. Note that had he written
> |
> | to split freely infinitives in `good English'
> |
> | that would be borderline grammatical at best. You *must* split the
> | infinitive to make this sentence be understood by native speakers.
>
> I am not a native English speaker, but wouldn't the opponents of split
> infinitives say that the sentence should be:
>
> Why are you not allowed to split infinitives freely in `good English'?
>
much better!
> In my ears that sounds as correct as the version with the split
> infinitive. The `to split freely infinitives ...' version sounds
> horrible ... in my ears that is.
>
in mine too (i'm a native english speaker). I was thinking only about
"unbreaking" the rule, not actually how to effectively communicate ...shows
the trouble you can get into when trying to quickly construct a sentence
from grammatical rules only. `to split freely infinitives ...' does sound
like something that might come out of an NLP program but I doubt would ever
be heard to freely flow from a native speaker! (yes, I meant to ironically
split all my infinitives again : )
Coby
--
(remove #\space "coby . beck @ opentechgroup . com")
"Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
> "Boris Schaefer" <·····@uncommon-sense.net> wrote in message
> ···················@qiwi.uncommon-sense.net...
> > Kaz Kylheku writes:
> >
> > | Coby Beck wrote:
> > |
> > | > Shouldn't that be "to split freely" : )
> > | > (i assume you did that on purpose but have seen no one pick it up)
> > |
> > | No, he most likely did that unconsciously, based on his understanding
> > | understanding of his native language. Note that had he written
> > |
> > | to split freely infinitives in `good English'
> > |
> > | that would be borderline grammatical at best. You *must* split the
> > | infinitive to make this sentence be understood by native speakers.
> >
> > I am not a native English speaker, but wouldn't the opponents of split
> > infinitives say that the sentence should be:
> >
> > Why are you not allowed to split infinitives freely in `good English'?
> >
>
> much better!
Bleah! If I wanted to speak French or Spanish, I'd speak in French or
Spanish -- when I'm speaking English, I want to speak English. Split
infinitives aren't an issue in North America, besides for a few high
school grammar teachers -- all our dictionaries, the MLA, and the New
York Times all agree that it's fine to split them whenever we want.
As was previously pointed out, this is probably a case where we're
using a compound verb (freely-split). "to split infinitives freely"
sounds to me like
(defun munge-list (lst)
(labels ((helper (l a)
(if (null l)
a
(helper (cdr l) (cons (munge (car a)) a)))))
(reverse (helper lst ()))))
looks. There's nothing wrong with expressing the idea that way.
There is something wrong with doing so in Common Lisp, though,
particularly if one is a CL'er who is just trying to import Scheme's
hatred of iteration. That's fine for them in their language, and it's
going to be an accent that comes through when they speak CL, which is
also just fine. However, claiming that the above should be preferred
over
(defun munge-list (list)
(loop for elt in list
collecting (munge elt)))
is not okay. It's perverting a perfectly good language, not to
optimize for communication, but to make it a cheap imitation of a
perfectly good language that already exists.
···@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> However, claiming that the above [horrible label function] should be
> preferred over
>
> (defun munge-list (list)
> (loop for elt in list
> collecting (munge elt)))
... or indeed (mapcar #'munge list)?
> is not okay. It's perverting a perfectly good language, not to
> optimize for communication, but to make it a cheap imitation of a
> perfectly good language that already exists.
Indeed.
Christophe
--
Jesus College, Cambridge, CB5 8BL +44 1223 510 299
http://www-jcsu.jesus.cam.ac.uk/~csr21/ (defun pling-dollar
(str schar arg) (first (last +))) (make-dispatch-macro-character #\! t)
(set-dispatch-macro-character #\! #\$ #'pling-dollar)
"Thomas F. Burdick" <···@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU> wrote in message
····················@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU...
> "Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
>
> > "Boris Schaefer" <·····@uncommon-sense.net> wrote in message
> > ···················@qiwi.uncommon-sense.net...
> > > Kaz Kylheku writes:
> > >
> > > | Coby Beck wrote:
> > > |
> > > | > Shouldn't that be "to split freely" : )
> > > | > (i assume you did that on purpose but have seen no one pick it up)
> > > |
> > > | No, he most likely did that unconsciously, based on his
understanding
> > > | understanding of his native language. Note that had he written
> > > |
> > > | to split freely infinitives in `good English'
> > > |
> > > | that would be borderline grammatical at best. You *must* split the
> > > | infinitive to make this sentence be understood by native speakers.
> > >
> > > I am not a native English speaker, but wouldn't the opponents of split
> > > infinitives say that the sentence should be:
> > >
> > > Why are you not allowed to split infinitives freely in `good
English'?
> > >
> >
> > much better!
>
> Bleah! If I wanted to speak French or Spanish, I'd speak in French or
> Spanish -- when I'm speaking English, I want to speak English. Split
> infinitives aren't an issue in North America, besides for a few high
> school grammar teachers -- all our dictionaries, the MLA, and the New
> York Times all agree that it's fine to split them whenever we want.
the "much better" was a comment on the two non-split versions, not to
mention that the entire exchange started tongue in cheek...hardly a good
excuse for being so emphatic.
Your response is a good illustration of how following all the rules, formal
or informal is still not enough to ensure effective communication. We still
need a genuine desire to understand!
Coby
--
(remove #\space "coby . beck @ opentechgroup . com")
> As was previously pointed out, this is probably a case where we're
> using a compound verb (freely-split). "to split infinitives freely"
> sounds to me like
>
> (defun munge-list (lst)
> (labels ((helper (l a)
> (if (null l)
> a
> (helper (cdr l) (cons (munge (car a)) a)))))
> (reverse (helper lst ()))))
>
> looks. There's nothing wrong with expressing the idea that way.
> There is something wrong with doing so in Common Lisp, though,
> particularly if one is a CL'er who is just trying to import Scheme's
> hatred of iteration. That's fine for them in their language, and it's
> going to be an accent that comes through when they speak CL, which is
> also just fine. However, claiming that the above should be preferred
> over
>
> (defun munge-list (list)
> (loop for elt in list
> collecting (munge elt)))
>
> is not okay. It's perverting a perfectly good language, not to
> optimize for communication, but to make it a cheap imitation of a
> perfectly good language that already exists.
>
"Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
> "Thomas F. Burdick" <···@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU> wrote in message
> ····················@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU...
> > "Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
> >
> > > "Boris Schaefer" <·····@uncommon-sense.net> wrote in message
> > > ···················@qiwi.uncommon-sense.net...
> > > > Kaz Kylheku writes:
> > > >
> > > > | Coby Beck wrote:
> > > > |
> > > > | > Shouldn't that be "to split freely" : )
> > > > | > (i assume you did that on purpose but have seen no one pick it up)
> > > > |
> > > > | No, he most likely did that unconsciously, based on his
> understanding
> > > > | understanding of his native language. Note that had he written
> > > > |
> > > > | to split freely infinitives in `good English'
> > > > |
> > > > | that would be borderline grammatical at best. You *must* split the
> > > > | infinitive to make this sentence be understood by native speakers.
> > > >
> > > > I am not a native English speaker, but wouldn't the opponents of split
> > > > infinitives say that the sentence should be:
> > > >
> > > > Why are you not allowed to split infinitives freely in `good
> English'?
> > > >
> > >
> > > much better!
> >
> > Bleah! If I wanted to speak French or Spanish, I'd speak in French or
> > Spanish -- when I'm speaking English, I want to speak English. Split
> > infinitives aren't an issue in North America, besides for a few high
> > school grammar teachers -- all our dictionaries, the MLA, and the New
> > York Times all agree that it's fine to split them whenever we want.
>
> the "much better" was a comment on the two non-split versions, not to
> mention that the entire exchange started tongue in cheek...hardly a good
> excuse for being so emphatic.
Hmm, I was so emphatic as a sort of nicety to any non-native speakers
who might have interpreted that "much better" as meaning that the
sentence it referred to sounded okay. I've appreciated all of the
outrage I've inspired in native speakers of French and Spanish
(especially French) by my awkward phrasing :).
···@famine.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> Hmm, I was so emphatic as a sort of nicety to any non-native speakers
> who might have interpreted that "much better" as meaning that the
> sentence it referred to sounded okay.
You mean this one?
"Why are you not allowed to split infinitives freely in ... English"
It DOES sound okay, and it IS. It avoids splitting an infinitive, but
it does so in a very natural way. I'm wondering how it could possibly
help a non-native English speaker to suggest that this isn't clear,
simple, correct usage...
(Or were you referring to the earlier version: "freely to split",
which IS bad) ?
···@ashi.footprints.net (Kaz Kylheku) writes:
> In article <·······················@typhoon.tampabay.rr.com>,
> Coby Beck wrote:
> > Shouldn't that be "to split freely" : )
> (i assume you did that on purpose but have seen
> no one pick it up)
> No, he most likely did that unconsciously, based on his
> understanding understanding of his native language. Note that had he
> written
>
> to split freely infinitives in `good English'
>
> that would be borderline grammatical at best. You *must* split the
> infinitive to make this sentence be understood by native speakers.
"... to split infinitives freely ...." works just as well 4 me.
"Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
> Shouldn't that be "to split freely" : )
> (i assume you did that on purpose but have seen no one pick it up)
>
yes. Trying to copy Fowler who has a wonderful trick of using the
construct he's discussing in the discussion.
In article <···············@world.std.com>, Kent M Pitman wrote:
>Tim Bradshaw <···@tfeb.org> writes:
>
>> Prescriptive grammar can be quite influential though. The infamous
>> split infinitive in English is a good example. Why are you not
>> allowed to freely split infinitives in `good English'?
>> Because you can't do it in Latin.
>
>I never bought into this concern. I figured "to boldly go" was a compound
>verb and "to go boldly" was a simple verb, modified. Neither was split.
>One was just constructed, a la German, and happened to have spaces in it. ;-)
A possible characterization, loosely using the notation of X-bar theory
is this:
VP
|
_
V
_
to V
V ADVP
| |
go boldly
The V and ADVP constituents of the bottom-most V' node can be exchanged
to generate ``boldly go'', reflecting the observation that a verb can take
adverbs on either side. According to this it's a compound verb either way;
there is no categorical difference.
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> I never bought into this concern. I figured "to boldly go" was a compound
> verb and "to go boldly" was a simple verb, modified. Neither was split.
> One was just constructed, a la German, and happened to have spaces in it. ;-)
Ah, but English doesn't compound, because English is like Latin not
this horrid German rubbish, you see.
--tim
(yes, of course English compounds, we just don't admit it. One of the
nicest things about German as a language is that it admits it is a
germanic language...)
Tim Bradshaw <···@tfeb.org> writes:
> Thom Goodsell <···@cra.com> writes:
>
> > Yes, well, you're confusing the _attempt_ to control language with the
> > fact of controlling language. "Educated" speakers of most language
> > have tried (and still do) to prescribe correct usage, and they never
> > succeed. IIRC, the French still have their prescriptive language body,
> > but the language still evolves "in the gutter," as one of my
> > Linguistics profs used to say.
>
> Prescriptive grammar can be quite influential though. The infamous
> split infinitive in English is a good example. Why are you not
> allowed to freely split infinitives in `good English'? Because you
> can't do it in Latin. English doesn't have much in common with Latin,
> of course, but a lot of people who prescribed English grammar regarded
> all languages as cheap versions of Latin (and English grammar was
> still taught this way 30 years ago, at least in the schools I went
> to), hence a lot of random rules like this which are now passed down
> through the generations.
>
Now that I'm halfway done with Latin I, I conclude that English
combines the worst aspects of German with the worst aspects of Latin.
Latin has a very clean syntax^H^H^H^H^H^H grammar, and although I
don't know much German yet it looks as if it is better than English.
English is just a mess. I'm going to begin speaking only in Elvish :).
> --tim
--
BPT <···@hobbiton.org> /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign
backronym for Linux: \ / No HTML or RTF in mail
Linux Is Not Unix X No MS-Word in mail
Meme plague ;) ---------> / \ Respect Open Standards
On Tue, 21 Aug 2001 10:50:48 GMT, BPT <···@hobbiton.org> wrote:
>> of course, but a lot of people who prescribed English grammar regarded
>> all languages as cheap versions of Latin (and English grammar was
>> still taught this way 30 years ago, at least in the schools I went
>> to), hence a lot of random rules like this which are now passed down
>> through the generations.
>>
>Now that I'm halfway done with Latin I, I conclude that English
>combines the worst aspects of German with the worst aspects of Latin.
>Latin has a very clean syntax^H^H^H^H^H^H grammar, and although I
>don't know much German yet it looks as if it is better than English.
>English is just a mess. I'm going to begin speaking only in Elvish :).
But German grammar is derived from Latin. (The usual story, about
which there is I admit some doubt, is that when Martin Luther
translated the bible into German he followed the Latin model to
standardise the various dialects.) English is far more muddled being
a mixture of French (ie latinate), German, Scandinavian not to mention
various later imports. By the time the nineteenth-century classicists
attempted to create 'standard English it was too late.
--
David Clark
<http://www.orditur-telas.com/>
From: Hartmann Schaffer
Subject: Re: Control of Human Language [was: Apprenticeship]
Date:
Message-ID: <3b82c11c@news.sentex.net>
In article <················@news.blueyonder.co.uk>,
·····@lostcause.co.uk (DJC) writes:
> ...
> But German grammar is derived from Latin. (The usual story, about
no.
> which there is I admit some doubt, is that when Martin Luther
> translated the bible into German he followed the Latin model to
> standardise the various dialects.) English is far more muddled being
> a mixture of French (ie latinate), German, Scandinavian not to mention
> various later imports. By the time the nineteenth-century classicists
> attempted to create 'standard English it was too late.
--
Lbh unir whfg ivbyngrq gur Qvtvgny Zvyraavhz Pbclevtug Npg ol oernxvat
gur cebgrpgvba bs pbclevtugrq zngrevny. Vs lbh ner abg n pvgvmra be
erfvqrag bs gur HFN, lbh evfx orvat vzcevfbarq naq uryq jvgubhg onvy
sbe hc gb gjb jrrxf hcba ragel gb gur HFN
(c) Copyright 2001 by Hartmann Schaffer (signature only)
BPT <···@hobbiton.org> writes:
> Now that I'm halfway done with Latin I, I conclude that English
> combines the worst aspects of German with the worst aspects of Latin.
> Latin has a very clean syntax^H^H^H^H^H^H grammar, and although I
> don't know much German yet it looks as if it is better than English.
> English is just a mess. I'm going to begin speaking only in Elvish :).
>
(loop for l in *natural-languages*
do (translating-output (*standard-output* l :fallback ':english)
(format *standard-output* "~&~A is kind of a hacky get-things-done-in-the-real-world language.
Rather like CL really; and like CL there are some people who just
can't stand this and either want to purify the language or go off and
invent other smaller and purer languages.~%~%"
(string-capitalize (language-name l)))))
--tim
From: Janis Dzerins
Subject: Re: Control of Human Language [was: Apprenticeship]
Date:
Message-ID: <87n14ss75t.fsf@asaka.latnet.lv>
Tim Bradshaw <···@tfeb.org> writes:
> (loop for l in *natural-languages*
> do (translating-output (*standard-output* l :fallback ':english)
Why do you quote the keyword?
--
Janis Dzerins
If million people say a stupid thing it's still a stupid thing.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Control of Human Language [was: Apprenticeship]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwwv3tamir.fsf@world.std.com>
Janis Dzerins <·····@latnet.lv> writes:
>
> Tim Bradshaw <···@tfeb.org> writes:
>
> > (loop for l in *natural-languages*
> > do (translating-output (*standard-output* l :fallback ':english)
>
> Why do you quote the keyword?
The original reason that keywords self-evaluate is because there was
a discrepancy between keywords in macros (which don't evaluate their args)
and functions (which do). By blurring the number of times they
evaluate, the guide words (similar to prepositions in English) look
the same in both cases.
There are those who believe that the rightful self-evaluating use
stylistically is when using the item as a guide word, and that in other
cases (e.g., when just using them as a canonically packaged symbol) one
should put a ' before them to mark them as "mere data" and not "something
syntactically special".
I often do a smilar thing in quoting t as in:
(defmacro foo (form &optional (test 't))
...)
where the test is contributing "the symbol T", not "the boolean T for true".
After all, if it was X instead it would have to be quoted and for
the same reason--it wasn't going to be used for its value at this time.
I might even quote a number in such a context if it wasn't going to be
used for numeric value but rather for pass-through to someone
else who was going to use it for numeric value...
From: xauau
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <87ae1dizf1.fsf@xeno.localhost>
···@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
>
> > (I say this while at the same time lamenting that correct usage
> > probably obfuscates the point in the face of a population who
> > probably, like me, is equally uninformed. I have a similar problem
> > with the term "schizo(phrenic)", which is used by so many people
> > informally to mean "multiple personality" that I think the scientific
> > community ought to, like Kleenex and Xerox, give up the hopeless quest
> > of correcting people's determined misuse of certain now-common names
> > and instead make a new and different term to be newly precise.)
>
> No way, uh-uh. As a science student, I'd be horrified if biologists
> decided to give up on the terms "Darwinism", "Natural Selection", and,
> most poignantly, "Survival of the Fittest", just because of the
> sloppy, and often 180-degree wrong use of these terms in the vulgar
> language.
Wandering a bit off-topic for c.l.l., but ...
You imply that science is truly objective in its use of language.
That's not necessarily so. Especially in the realm of psychiatry, the
distinctions between medicine and socio-political issues are blurred.
Diagnostic labels (often, but not always, unintentionally) carry
strong socio-political overtones.
That these terms should change when they no longer match the
socio-political climate of the day is quite understandable. Eg,
homosexuals, once thought to be morally degenerate, mentally ill and
socially unfit today enjoy the same legal rights and social /
professional respect as other citizens. In past times, it was common
to find homosexuality described in crypto-medical jargon that was
leavily laden with value judgement masquerading as science. IMHO,
these recent changes have been changes for the better.
Changes are not always for the better, of course. IMO, the changing
terminology often does more harm than good to the 'afflicted'.
Eg. a few decades ago, a person who was coldly aloof, unfriendly,
solitary-by-choice, prone to interests in matters that are 'remote' to
others (mathematics? science? philosophy?), was not necessarily
assumed to be "ill". Today he's likely to be given the much more
impressive pseudo-medical label "Schizoid Personality Disorder", which
pretty much implies he's somehow 'defective'. Whether he is or not ;-)
IMHO, we're seeing this more and more, and it is NOT a good thing:
statistically unusual behaviour or personality traits are subsumed by
'diseases' or 'disorders', which may or may not have some biological
basis. Right now, no concrete evidence of biological anomaly is even
necessary to formally define an individual as being diseased or
defective. The political implications of this fact are too seldom
discussed, especially in the medical fraternity.
It's almost a cliche now, but it's worth repeating. Many of the most
influential people in history would not have survived a DSM-IV
classification unscathed. Our culture would be sadly impoverished if
their 'disorders' had been medicalised and 'treated'.
In a nutshell, my point is this: There is a lot of political power in
scientific language. It's very dangerous to forget it.
"xauau" <·····@yahoo.com.au> wrote in message
···················@xeno.localhost...
>
> That these terms should change when they no longer match the
> socio-political climate of the day is quite understandable. Eg,
> homosexuals, once thought to be morally degenerate, mentally ill and
> socially unfit today enjoy the same legal rights and social /
> professional respect as other citizens. In past times, it was common
> to find homosexuality described in crypto-medical jargon that was
> leavily laden with value judgement masquerading as science. IMHO,
> these recent changes have been changes for the better.
I agree with the point you are making. But I can't let this go by
unquestioned:
> homosexuals, once thought to be morally degenerate, mentally ill and
> socially unfit today enjoy the same legal rights and social /
> professional respect as other citizens.
What country do you live in? I am unaware of any country/society/culture
where this is true. Yes we are definitely at a better place (I'm now
referring to the usual "default" context of North America) than in the past
and believing homosexuality is not an illness or a crime is very common.
But it is simply a dangerous embellishment to say gay people enjoy the same
legal rights or they enjoy the same social respect. We are closer, but by
no means are we there!
Coby
--
(remove #\space "coby . beck @ opentechgroup . com")
From: Marcin Tustin
Subject: Re: [off topic]Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <9kpdlk$glh$4@news6.svr.pol.co.uk>
Coby Beck <·····@mercury.bc.ca> wrote in message
·························@typhoon.tampabay.rr.com...
> > homosexuals, once thought to be morally degenerate, mentally ill and
> > socially unfit today enjoy the same legal rights and social /
> > professional respect as other citizens.
>
> What country do you live in? I am unaware of any country/society/culture
> where this is true. Yes we are definitely at a better place (I'm now
> referring to the usual "default" context of North America) than in the
past
> and believing homosexuality is not an illness or a crime is very common.
> But it is simply a dangerous embellishment to say gay people enjoy the
same
> legal rights or they enjoy the same social respect. We are closer, but by
> no means are we there!
Observing media-reported precedents, it seems that in the UK it is
unlawful to discriminate against someone for being homo- or hetero- sexual
(without good reason, eg a job involving talking about being homosexual),
but partners do not enjoy the same rights (Eg opposite sex partners are
often accepted as spouses, but same-sex partners not. Note that non-spouse
opposite sex partners have the same legal rights as same-sex partners: None
(This based on listening to a lawyer on R4 last week). However samesex
partnerships cannot attain the legal rights mixed sex partnerships can).
Marcin Tustin schrieb
>
> Coby Beck <·····@mercury.bc.ca> wrote in message
> ·························@typhoon.tampabay.rr.com...
>
>> > homosexuals, once thought to be morally degenerate, mentally ill and
>> > socially unfit today enjoy the same legal rights and social /
>> > professional respect as other citizens.
>>
>> What country do you live in? I am unaware of any country/society/culture
>> where this is true. Yes we are definitely at a better place (I'm now
>> referring to the usual "default" context of North America) than in the
> past
>> and believing homosexuality is not an illness or a crime is very common.
>> But it is simply a dangerous embellishment to say gay people enjoy the
> same
>> legal rights or they enjoy the same social respect. We are closer, but by
>> no means are we there!
>
> Observing media-reported precedents, it seems that in the UK it is
> unlawful to discriminate against someone for being homo- or hetero- sexual
> (without good reason, eg a job involving talking about being homosexual),
I would suggest the Netherlands or Denmark, but this is getting off
topic a bit to much.
Ciao
Felix
From: xauau
Subject: Re: [off topic]Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <87zo9b88lj.fsf@xeno.localhost>
"Coby Beck" <·····@mercury.bc.ca> writes:
> I agree with the point you are making. But I can't let this go by
> unquestioned:
>
> > homosexuals, once thought to be morally degenerate, mentally ill and
> > socially unfit today enjoy the same legal rights and social /
> > professional respect as other citizens.
>
> What country do you live in? I am unaware of any country/society/culture
> where this is true.
I went too far by including "same legal rights".
I live in Australia. AFAIK there are still at least four inequalities
w.r.t homosexuality and the law.
- Same sex marriages. Dunno whether they're accorded the same legal
status as male-female marriages. I doubt it. I think most
Australians would be open to the idea, but there are at least two
ultra-conservative Christian politicians here who would raise hell
to prevent it.
- Legal status of defacto partner w.r.t the Wills, Probate and
Administration Act. IOW, if a married/divorced/separated man dies
without leaving a will, his current female partner will inherit his
estate provided they've been together for 2+ years. A male partner
doesn't have the same rights, even if he and the deceased have been
effectively monogamous for half a century.
- Adoption laws(?). Not sure whether there has been a test case, but
I don't think so. I'm assuming that same-sex unions don't have the
same legal status as conventional marriages w.r.t. adoption. I could
be wrong.
- Age of consent. For hetero couples it's sixteen. For gay couples
it's eighteen. I vaguely remember some discussion about changing the
law. Most people involved in the debate favoured either reducing the
age of consent for gay couples, OR raising the age of consent for
'straight' couples. Either way, equality would result. Not sure if
this eventually was pushed through into law. If not, the debate is
sure to go on.
So you're right, Coby. The legal rights I had in mind were the rights
that Oscar Wilde and many others did NOT have. I hadn't thought of
"same legal rights" as a "dangerous embellishment", but I see that it
actually is.
From: Craig Brozefsky
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <87wv4hyhqk.fsf@piracy.red-bean.com>
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> > My issues with your terminology aside, this issue is of central
> > importance for the lisp community and find your characterization
> > of it very useful. Licenses, committees and the like are tools the
> > community can use to deal with the socialization of it's
> > development process such that it can compete with Java and it's
> > ilk.
>
> "its ilk" (sorry, couldn't resist the humor in pursuing a hopeless
> quest to correct determined misuse of a now-common spelling :-)
That rule always gets me when my vigilance falters. There is a
difference tho. "its vs. it's" does not have the rhetorical baggage of
words like Socialist, Totalitarian and the like.
> If you wanted to expand a little more on the last sentence (using
> the spelling of your choice), I'd be interested for an elaboration
> of what you were getting at. I personally see committees (by which
> I hear standards committees, for obvious reasons of my background,
> though maybe you mean some other kind) as synchronization tools and
> suitable only for elective groups, not for the society as a whole.
I was thinking of something more akin to working committees, which
helped to communicate and document common practice in the field. They
can have a synchronizing aspect as well, and since I would consider
the Lisp community an elective group, that aspect is useful for our
purposes. The synchronization can be carried out with varying levels
of formality and beaurocracy. An informal example would be the
obligatory mailing list for nearly any software tool, or socially
recognized problem domain.
> Licenses I see not as tools of policy but tools of implementation.
I don't know the difference between policy and implementation that you
are talking about here.
> So to me committees and licenses are of different ilk and are
> uncomfortable bonded by "and" without exposition as to what they are
> doing hand in hand. Hence my request for elaboration.
The fruits of working commitees (perhaps working groups is a more
common term) and liberally licensed implementations of their policies
are all around us, and are a large part of what facilitates this
conversation. These tools go hand in hand. The IETF, the SRFIs for
the scheme community tie policy and implementation together.
"We reject kings, presidents and voting. We believe in rough
consensus and running code." David Clark (MIT).
Would be worth it to check out:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/people/reagle/regulation-19990326.html
--
Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com>
http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
The outer space which me wears it has sexual intercourse. - opus
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwelqplshv.fsf@world.std.com>
Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com> writes:
> I was thinking of something more akin to working committees, which
> helped to communicate and document common practice in the field. They
> can have a synchronizing aspect as well, and since I would consider
> the Lisp community an elective group, that aspect is useful for our
> purposes. The synchronization can be carried out with varying levels
> of formality and beaurocracy. An informal example would be the
> obligatory mailing list for nearly any software tool, or socially
> recognized problem domain.
>
> > Licenses I see not as tools of policy but tools of implementation.
>
> I don't know the difference between policy and implementation that you
> are talking about here.
You could argue that the X3J13 committee held back Lisp development
for many years due to everyone waiting for the resulting resynch. You
could even argue it holds things back now since many people seem to be
waiting for a reprise of the same style of evolution, rather than
evolution in some new form. But you don't mean a community-wide thing
like that, which is why you're probably confused as to my meaning and
why I asked you to clarify. Thanks.
From: Craig Brozefsky
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <87ofptxlqa.fsf@piracy.red-bean.com>
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> > > Licenses I see not as tools of policy but tools of implementation.
> >
> > I don't know the difference between policy and implementation that you
> > are talking about here.
>
> You could argue that the X3J13 committee held back Lisp development
> for many years due to everyone waiting for the resulting resynch. You
> could even argue it holds things back now since many people seem to be
> waiting for a reprise of the same style of evolution, rather than
> evolution in some new form.
What is the relevance of this with regards to Licenses and their being
tools of implementation or policy?
I think Licenses are tools of both, similiar to code which is both
policy and implementation at the same time. I'm taking policy as
being those things which control the distribution, use, and
combination of the work with other works. I also understand
implementation as the process of creating the work (including
providing/funding its labor), the development cycle, and technical
distribution issues (packaging).
I do see it as an example of the pitfalls of putting the wrong
emphasis on the "standards committee" and the standard. I don't think
we should be reactionary and go the route of Java tho, which is to
have standards whipped up in committees way before practice has
dictated a necessity for them, so that the large companies which can
afford to send people to these committees can forclose upon the
development of practices in that problem domain which are not under
their control. SOAP is another example of what not to do.
> But you don't mean a community-wide thing like that, which is why
> you're probably confused as to my meaning and why I asked you to
> clarify. Thanks.
I can't see what led you to believe I don't think community-wide
participation is neccesarry in general problem domains (language
level, as opposed to tool level). What do you find missing?
--
Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com>
http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
The outer space which me wears it has sexual intercourse. - opus
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwk80hnnh7.fsf@world.std.com>
Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com> writes:
> I do see it as an example of the pitfalls of putting the wrong
> emphasis on the "standards committee" and the standard. I don't think
> we should be reactionary and go the route of Java tho, which is to
> have standards whipped up in committees way before practice has
> dictated a necessity for them, so that the large companies which can
> afford to send people to these committees can forclose upon the
> development of practices in that problem domain which are not under
> their control. SOAP is another example of what not to do.
I see you missed my point about Java. Linguistically, Java made it
impossible, I think, for those litle standards committees they have
to have much effect if the community doesn't like it. The community
can make something just as good itself if it wants to compete. If
no one is competing, I allege, it is because they mostly like what
they are getting. Because the linguistic overhead of using competition
is negligible.
From: Craig Brozefsky
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <87zo9br1c9.fsf@piracy.red-bean.com>
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com> writes:
>
> > I do see it as an example of the pitfalls of putting the wrong
> > emphasis on the "standards committee" and the standard. I don't think
> > we should be reactionary and go the route of Java tho, which is to
> > have standards whipped up in committees way before practice has
> > dictated a necessity for them, so that the large companies which can
> > afford to send people to these committees can forclose upon the
> > development of practices in that problem domain which are not under
> > their control. SOAP is another example of what not to do.
>
> I see you missed my point about Java.
No. I understand the point you made about Java. However, because a
particular language is linguistically resistent (tho in now way immune
as it's short history has shown) to the negative effects of these
misguided standards groups, does not mean that we should not identify
what drives those committees and avoid those mistakes.
A linguistic resistence is not a social resistance. Linguistic
democratization only goes so far, and the package naming system of
Java is hardly sufficient to resolve all of the relevant linguistic
issues of conflicting solutions. Within the community there is
competition for resources, and certain groups are given positions of
greater authority than others.
> Linguistically, Java made it impossible, I think, for those litle
> standards committees they have to have much effect if the community
> doesn't like it.
It's hardly impossible. And it's not the "little" standards
committees I'm talking about anyways, it's the Sun-aligned working
groups dominated by reps from the likes of IBM, MS, and Oracle. They
do things like determine what is shipped with the standard
distribution, what "RPC" protocol will be supported in the base
distribution, and what features and/or language changes get made.
> The community can make something just as good itself if it wants to
> compete. If no one is competing, I allege, it is because they
> mostly like what they are getting. Because the linguistic overhead
> of using competition is negligible.
There is a non-negligible social overhead involved in finding
community resources sufficient to support the alternative standard or
solution. These industrial committees driven by a need to establish
"solutions" under their control in their largely fabricated problem
domain have been recognized as having an authority both within the
user community, as well as in the investment community. This has very
real effects on solutions driven by other groups within the community.
WebObjects would be an example. It's solution to the issues of object
persistence are in many ways vastly superior to the EJB spec, but it
cannot gather any social support within the Java community because it
does not conform to the EJB standards.
--
Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com>
http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
The outer space which me wears it has sexual intercourse. - opus
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwvgjza24o.fsf@world.std.com>
Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com> writes:
> A linguistic resistence is not a social resistance.
FWIW, I once tried to implement a stripped down Emacs at MIT and called
it MinEmacs. Stallman flipped out and said you could remove anything from
Emacs but its redefinability and still call it Emacs, that this ability
to outgrow its original definition was the core element, not the syntax.
The linguistic and social aspects are certainly coupled to some degree.
> > Linguistically, Java made it impossible, I think, for those litle
> > standards committees they have to have much effect if the community
> > doesn't like it.
>
> It's hardly impossible. And it's not the "little" standards
> committees I'm talking about anyways, it's the Sun-aligned working
> groups dominated by reps from the likes of IBM, MS, and Oracle. They
> do things like determine what is shipped with the standard
> distribution, what "RPC" protocol will be supported in the base
> distribution, and what features and/or language changes get made.
But what makes it hard to go against those is that they ARE a big piece of
the community. Were they not, the fact of their size would matter little.
If you said it was Toyota, Boeing, and CBS (randomly chosen large companies)
instead, they would not cause any resistence to your doing otherwise.
The resistence is caused not by the bigness of the company but by the
size of the installed base. You can't both say there's a large base and
at the same time say the community doesn't like what they do.
> > The community can make something just as good itself if it wants to
> > compete. If no one is competing, I allege, it is because they
> > mostly like what they are getting. Because the linguistic overhead
> > of using competition is negligible.
>
> There is a non-negligible social overhead involved in finding
> community resources sufficient to support the alternative standard or
> solution.
I agree this is an issue, but I think it's mostly stigma about certain
ways of doing things and is not a technical barrier. In the past, it
was a technical barrier because it was impractical to link in two
equivalent but competing systems in the same product, space being of
such a premium. These days, it wouldn't be such a big deal to have
redundant components and so the need to be the-one-and-only-standard is
lessened. Plug compatibility still matters, but as systems get faster,
that too can be massaged by having compatibility layers between at
least some would-be incompatible systems. That doesn't mean it's all
solved, but I do think the trend is in the right direction.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwitg1nnbc.fsf@world.std.com>
Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com> writes:
> > But you don't mean a community-wide thing like that, which is why
> > you're probably confused as to my meaning and why I asked you to
> > clarify. Thanks.
>
> I can't see what led you to believe I don't think community-wide
> participation is neccesarry in general problem domains (language
> level, as opposed to tool level). What do you find missing?
By community-wide participation, I mean "each and every member of the
community must participate". I can't believe that's what you are saying.
I don't mean "each and every member of the community has the option of
participating", which is still what I think you must think I think you're
saying. Look, the point is that requring ALL in the community to participate
is requiring all in the community to be held back. That's the old way that
we worked under J13. In the new way, as with Java, people can move ahead
on their own if they want. You don't see that as a fundamental shift? Or
you don't agree that that's so?
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com> writes:
>
> (I say this while at the same time lamenting that correct usage
> probably obfuscates the point in the face of a population who
> probably, like me, is equally uninformed. I have a similar problem
> with the term "schizo(phrenic)", which is used by so many people
> informally to mean "multiple personality" that I think the scientific
> community ought to, like Kleenex and Xerox, give up the hopeless quest
> of correcting people's determined misuse of certain now-common names
> and instead make a new and different term to be newly precise.)
>
My `computer scientology' teacher incorrectly defined variable,
constant, and several other terms. (Possibly not coincidentally, the
particular CS class I am in uses Visual Ba$ick.) Should Real
Programmers and hackers give up the `hopeless' quest to correct
people's determined misuse of certain now-common names? (BTW, the CS
teacher misdefining terms is a rather extreme example, but I still
find that misuses are common.)
--
BPT <···@hobbiton.org> /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign
backronym for Linux: \ / No HTML or RTF in mail
Linux Is Not Unix X No MS-Word in mail
Meme plague ;) ---------> / \ Respect Open Standards
From: Peter Wood
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <80ae1ejnk2.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
>
> > Assuming that when Lisp was 'born' society was generally more
> > conservative[1],
>
> I'd be extremely curious to know, in spite of your footnote, what
> characterizes such conservatism. I understand conservatism in the US
> political system to mean "adhering to a strict reading of the constitution",
> but in the absence of a constitution-analog to read strictly, I'm less sure
> what it might mean. I don't mean to suggest that you mean nothing, only
> that I'm baffled by what you might mean.
I can use 'conservative' to refer (for example) to groupings in the
US, the old Soviet Union, Revolutionary Iran, or modern Israel. The
members of these groups entertain radically different (and mutually
incompatible) political ideologies. They also share certain features
which justify the label.
'Conservative' can refer to a mindset. If I confronted a conservative
from one of these groupings with accusations of police brutality by
the system they support, a typical reaction will be to focus on the
*victim's* misdeeds, which unleashed the brutality. The victim was a
junkie, an enemy of the state/reactionary, infidel or terrorist.
Chauvinists (another type of conservative) typically focus on rape
victim's behaviour, clothing, etc. *Note: I'm not saying these
chauvinists are rapists. They don't have to be. Criminals do it for
them*
The feature these groups share, consciously or not, is the attitude
"I'm on top, and I'm staying there." With the possible exception of
Israel, which has the excuse of a recent historical trauma associated
with 'not being on top', and which may have good reason to fear
relinquishing control, the conservative mindset is ethically wrong.
Conservatives generally do not recognise situations as being ethical
choices, but as being 'it was me or him'[1]. And Kent, an ethical choice
is just that - a *choice* - You choose, and accept the consequences,
otherwise its not ethics, but pragmatism. There's no certainty that
you make the right decision.
When Lisp was 'young', people: were generally more trusting of
authority; had a more naive belief in the ability of science to yield
progress; had a blinder faith in progress; and accepted the status quo
to a greater extent than in the late sixties/early seventies. I
speculate that such attitudes filtering down through the years are
reflected in the *relative* lack of support, amongst Common Lispers,
for Free software, which is perceived as undermining authority,
quality, and motivation to work, and the economic structure which
supports programmers. In fact, hang 'em high!! its
... terrorism!!!![2]
Regards,
Peter
[1] A true 'me or him' situation is not an ethical dilemma. However,
such a situation only arises when your life is threatened, not
your priviledges.
[2] The jailing of Skylarov by Adobe and the US is proof that the
police-brutality metaphor is not too far fetched. That behaviour
is fucking evil.
Peter Wood <··········@worldonline.dk> writes:
> When Lisp was 'young', people: were generally more trusting of
> authority; had a more naive belief in the ability of science to yield
> progress; had a blinder faith in progress; and accepted the status quo
> to a greater extent than in the late sixties/early seventies.
Although you couch this belief in scientific and technological
progress in quite negative phraseology (an unfortunate hallmark of the
middle classes in our era), I was about to make a similar point in
response to your earlier post. The lisp community is *definitely*
technophilic, at least in its problem domain. And that feature
appeals to adherents to all Marx-derived (or partially Marx-derived)
strains of Socialism. All strains of Marxist (or "Scientific")
Socialism are based on the idea that capitalism will develop (or
already has) technology allowing production to increase the point that
scarcity can be eliminated, and all of class society along with it.
And that's a fundementally technophilic politics, because it's
advanced technology that makes this historical epoch unique in being
the first time in history that transition to a classless society would
be possible.
Which is hardly to suggest that *in fact* the Lisp community is full
of Reds. But in the course of telling others around me how wonderful
Lisp is, the only converts I've made were Socialists of some sort or
other.
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfw1ymqfcst.fsf@world.std.com>
Peter Wood <··········@worldonline.dk> writes:
> When Lisp was 'young', people: were generally more trusting of
> authority;
Actually, when Lisp was young, software was free. Most of us barely thought
to copyright the code we wrote. A few companies did. But college students
never did. We shared code freely and it was shared back with us. And we
rejoiced in a euphoria that came from that free sharing, the equitable
meritocracy it made us feel like we had built, and the wonders of all we
had built and would build. Then one day, the euphoria disappeared and we
found that no one wanted to fund us any more. We had never planned for that
day and found ourselves economically disempowered to regain our stride. Many
of us had to work for others and looked back on all the value we had built in
the past and said "doesn't that count for anything?" But it didn't. None
of it counted for anything except for the people smart enough to have arranged
to make money off of it. The rest of us just had warm fuzzies to live on
until, very slowly, we have eeked our way back onto our feet.
The original Maclisp manual, not a piece of software but a book, I
wrote for the community. I later could have used the money that came
of it but at the time no one at MIT stopped to tell me how much they
made on it, nor did they feel any shame saying "just write 'Copyright
MIT' here." when they "helpfully" published it for me (as if another
publishing company would not). It made two full press runs and I
didn't see a dime. A couple years back, I went begging to MIT just
for historical value to reclaim the copyright and recovered the right
to republish it myself free as long as I still credit MIT for owning
the copyright. You could say this was the evil of copyright working
against me, but it wasn't--it was my stupidity in not realizing *I*
could have claimed copyright and *I* could have mde money. I wrote
that document laregly on my own time, no one paid me for it. It was
rightly mine. But I was taught that sharing was good and money was
bad. (As an amusing aside, I have to thank Rod Brooks for having the
kindness to write a nice letter to MIT saying, in so many words, that
everything I'd ever done was now commercially worthless, in order to ease
my re-obtaining the legal rights to my old papers and that manual. :-)
And then I worked for years at MIT instead of going out into business like
all my friends. Many are millionaires now, and most are at least much more
well off financially than me. I personally felt bad for MIT that everyone
had left and I stayed "to help out" for several critical years. Did it make
a difference to MIT that I was there? I doubt it? Would it have made a
difference to me to have the commercial money I could have made during the
AI boom of the early 80's? You bet.
And now we are told by a new generation of people that (a) we are stingy and
have never understood the value of sharing and (b) if only we would relinquish
our obviously wrong-headed quest for power, we would experience true success.
All in all, I'd rather have a bologna sandwich. I can eat that.
I rather prefer Erik Naggum's summary, which suggests (paraphrasing) that
headstrong youth (often still funded by parents), people funded by socialist
governments, and people who are willing to take vows of poverty can get by
on free software, but the rest of us need to eat, to plan for rainy days and
retirement, to plan for personal autonomy and the commercially funded vision
that comes with treating software as if it had value.
> had a more naive belief in the ability of science to yield
> progress;
Yes, we had this. This is what led us to go with free software originally.
> had a blinder faith in progress;
Yes, this is what allowed us to let someone else control the money originally.
> and accepted the status quo
Yes, but that status quo was free software
> to a greater extent than in the late sixties/early seventies.
Oh, I'm talking late 70's onward. I can't speak to before that other than
to say that when I arrived at MIT in 1977, the culture I'm talking about was
well-entrenched by people older than I.
> I speculate that such attitudes filtering down through the years are
> reflected in the *relative* lack of support, amongst Common Lispers,
> for Free software,
No, this doesn't ring true.
I don't think the path has been monotonic.
I think there have been lessons learned and potentially lost.
I do think there's some resistance to change, but not all of it is
due to the mere fact of change. Some of it is an understanding of
the value of what we had before. Some of it is a recognition that
change often moves cyclically, and the longer you've been around the
more cycles you recognized. I'll give some examples.
I think the original Lisp predicate was COND [more of a case-like thing,
really]. But eventually it was encapsulated as IF, and some people I know
thought IF so cool (for lack of extra parens) that they converted all
their code. Others "stubbornly" stuck with COND. Of the IF fanatics,
some eventually found the rightward indentation problem of heavily nested
IF a pain and "re"discovered COND.
Originally, too, there were single user computers. Then someone invented
time-sharing to better use excess compute power. Then people invented the
notion of single-user machines. This "new" invention must have been a laugh
to pre-timesharing mainframe users of yore. Even so, these single user
machines eventually became so powerful that they've spawned "multi-user"
workstation configurations.
I've also seen cycles in client-side euphoria (look at all the extra
compute power in people's living rooms, let's use it) or server-side
(get that stupid computer out of your living room, why not take advantage
of the power in our central office). Voice mail went that way, too, with
everyone having a box in their living room to centralized boxes that you
just dial up. One of these days, when all the boxes are gone from your
living room, someone will "invent" home phone machines anew and tell you
how much more private they are (no messages held by third parties) or
how much more customizable.
So when someone talks about the novelty of free software and us old-timers
who have just not lived it--well, no, this doesn't ring true. We didn't
have the specific notions of free software you have now. But we did have
a community that traded a lot, and that Richard Stallman was happy to call
himself a part of. I've been there.
> which is perceived as undermining authority,
I think if you had the patience to do so, you could go back and see
how many times I have answered a question about conformance to
standards, goodness for community, etc. with qualifying words like
"Just because I was a member of the committee doesn't make my opinion
any more valid than anyone else's." or "Your mileage may vary." or
"JMO/just my opinion". I think it's a lot. Some of us are, or try to
be, guardians of historical fact (or historical reasonable
approximation). But we rarely profess to know what is right. We do
profess to have ideas and thoughts which we offer with associated
justifications and backgrouind, and we allow you to decide. All in
all, I think we're not guilty on the "rejecting our authority" claim,
though.
> quality, and motivation to work, and the economic structure which
> supports programmers.
These are our experiences, not our theories. You are free to reject them.
But if you contest our credentials we will cite them, and if you claim they
have no legitimacy we will challenge your credentials to have any firmer
opinion than our own. That is not an authority issue. That is simple debate.
In fact, hang 'em high!! its
> ... terrorism!!!![2]
>
> Regards,
> Peter
>
> [1] A true 'me or him' situation is not an ethical dilemma. However,
> such a situation only arises when your life is threatened, not
> your priviledges.
THere were two reference points for [1] in your article. This confused
me for a while.
Even with the right reference point, I don't understand the me-or-him
reference. I almost fear to ask, since it looks like it will be a useless
subthread, but...
> [2] The jailing of Skylarov by Adobe and the US is proof that the
> police-brutality metaphor is not too far fetched. That behaviour
> is fucking evil.
Sorry, not familiar with ref [2].
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> > [2] The jailing of Skylarov by Adobe and the US is proof that the
> > police-brutality metaphor is not too far fetched. That behaviour
> > is fucking evil.
>
> Sorry, not familiar with ref [2].
Dimitri Sklyerov is a Russian programmer who developed a piece of
software for a Russian software company, that circumvents the copy
protection in one of Adobe's products. Someone told me (though I
can't remember who, so it may have been anyone from an ACLU lawyer to
a maniac in People's Park) that Russian law requires that consumers
have the ability to make backup copies of information they buy (CDs,
electronic books, whatever), and this allowed that. He was in the US
giving a speech, and was arrested, and charges filed against him under
the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (who named that??? -- do we now
live in the Digital Millennium???). The EFF has a FAQ:
<http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/US_v_Sklyarov/us_v_sklyarov_faq.html>
It's rather appalling, but exactly what one would expect from
imperialism.
From: Peter Wood
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <80bsltzvj4.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
···@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
> Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
>
> > > [2] The jailing of Skylarov by Adobe and the US is proof that the
> > > police-brutality metaphor is not too far fetched. That behaviour
> > > is fucking evil.
> >
> > Sorry, not familiar with ref [2].
>
> Dimitri Sklyerov is a Russian programmer who developed a piece of
> software for a Russian software company, that circumvents the copy
> protection in one of Adobe's products. Someone told me (though I
> can't remember who, so it may have been anyone from an ACLU lawyer to
> a maniac in People's Park) that Russian law requires that consumers
> have the ability to make backup copies of information they buy (CDs,
> electronic books, whatever), and this allowed that. He was in the US
> giving a speech, and was arrested, and charges filed against him under
> the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (who named that??? -- do we now
> live in the Digital Millennium???).
It means 'We've got your number, and we'll keep it for 1000 years.'
> The EFF has a FAQ:
> <http://www.eff.org/IP/DMCA/US_v_Sklyarov/us_v_sklyarov_faq.html>
>
> It's rather appalling, but exactly what one would expect from
> imperialism.
Yes. Absolutely shocking. Well, maybe it can open somebody's eyes to
who the enemy is.
Regards,
Peter
Peter Wood <··········@worldonline.dk> writes:
> ···@conquest.OCF.Berkeley.EDU (Thomas F. Burdick) writes:
>
> > It's rather appalling, but exactly what one would expect from
> > imperialism.
>
> Yes. Absolutely shocking. Well, maybe it can open somebody's eyes to
> who the enemy is.
Actually, I meant to convey a complete lack of shock. I'm plenty
horrified, just not surprised in the least. Events like this do give
me hope for a large section of the technocracy siding with the working
classes, though.
From: Marcin Tustin
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <9kpdll$glh$5@news6.svr.pol.co.uk>
> also seen cycles in client-side euphoria (look at all the extra
> compute power in people's living rooms, let's use it) or server-side
> (get that stupid computer out of your living room, why not take advantage
> of the power in our central office). Voice mail went that way, too, with
> everyone having a box in their living room to centralized boxes that you
> just dial up. One of these days, when all the boxes are gone from your
> living room, someone will "invent" home phone machines anew and tell you
> how much more private they are (no messages held by third parties) or
> how much more customizable.
In the UK almost no-one has an answering service for their landline...We
all have these strange "ansaphone" boxes (If anything at all) - Answering
services are just something that comes as part of having a mobile phone,
here.
"Marcin Tustin" <·······@GUeswhatthisbitisfor.mindless.com> writes:
>> also seen cycles in client-side euphoria (look at all the extra
>> compute power in people's living rooms, let's use it) or
>> server-side (get that stupid computer out of your living room, why
>> not take advantage of the power in our central office). Voice mail
>> went that way, too, with everyone having a box in their living room
>> to centralized boxes that you just dial up. One of these days, when
>> all the boxes are gone from your living room, someone will "invent"
>> home phone machines anew and tell you how much more private they
>> are (no messages held by third parties) or how much more
>> customizable.
> In the UK almost no-one has an answering service for their
> landline...We all have these strange "ansaphone" boxes (If anything
> at all) - Answering services are just something that comes as part
> of having a mobile phone, here.
Answering machines are definitely heading towards "dodo-hood" in North
America, too, mobile phones being a nice "last nail in the coffin."
[Paranoia speaking for a moment...] The phone companies are doubtless
very pleased to be able to charge people $10/month for offering
answering services; that doubtless very nicely funds the equipment
that does the answering...
It will be interesting to see what the next phase of "telephony
convergence" brings; the thing that would be somewhat nice would be
for there to be a single "answering presence" that could be shared by
mobile and landlines, as well as for there to be a single "phone
number" that offers multiple services.
--
(reverse (concatenate 'string ··········@" "enworbbc"))
http://vip.hyperusa.com/~cbbrowne/internet.html
"There's nothing worse than having only one drunk head."
-- Zaphod Beeblebrox
From: Kurt B. Kaiser
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <m38zgvbht8.fsf@float.ne.mediaone.com>
········@hex.net writes:
> It will be interesting to see what the next phase of "telephony
> convergence" brings; the thing that would be somewhat nice would be
> for there to be a single "answering presence" that could be shared by
> mobile and landlines, as well as for there to be a single "phone
> number" that offers multiple services.
www.ilink.com
Works great! One number rings multiple phones. Nine way conferencing. Voice
mailbox. All accessible via internet, too.
Regards, KBK
···@shore.net (Kurt B. Kaiser) writes:
> ········@hex.net writes:
>> It will be interesting to see what the next phase of "telephony
>> convergence" brings; the thing that would be somewhat nice would be
>> for there to be a single "answering presence" that could be shared
>> by mobile and landlines, as well as for there to be a single "phone
>> number" that offers multiple services.
> www.ilink.com
> Works great! One number rings multiple phones. Nine way
> conferencing. Voice mailbox. All accessible via internet, too.
Ah, but the burning question: Does it mean that I now truly only have
one phone number, irrespective of the number of communications
devices?
--
(reverse (concatenate 'string ········@" "enworbbc"))
http://vip.hex.net/~cbbrowne/
"Bawden is misinformed. Common Lisp has no philosophy. We are held
together only by a shared disgust for all the alternatives."
-- Scott Fahlman, explaining why Common Lisp is the way it is....
········@hex.net writes:
> > www.ilink.com ***see below***
>
> > Works great! One number rings multiple phones. Nine way
> > conferencing. Voice mailbox. All accessible via internet, too.
>
> Ah, but the burning question: Does it mean that I now truly only have
> one phone number, irrespective of the number of communications
> devices?
Yes, isn't that what you wanted? The 'one' number will ring at up to five
phones, parallel or sequential. Configuration is via phone or internet. Can
also page you if you get a call. (The original numbers still work)
The 'one' number is toll free. You pay 4 - 8 cents/ min, depending on your
deal. I've had it for several years and it's really nice when travelling or
when the kids want to call. How much per min is your calling card?
You can ring any phone from your 'one' number. Receive faxes and then
download them to the nearest fax machine. Get email with an audio file
containing your voice messages. It's a big step forward.
This is Voice over IP, but not the internet. They have a private network, voice
quality is decent.
The whole API to do these things is available from i-link for custom
applications, seems like a good match for lisp-based telephony
applications. (This ?might? bring this thread back on topic!)
The link I gave is incorrect, it's www.i-link.com
Disclaimer: The company itself is small, and a financial disaster area. I have
no financial interest in I-link (I just use the product), and I don't recommend
it as an investment of either money or time. I do hope they make it, they are
an example of the coming wave of computer telephony.
Regards, KBK
From: Kurt B. Kaiser
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <m3k80h260g.fsf@float.ne.mediaone.com>
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> > Assuming that when Lisp was 'born' society was generally more
> > conservative[1],
>
> I'd be extremely curious to know, in spite of your footnote, what
> characterizes such conservatism. I understand conservatism in the US
> political system to mean "adhering to a strict reading of the constitution",
> but in the absence of a constitution-analog to read strictly, I'm less sure
> what it might mean. I don't mean to suggest that you mean nothing, only
> that I'm baffled by what you might mean.
The way I've come to understand these terms, conservatism originally meant a
reluctance to accept change; the opposite of progressive. Liberalism meant
promoting those changes which increased individual liberty.
In the USA, the words conservative and liberal have been corrupted/co-opted
(especially 'liberal'). A conservative, while still resistant to change,
supports individual economic freedom but has a tendency to want to control what
you think (because it's good for you). A liberal usually supports freedom of
thought/action (but regard 'politically correct' groupthink!), but wants to
control individual economic choice through planning and redistribution (because
it's good for you).
The writers of the US Constitution were progressive liberals in the
traditional sense. Current followers of the Constitution could be termed
conservative liberals!
> > Perhaps the 'face of it' is wrong. In the Eastern 'guru' traditions,
> > a disciple must accept *everything* the guru says, and this is
> > believed to improve the learning process. Maybe the Eastern way just
> > formalises the principle that learning is imitation (in the
> > beginning). Perhaps the more conservative[1] attitudes of the
> > original Lispers have filtered down to today's (yesterday's ? ;-) )
> > lispers.
Most likely to avoid the aggravation of rash young apprentices arguing with the
master years before they had the depth to understand what he was really about!
(This is also true for apprentice boatwrights.)
> It wasn't obvious to me if the guru thing was an example of conservatism
> or nonconservatism, or if it was orthogonal (which I think it is).
> I tend to largely reject the term "guru" for myself and anyone I respect;
> I sometimes use it in cocktail party conversation for want of a more pithy
> term, but in serious discussion I find it means "imitate without
> understanding", and my anti-panacea campaign says it's fine to imitate,
> but you must understand.
Most 'gurus' prove to have feet of clay. The term also seems to be used by
management or marketing to refer to technical people as it has a shade of
denigration associated with it.
> I come back to my central anti-panacea pitch: the world is about tradeoffs.
> As long as you see them and make them thoughtfully, you're probably
> doing ok. As long as you think the tradeoff has been decided and eliminated
> and need no longer be thought about it, you should know you're entering
> dangerous turf.
Forget it, a LispOS hasn't a chance of succeeding.
Regards, KBK
From: Lars Lundback
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <3b6e50cf.11919872@news1.telia.com>
On Mon, 06 Aug 2001 04:02:35 GMT, ···@shore.net (Kurt B. Kaiser) wrote:
>
>Forget it, a LispOS hasn't a chance of succeeding.
>
What is a LispOS?
Lars
From: Kurt B. Kaiser
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <m37kwh1kzi.fsf@float.ne.mediaone.com>
···············@telia.com (Lars Lundback) writes:
> On Mon, 06 Aug 2001 04:02:35 GMT, ···@shore.net (Kurt B. Kaiser) wrote:
> What is a LispOS?
Rather than giving you a specific URL, I think the best way to answer this is
to suggest you search groups.google.com (comp.lang.lisp) for LispOS.
Basically, it's a computing environment which is Lisp all the way down to the
hardware, but the latter is mass market, unlike a Lisp machine.
Regards, KBK
From: Lars Lundback
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <3b6f7e3d.3965116@news1.telia.com>
On Mon, 06 Aug 2001 11:36:49 GMT, ···@shore.net (Kurt B. Kaiser) wrote:
> Rather than giving you a specific URL, I think the best way to answer this is
> to suggest you search groups.google.com (comp.lang.lisp) for LispOS.
Yes, the subject seems attractive.
> Basically, it's a computing environment which is Lisp all the way down to the
> hardware, but the latter is mass market, unlike a Lisp machine.
I understand that the extent of this environment is crucial for success,
and would like to hear more about it.
Lars
From: Kurt B. Kaiser
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <m34rrjbhah.fsf@float.ne.mediaone.com>
···············@telia.com (Lars Lundback) writes:
> I understand that the extent of this environment is crucial for success,
> and would like to hear more about it.
Jeez, Lars, you're more familiar with LispOS than I am, if you're the same Lars
Lundback who made all those posts to the "anyone remembers LISPOS"
etc. threads!
Maybe it's time for the summer LispOS / LISPOS thread? =)
Regards, KBK
From: Lars Lundback
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <3b717f53.1255220@news1.telia.com>
On Tue, 07 Aug 2001 23:11:20 GMT, ···@shore.net (Kurt B. Kaiser) wrote:
> Jeez, Lars, you're more familiar with LispOS than I am, if you're the same Lars
> Lundback who made all those posts to the "anyone remembers LISPOS"
> etc. threads!
Seems I'm not very good at the cloak and dagger stuff :-)
> Maybe it's time for the summer LispOS / LISPOS thread? =)
But you said:
"Forget it, a LispOS hasn't a chance of succeeding."
and how could I resist?
Lars
Btw, It's raining again.
From: Kurt B. Kaiser
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <m3lmku5mjg.fsf@float.ne.mediaone.com>
···············@telia.com (Lars Lundback) writes:
> > Maybe it's time for the summer LispOS / LISPOS thread? =)
>
> But you said:
>
> "Forget it, a LispOS hasn't a chance of succeeding."
>
> and how could I resist?
I was attempting to respond tongue in cheek to the statement (paraphrased) that
just when you think the conclusion is forgone, here it comes again!
After re-reading those LispOS threads, IMHO it seems you can divide the posters
into two groups:
1. It's not practical to do this because it's too late and too hard, besides
you won't be able to keep up with the range of hardware you need to support
to be successful. It's certainly not economically viable. Better to work
on something useful, like open-clim, or even better, something not open
source. An application, maybe?
2. We don't care, it would be really fun to do for the love of it.
So forget about group 1, they are correct, but mostly irrelevant to LispOS.
Then the objection is: you will need half a dozen people to cover the
disciplines involved.
To that I say, Linus did it (but he had RMS working for him ;-)
He wasn't trying for the ultimate do-everything, perfect solution. He
just wanted to hack something into existence because he didn't have what he
wanted in Minix. As he succeeded, he raised his goals.
Without gcc and the Minix example, he probably would not have suceeded. And
without Gnu/BSD, the work he did would not have achieved critical mass.
To quote Linus' famous 5 Oct 91 post (10 years!):
"Do you pine for the nice days of minix-1.1, when men were men and wrote their
own device drives? Are you without a nice project and just dying to cut your
teeth on a OS you can try to modify for your own needs? Are you finding it
frustrating when everything works on minix? No more all-nighters to get a
nifty program working? Then this post might be just for you :-)
...
"I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "Why?". Hurd will be out in
a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix. This is
a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjoyed doing it, and somebody might
enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still
small enough to understand, use and modify, and I'm looking forward to any
comments you might have."
What are the parallels for LispOS?
Regards, KBK
From: Marcin Tustin
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <9kugb4$4o5$1@newsg1.svr.pol.co.uk>
Kurt B. Kaiser <···@shore.net> wrote in message
···················@float.ne.mediaone.com...
> ···············@telia.com (Lars Lundback) writes:
>
[snip linux/lispos]
> What are the parallels for LispOS?
Damned good. I'd join, but I know nothing about (or nearly), about as
much about OSes, and I've only just started playing with lisp (And I work 5
days a week).
> Regards, KBK
From: Lars Lundback
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <3b720de7.1185712@news1.telia.com>
On Wed, 08 Aug 2001 20:26:29 GMT, ···@shore.net (Kurt B. Kaiser) wrote:
> 1. It's not practical to do this because it's too late and too hard, besides
> you won't be able to keep up with the range of hardware you need to support
> to be successful. It's certainly not economically viable. Better to work
> on something useful, like open-clim, or even better, something not open
> source. An application, maybe?
I agree, although I'm doubtful about open-clim.
> 2. We don't care, it would be really fun to do for the love of it.
That is the best reason I could think of. Always do what you think is
fun.
> To quote Linus' famous 5 Oct 91 post (10 years!):
> .....
> "I can (well, almost) hear you asking yourselves "Why?". Hurd will be out in
> a year (or two, or next month, who knows), and I've already got minix. This is
> a program for hackers by a hacker. I've enjoyed doing it, and somebody might
> enjoy looking at it and even modifying it for their own needs. It is still
> small enough to understand, use and modify, and I'm looking forward to any
> comments you might have."
>
> What are the parallels for LispOS?
I'd say that some Lispers would, as true hackers, enjoy having an OS of
their own which is "small enough to understand, use and modify". :-)
Lars
And it's raining again, dammit.
From: Kurt B. Kaiser
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <m33d751dur.fsf@float.ne.mediaone.com>
···············@telia.com (Lars Lundback) writes:
> On Mon, 06 Aug 2001 04:02:35 GMT, ···@shore.net (Kurt B. Kaiser) wrote:
>
> >
> >Forget it, a LispOS hasn't a chance of succeeding.
> >
>
> What is a LispOS?
>
If anyone is interested in working on a LispOS, I'd recommend looking
at TUNES (<URL:http://www.tunes.org/>). IIRC, it is Lisp-based and has
a very interesting kernel design. They also have archives of the old
LispOS mailing list.
I just hope I don't start a flame war over ``A LispOS should use
Common Lisp'' versus ``A LispOS needs a completely different Lisp''
;).
> Lars
--
BPT <···@hobbiton.org> /"\ ASCII Ribbon Campaign
backronym for Linux: \ / No HTML or RTF in mail
Linux Is Not Unix X No MS-Word in mail
Meme plague ;) ---------> / \ Respect Open Standards
From: Marcin Tustin
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <9kpdlj$glh$3@news6.svr.pol.co.uk>
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> wrote in message
····················@world.std.com...
> Peter Wood <··········@worldonline.dk> writes:
>
> An excellent metaphor. This is how I learned Lisp and, at some point,
> programming generally. (The actual history of how I learned programming
> originally was in near-total isolation, in an environment where personally
> owning a computer was literally illegal, so I was happy to come to MIT
> where computers were allowed and where other people existed to help you
> figure out how to use them.)
??!!?!??!?Where was it literally illegal to own a computer?
[I agree with much of what you say.]
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwsnf3k5ly.fsf@world.std.com>
"Marcin Tustin" <·······@GUeswhatthisbitisfor.mindless.com> writes:
> Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> wrote in message
> ····················@world.std.com...
> > Peter Wood <··········@worldonline.dk> writes:
> >
>
> > An excellent metaphor. This is how I learned Lisp and, at some point,
> > programming generally. (The actual history of how I learned programming
> > originally was in near-total isolation, in an environment where personally
> > owning a computer was literally illegal, so I was happy to come to MIT
> > where computers were allowed and where other people existed to help you
> > figure out how to use them.)
>
> ??!!?!??!?Where was it literally illegal to own a computer?
Heh, I was surprised no one picked up on that before.
Panama Canal Zone. It was, at the time, before the US gave it bck to
Panama, about 60% civilian and 40% military, but all
government-controlled. There was a law or rule (pretty much the same
under the circumstances) that all computers had to be owned by the
Office of the Comptroller. The school wanted one but originally
couldn't get one and had to borrow time on the central office's IBM
1130. Then someone bright in school administration figured out how to
purchase a Wang BASIC system by saying it wasn't a computer but a
"computer teaching aid". He figured by the time anyone figured out
that it took a computer to aid in teaching computers that it would be
so ingrained in the school's activities that they would change the
law, which they did. Anyway, given the paucity of openly available
computers, we had no real experts to draw on in teaching us stuff when
we got those "teaching aids" and we had to think up how to use them
ourselves. We had manuals on what the instructions did, and a few
copies of "creative computing" magazine (or some such) with listings
of a few BASIC programs, and the rest we just had to make up out of
thin air.
I remember seeing output from a "guss an animal" program in a book on
computers and thinking "I wonder how they did that." I'd only ever
seen FORTRAN and BASIC and had to go from that to the realiziation
that I needed "a datatype that had extensible memory", which nothing
in those languages had. I finally figured out a trick for storing
pointers onto a magnetic tape, implementing what I later learned to
call linked lists. Probably my love for Lisp comes a lot out of how
much simpler my life became when I found it came with CONS built-in
and not a kludge you had to make on magnetic tape. And having people
who'd also thought about other things you could do with conses than
just this one program of mine was a bonus. :-)
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> "Marcin Tustin" <·······@GUeswhatthisbitisfor.mindless.com> writes:
>
> > Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> wrote in message
> > ····················@world.std.com...
>>> An excellent metaphor. This is how I learned Lisp and, at some
>>> point, programming generally. (The actual history of how I
>>> learned programming originally was in near-total isolation, in an
>>> environment where personally owning a computer was literally
>>> illegal, so I was happy to come to MIT where computers were
>>> allowed and where other people existed to help you figure out how
>>> to use them.)
>> ??!!?!??!?Where was it literally illegal to own a computer?
> Heh, I was surprised no one picked up on that before.
> Panama Canal Zone. It was, at the time, before the US gave it bck
> to Panama, about 60% civilian and 40% military, but all
> government-controlled. There was a law or rule (pretty much the
> same under the circumstances) that all computers had to be owned by
> the Office of the Comptroller.
I wish I'd noticed; I'm sure glad someone did, because that's an
exceedingly entertaining story...
Gives totalitarianism a whole new slant; we always thought it was
restricted to "those bad communists," but apparently the "Land of the
Free" can do a pretty good job when they try...
> Then someone bright in school administration figured out how to
> purchase a Wang BASIC system by saying it wasn't a computer but a
> "computer teaching aid".
There's always someone from "military logistics" that figures this
sort of thing out; the "Radar O'Reilly" sort of character. My brother
Brad has a not dissimilar story, albeit related to buying tools for
naval use. We're not sure how close to a "Radar" he is...
It's really regrettable that I can't think of a good ob-Lisp comment...
--
(concatenate 'string "cbbrowne" ·@acm.org")
http://vip.hyperusa.com/~cbbrowne/linux.html
The difference between a child and a hacker is the amount he flames about
his toys.
-- Ed Schwalenberg
From: Peter Wood
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <80hevj8x0e.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> I think Java, more than anything, represented a shift toward a kind of
> democratization of the programming landscape.
I think Perl did this before Java. And did it right.
Regards,
Peter
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <3206013278040666@naggum.net>
* Peter Wood <··········@worldonline.dk>
> If the above is true[2] (even if only in part) it would help to explain
> the *relative* lack of support for the principles of Free software in the
> lisp community. I have no idea about the numbers, but I think it's a
> safe bet that there is a relationship between the year(s) of origin of a
> language and the present day level of support for Free software in that
> language's community.
Who are the people who think that free software is beneficial to them?
Who are the people who believe that creating free software is beneficial?
What are the kinds of software that are created and distibuted for free?
How old and mature are the people who want and create free software?
Can free software people learn to live with something that is broken, or
do they have this _need_ to fix everything that could be improved, given
enough free resources?
How do people who create and distribute free software pay their bills?
What do people who create and distribute free software hope to achieve,
if not the recognition that someday results in getting "enough" money?
What if Common Lisp people think of themselves and others in different
value terms than young impatient punks who would rather fix something on
their own in their own way than ask somebody more competent to do it?
What if the idea that you should modify the source code is an expression
of the arrogance of youth that you know everything better than everybody
else and that you discover that this is in fact wrong only after you have
done a lot of really hard programming so you know that programming is not
that simple, easy task, anymore?
What if you discover that getting anything _right_ is so difficult that
you actually want to get paid very well if you are among the few can do
it? If you are in that position, why would you want to _use_ whatever
somebody gives away for free to _everybody_, obviously not realizing its
value to either himself or anyone else?
The simple answers that people who generally do not ask hard questions
come up with are generally wrong. Free software is the intended solution
to a perceived problem. Is the problem real? Is the solution able to do
something about it? Once it has been tried for a while, has anything
actually _changed_? These are uncomfortable questions. They should have
been asked long ago.
I think the lack of interest in free software in the Common Lisp world is
a sign that Common Lisp people value their time. This could be true for
such a simple reason as their higher age than those who get excited by
the next new language to reinvent everything from scratch. It could also
be because Common Lisp attracts people who have become seriously tired of
all the bad languages out there that offer nothing but more work to solve
the same old problems. ///
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwofpua1w3.fsf@world.std.com>
Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
> [...]
> What do people who create and distribute free software hope to achieve,
> if not the recognition that someday results in getting "enough" money?
Of your various questions, I liked this one best. The strange hiding of
the inevitable, as if the cloak you dress it up in makes it any different.
> What if Common Lisp people think of themselves and others in different
> value terms than young impatient punks who would rather fix something on
> their own in their own way than ask somebody more competent to do it?
Or, just to be general here, and 'accidentally' to omit charged terms that
only distract from the point, "impatient people of any kind" ...?
> What if the idea that you should modify the source code is an expression
> of the arrogance of youth that you know everything better than everybody
> else and that you discover that this is in fact wrong only after you have
> done a lot of really hard programming so you know that programming is not
> that simple, easy task, anymore?
Good point. Source reveals a great many things but one thing it
doesn't reveal, except in those rare cases someone takes the time to
put it there, are the myriad ways that something was NOT implemented
and why. Perhaps in some cases those ways were tried first and were
known to have problems.
> What if you discover that getting anything _right_ is so difficult that
> you actually want to get paid very well if you are among the few can do
> it? If you are in that position, why would you want to _use_ whatever
> somebody gives away for free to _everybody_, obviously not realizing its
> value to either himself or anyone else?
Not to mention the value of genetic differentiation to society as a whole.
Paradoxically, free software both empowers someone to use it but empowers
an employer to say "why are you writing a different solution--someone already
wrote a way to do that", never questioning whether the existing tool is the
only way, the best way, the most resilient way, the fastest way ... oh, I
take that back. If you could show it was going to be faster, the employer
would probably take that. But probably none of the others. I've been hit
with this kind of employer even in Java, where it's not always open source.
Suffice that it's adequately cheap and available; that makes a standard these
days, especially in the US. It's why McDonald's is the "standard" food.
Price it like real food and people might contemplate what they eat, but make
it so cheap that it's the obvious choice, and competition based on quality,
etc. becomes near irrelevant. (Yes, yes, I'm making vague generalizations
here in order to speak statistically; please no specific counterexamples
unless they speak equally to statistics.)
> The simple answers that people who generally do not ask hard questions
> come up with are generally wrong. Free software is the intended solution
> to a perceived problem. Is the problem real? Is the solution able to do
> something about it? Once it has been tried for a while, has anything
> actually _changed_? These are uncomfortable questions. They should have
> been asked long ago.
I'd be content if they were merely "still asked on a regular basis".
> I think the lack of interest in free software in the Common Lisp world is
> a sign that Common Lisp people value their time. This could be true for
> such a simple reason as their higher age than those who get excited by
> the next new language to reinvent everything from scratch. It could also
> be because Common Lisp attracts people who have become seriously tired of
> all the bad languages out there that offer nothing but more work to solve
> the same old problems. ///
Or it could be a proof that in fact the "next new language to reinvent
everything from scratch" didn't. Heck, I might use it if it did. They
keep leaving out parts, and usually the parts I need. Sigh.
p.s. I feel like Sylvester Stallone in "Demolition Man" for asking, but...
"what are the three slashes for?" Is this some promotional deal you
did with Jurassic Park III where suddenly, in mid-post, you appear
to be clawed away by some prehistoric monster who leaves only slash
marks behind? Or is it just, as in Lisp, that you feel somehow when
you get to the end of your post, you've left your values far behind?
;-)
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
>
> > [...]
> > What do people who create and distribute free software hope to achieve,
> > if not the recognition that someday results in getting "enough" money?
>
> Of your various questions, I liked this one best. The strange hiding of
> the inevitable, as if the cloak you dress it up in makes it any different.
Well, there's also the attempt to gain recognition and increased
status (says the non-CS major who's embarked on a significant project
purely for the research paper he can get out of it, thinking he may
want to go to CS grad school in a few years -- who's gonna release it
as Free Software, hoping that will make it better known / more widely
used, thus more useful to point to :)
In article <···············@world.std.com>, Kent M Pitman wrote:
>Not to mention the value of genetic differentiation to society as a whole.
>Paradoxically, free software both empowers someone to use it but empowers
>an employer to say "why are you writing a different solution--someone already
>wrote a way to do that", never questioning whether the existing tool is the
>only way, the best way, the most resilient way, the fastest way ... oh, I
This is not limited to free software, but also to proprietary implementations
of standard languages and interfaces.
``Why are you doing it this way, when you could be using some C++ STL
gadget?''
``Well, that gadget's design or implementation sucks, that's why!''
But why should the employer not be empowered to question any suspicious
occurences of Not Invented Here? Sometimes there isn't a good reason to
reinvent something from scratch, yet it's done anyway.
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <3206026889317472@naggum.net>
* Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com>
> p.s. I feel like Sylvester Stallone in "Demolition Man" for asking, but...
> "what are the three slashes for?"
It is supposed to be a stylized "E" (actually "EN", but that is not quite
evident until you see the six-stroke variation).
> Is this some promotional deal you did with Jurassic Park III where
> suddenly, in mid-post, you appear to be clawed away by some
> prehistoric monster who leaves only slash marks behind?
:D Several other people have commented similarly, but I invented this
long before the dinosaurs were even contemplated. I signed off on notes
with three slashes many years ago. It seemed appropriate to revive it.
(All puns intended.)
> Or is it just, as in Lisp, that you feel somehow when you get to the
> end of your post, you've left your values far behind? ;-)
Haha! Excellent! ///
From: Michael Livshin
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <s3g0b62ybn.fsf@yahoo.com.cmm>
Kent M Pitman <······@world.std.com> writes:
> Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
>
> Source reveals a great many things but one thing it doesn't reveal,
> except in those rare cases someone takes the time to put it there,
> are the myriad ways that something was NOT implemented and why.
> Perhaps in some cases those ways were tried first and were known to
> have problems.
excellent point!
> Paradoxically, free software both empowers someone to use it but empowers
> an employer to say "why are you writing a different solution--someone already
> wrote a way to do that", never questioning whether the existing tool is the
> only way, the best way, the most resilient way, the fastest way ... oh, I
> take that back. If you could show it was going to be faster, the employer
> would probably take that. But probably none of the others. I've been hit
> with this kind of employer even in Java, where it's not always open source.
> Suffice that it's adequately cheap and available; that makes a standard these
> days, especially in the US. It's why McDonald's is the "standard" food.
> Price it like real food and people might contemplate what they eat, but make
> it so cheap that it's the obvious choice, and competition based on quality,
> etc. becomes near irrelevant. (Yes, yes, I'm making vague generalizations
> here in order to speak statistically; please no specific counterexamples
> unless they speak equally to statistics.)
all true, but I'm not sure how this condemns specifically free
software (in the GNU "free as in free speach" sense). Microsoft's
products are also moderately cheap (or come "free" with the computers)
and very, very ubiquitous. let's not go there.
> > The simple answers that people who generally do not ask hard questions
> > come up with are generally wrong. Free software is the intended solution
> > to a perceived problem. Is the problem real? Is the solution able to do
> > something about it? Once it has been tried for a while, has anything
> > actually _changed_? These are uncomfortable questions. They should have
> > been asked long ago.
>
> I'd be content if they were merely "still asked on a regular basis".
they are, by many individuals. it's misleading to judge groups by
what is visible through the public outlets like, say, Slashdot. let's
just say that all top-rate free software people I personally know
reasonably well are _not_ drones, and tend to reflect a lot (or at
least come out that way in writing, but well...).
I don't really care what a random 19 yr old student hacker thinks
-- but those types tend to be the most vocal.
> > ///
>
> p.s. I feel like Sylvester Stallone in "Demolition Man" for asking, but...
> "what are the three slashes for?"
perhaps Erik's been hired by Three Sausages[1]? :)
[1] a.k.a. Eriksson.
--
You can sing to my cat if you like.
"Kent M Pitman" <······@world.std.com> wrote in message
····················@world.std.com...
> Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
>
> > What if the idea that you should modify the source code is an
expression
> > of the arrogance of youth that you know everything better than
everybody
> > else and that you discover that this is in fact wrong only after you
have
> > done a lot of really hard programming so you know that programming is
not
> > that simple, easy task, anymore?
>
> Good point. Source reveals a great many things but one thing it
> doesn't reveal, except in those rare cases someone takes the time to
> put it there, are the myriad ways that something was NOT implemented
> and why. Perhaps in some cases those ways were tried first and were
> known to have problems.
>
So true, and I think understated. I'm sure the majority of difficult and
subtle algorithms represent some amount of trial and error. I always try to
reflect that in comments especially when a more obvious but subtley wrong
approach would likely pop into a future developers mind.
I got that way by being bitten "fixing" someone elses "convoluted"
code...oops...there *was* a reason.....
Coby
--
(remove #\space "coby . beck @ opentechgroup . com")
> > What if you discover that getting anything _right_ is so difficult
that
> > you actually want to get paid very well if you are among the few can
do
> > it? If you are in that position, why would you want to _use_ whatever
> > somebody gives away for free to _everybody_, obviously not realizing
its
> > value to either himself or anyone else?
>
> Not to mention the value of genetic differentiation to society as a whole.
> Paradoxically, free software both empowers someone to use it but empowers
> an employer to say "why are you writing a different solution--someone
already
> wrote a way to do that", never questioning whether the existing tool is
the
> only way, the best way, the most resilient way, the fastest way ... oh, I
> take that back. If you could show it was going to be faster, the employer
> would probably take that. But probably none of the others. I've been hit
> with this kind of employer even in Java, where it's not always open
source.
> Suffice that it's adequately cheap and available; that makes a standard
these
> days, especially in the US. It's why McDonald's is the "standard" food.
> Price it like real food and people might contemplate what they eat, but
make
> it so cheap that it's the obvious choice, and competition based on
quality,
> etc. becomes near irrelevant. (Yes, yes, I'm making vague generalizations
> here in order to speak statistically; please no specific counterexamples
> unless they speak equally to statistics.)
>
> > The simple answers that people who generally do not ask hard questions
> > come up with are generally wrong. Free software is the intended
solution
> > to a perceived problem. Is the problem real? Is the solution able to
do
> > something about it? Once it has been tried for a while, has anything
> > actually _changed_? These are uncomfortable questions. They should
have
> > been asked long ago.
>
> I'd be content if they were merely "still asked on a regular basis".
>
> > I think the lack of interest in free software in the Common Lisp world
is
> > a sign that Common Lisp people value their time. This could be true
for
> > such a simple reason as their higher age than those who get excited by
> > the next new language to reinvent everything from scratch. It could
also
> > be because Common Lisp attracts people who have become seriously tired
of
> > all the bad languages out there that offer nothing but more work to
solve
> > the same old problems. ///
>
> Or it could be a proof that in fact the "next new language to reinvent
> everything from scratch" didn't. Heck, I might use it if it did. They
> keep leaving out parts, and usually the parts I need. Sigh.
>
> p.s. I feel like Sylvester Stallone in "Demolition Man" for asking, but...
> "what are the three slashes for?" Is this some promotional deal you
> did with Jurassic Park III where suddenly, in mid-post, you appear
> to be clawed away by some prehistoric monster who leaves only slash
> marks behind? Or is it just, as in Lisp, that you feel somehow when
> you get to the end of your post, you've left your values far behind?
> ;-)
>
From: Tim Moore
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <9kktld$1ot$0@216.39.145.192>
On Sun, 5 Aug 2001, Kent M Pitman wrote:
> Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
>
> > [...]
> > What do people who create and distribute free software hope to achieve,
> > if not the recognition that someday results in getting "enough" money?
>
> Of your various questions, I liked this one best. The strange hiding of
> the inevitable, as if the cloak you dress it up in makes it any different.
I don't even see this as a question; it's really a simple statement of
fact. One of the main drivers of free software involvement, as noted by
Eric Raymond, is status. If that status results in a tasty job, what's
the problem? This is hardly a chilling indictment of free software.
> > What if the idea that you should modify the source code is an expression
> > of the arrogance of youth that you know everything better than everybody
> > else and that you discover that this is in fact wrong only after you have
> > done a lot of really hard programming so you know that programming is not
> > that simple, easy task, anymore?
>
> Good point. Source reveals a great many things but one thing it
> doesn't reveal, except in those rare cases someone takes the time to
> put it there, are the myriad ways that something was NOT implemented
> and why. Perhaps in some cases those ways were tried first and were
> known to have problems.
If it is an expression of the arrogance of youth, then I've never grown
up. Conversely, as a sometime open-source author I wouldn't assume that
my code as written is fit for all purposes ever imagined and not.
> > What if you discover that getting anything _right_ is so difficult that
> > you actually want to get paid very well if you are among the few can do
> > it? If you are in that position, why would you want to _use_ whatever
> > somebody gives away for free to _everybody_, obviously not realizing its
> > value to either himself or anyone else?
The value of something and the supposed value put on it by its author may
not be the same thing at all. On the other hand, the author may very well
realize its value and be seeking to increase its value by giving it away.
This doesn't seem to me to have anything to do with wether or not you've
achieved the apotheosis of programming skill or not.
> > I think the lack of interest in free software in the Common Lisp world is
> > a sign that Common Lisp people value their time. This could be true for
> > such a simple reason as their higher age than those who get excited by
> > the next new language to reinvent everything from scratch. It could also
> > be because Common Lisp attracts people who have become seriously tired of
> > all the bad languages out there that offer nothing but more work to solve
> > the same old problems. ///
>
> Or it could be a proof that in fact the "next new language to reinvent
> everything from scratch" didn't. Heck, I might use it if it did. They
> keep leaving out parts, and usually the parts I need. Sigh.
There are Lispers who are vary interested in free software, and there
always have been. To pick one tiny example, CMU Common Lisp's ancestor
Spice Lisp has always been in the public domain and formed the basis for
at least two commercial Common Lisp implementations that I know of. Maybe
those Lispers just haven't learned the value of their time?
Tim
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfwg0b5lsop.fsf@world.std.com>
Tim Moore <·····@herschel.bricoworks.com> writes:
> If that status results in a tasty job, what's
> the problem? This is hardly a chilling indictment of free software.
It's the debate opposition here that keeps trying to paint me as making
chilling indictments. That's not my intent.
I was just indirectly addressing the view of some (not all) free software
advocates that "(pursuit of) money is bad", which seems to be why they
like free software. It seems to, for them, promote some sort of socialist
goal. In that light, and for those people, the pursuit of fame and fortune
that results indirectly rather than directly from software seems out of
line. That doesn't make it inconsistent with free software, and wasn't
intended to. It's just an observation.
From: Eduardo Muñoz
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <u4rrm9p0d.fsf@jet.es>
Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
> Who are the people who think that free software is beneficial to them?
Users of emacs, make, bash, apache... all over the world.
> Who are the people who believe that creating free software is beneficial?
See above
> What are the kinds of software that are created and distibuted for free?
Editors, utilities, shells, http servers.
> How old and mature are the people who want and create free software?
As old and mature as you or me. Richard
S. Stallman comes to my mind.
> How do people who create and distribute free software pay their bills?
Just like you and me. They have works.
> What do people who create and distribute free software hope to achieve,
> if not the recognition that someday results in getting "enough" money?
I don't think Stallman (and many others) does it
"for the money".
> What if you discover that getting anything _right_ is so difficult that
> you actually want to get paid very well if you are among the few can do
> it? If you are in that position, why would you want to _use_ whatever
> somebody gives away for free to _everybody_, obviously not realizing its
> value to either himself or anyone else?
I can see in your message headers this:
User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.7
Why do you use Emacs? It's obiously free
software. Gnus is free software too. Didn't you
know?
What do you do if you find an annoying bug in
emacs?
a) Send a bug report and a patch
b) Patch it only for yourself
c) Stand the bug
Only 'a' seems non-idiot to me
I can't see why do you use free software and at
the same time you see so angry about it.
Sure that there are a lot of "young punks" on
sourceforge doing an incredible amount of work for
nothing. But you *should* know that they aren't
anywhere. Any succesfull free software project has
a supporting community around it (emacs, apache,
linux) or/and big companies behind them.
You should read/investigate more about free software
\\\
--
Eduardo Mu�oz
From: larry a price
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <ohyelqpsnc0.fsf@garcia.efn.org>
In article <·············@jet.es> "Eduardo =?iso-8859-1?q?Mu=F1oz?=" <···@jet.es> writes:
Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
> Who are the people who think that free software is beneficial to them?
Users of emacs, make, bash, apache... all over the world.
> Who are the people who believe that creating free software is beneficial?
See above
Funny you should mention emacs as mr. Naggum has his name on several
of the .el files that are part of the standard distro for that fine
editor (a fact that causes me some mild embarrassment for ob-reasons)
My take on the free software debate is that it's as simple and as
complicated as language itself. Who owns the english language?
No one, at least not in any sense that relates to the idea of property
to which one has exclusive rights. While it may be possible under
some fairly fragile social agreements to secure exclusive rights to
particular linguistic artifacts constructed of the english
language, it is practically impossible to lay claim to such an
artifact in perpetuity in the way that one could a house, or a
shovel.
In it's natural state language and things made of language
don't map very well to the idea of property that is so central to
modern society. And if it is nothing else, software is linguistic in
nature. Of course software's interaction with hardware (it's
execution) is not analoguous to anything much in the world of natural
languages. Which may explain why device drivers are still such a
sticking point for free software. (wasn't rms' encounter with a printer
driver (a|the) catalyst for GNU?)
In our society everyone writes, to some degree or another. If you want
to participate in the intellectual life of society you write a lot. At
some point in the not too distant future, when writing about certain
topics, it will be an effective requirement that to be taken seriously
you must be able to express yourself in a machine readable
format.<0.2wink>
It would be a societal blunder of major proportions, and in fact be a
destruction of value; if we were to allow some of the essential tools
of expression to be governed by private or government interests. Or if
we even just marginalise the freely available tools in favor of
incompatible commercial ones.
Think About It.
Of course the lingua franca is more likely to resemble javascript than
lisp, though that may not be that big of a drawback. see:
http://ganley.org/software/jslisp.html
--
·@ _________
ae premise 1: The Truth Makes No Sense ( )__
pf ____( )
rn premise 2: Beauty Is Truth ( )
i. / / / / / / / / / /
co conclusion: Beauty Is Unconscious / / / / / / / / / /
er ·@/ http://www.efn.org/~laprice
g |
__________________________/_\_________________________________________________
From: Marcin Tustin
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <9ks2fd$jge$1@news6.svr.pol.co.uk>
larry a price <·······@garcia.efn.org> wrote in message
····················@garcia.efn.org...
> It would be a societal blunder of major proportions, and in fact be a
> destruction of value; if we were to allow some of the essential tools
> of expression to be governed by private or government interests. Or if
> we even just marginalise the freely available tools in favor of
> incompatible commercial ones.
> Think About It.
While I use emacs (and linux) and might even be tempted to fix bugs in
Xemacs (Not actually done so yet), I wouldn't like to suggest that free
software actually combats government or corporate control (except
sometimes). Incompatibility can be dealt with by standardisation of one form
or another. This could either be ISO-style (the great and the good get
together). or it could be bazaar-style (people release specs for their
products). These are better than open source which seems to encourage poor
docs, necessitating reverse-engineering of the protocols.
As far as govt/corporate control, except where either acts to restrict
free speech, generally there is no control to combat. In the free speech
case, then freedom of the software is/maybe necessary because one cannot
defend copyright on that which is illegal. In the case of a monopolist, free
software surely acts as a low cost competitor, and that is a good thing, but
consider that developers want to get paid. Hence, although many free
programming tools exist (Because these tools need to be high quality to
sell, and because the makers often need them asap), other kinds of software
tend to be strictly hobbyist (Systems software seems to fall in between
here). Stuff which other people will pay for will tend not to exist in its
highest quality form (usually) in free software.
> Of course the lingua franca is more likely to resemble javascript than
> lisp, though that may not be that big of a drawback. see:
> http://ganley.org/software/jslisp.html
From: Rob Warnock
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <9kqc13$9k9n0$1@fido.engr.sgi.com>
Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
+---------------
| What if the idea that you should modify the source code is an expression
| of the arrogance of youth that you know everything better than everybody
| else and that you discover that this is in fact wrong only after you have
| done a lot of really hard programming so you know that programming is not
| that simple, easy task, anymore?
|
| What if you discover that getting anything _right_ is so difficult that
| you actually want to get paid very well if you are among the few can do it?
+---------------
Hmmm, perhaps it's time for more snippets from my favorite Dijkstra rant[*]:
Programming is one of the most difficult branches of applied
mathematics; the poorer mathematicians had better remain pure
mathematicians.
The easiest machine applications are the technical/scientific
computations.
The tools we use have a profound (and devious!) influence on
our thinking habits, and, therefore, on our thinking abilities.
...
The problems of business administration in general and data base
management in particular are much too difficult for people that
think in IBMese, compunded with sloppy English.
About the use of language: it is impossible to sharpen a pencil
with a blunt axe. It is equally vain to try to do it with ten
blunt axes instead.
(Where he said "IBMese", I suspect today one might equally-well
substitute one's least-favorite technical buzzword of the week...)
-Rob
[*] EWD 498 "How do we tell truths that might hurt?", pp.129-131
in Edsger W. Dijkstra, "Selected Writing on Computing: A Personal
Perspective" (Springer Verlag, 1982) ISBN 0-387-90652-5. Scanned
version at <URL:http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd04xx/EWD498.PDF>
-----
Rob Warnock, 30-3-510 <····@sgi.com>
SGI Network Engineering <http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/> [until 8/15]
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. Phone: 650-933-1673
Mountain View, CA 94043 PP-ASEL-IA
[Note: ·········@sgi.com and ········@sgi.com aren't for humans ]
Peter Wood wrote:
> If the above is true[2] (even if only in part) it would help to explain
> the *relative* lack of support for the principles of Free software in
> the lisp community. I have no idea about the numbers, but I think
> it's a safe bet that there is a relationship between the year(s) of
> origin of a language and the present day level of support for Free
> software in that language's community.
...
> [2] And I'm not sure it is. I'm speculating. And not suggesting that
> its the only factor.
I'm not convinced there's a lack of support for the principles
of Free software in the Lisp community. Consider CLISP and
CMU CL, for instance. Or cCLan or whatever it's called.
Are you sure what you're seeing isn't just that Kent and
Erik aren't fans of "Free Software"?
It certainly doesn't look to me as if the Lisp community
is any less pro-free-software than, say, the C and C++
communities. (Though those are much less well defined.)
--
Gareth McCaughan ················@pobox.com
.sig under construc
················@pobox.com (Gareth McCaughan) writes:
> It certainly doesn't look to me as if the Lisp community
> is any less pro-free-software than, say, the C and C++
> communities. (Though those are much less well defined.)
Actually, this is a really good point. The percentage of C and
(especially) C++'ers who are Free Software partisans pales compared to
the percentage of Lispers I've run into. And a very significant
percentage of C and C++'ers I've met have either not given Free
Software a second thought or are so anti-Free Software that they would
*not* use it on principle (caveat: I'm originally from Seattle, a 30
min drive from the MicroSoft epicenter). C is the lingua franca of
programming, so the overwhelming majority of Free Software is written
in C out of necessity; but it's good to remember that the vast
majority of C programs are not Free Software.
From: Peter Wood
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <808zgxzu7u.fsf@localhost.localdomain>
················@pobox.com (Gareth McCaughan) writes:
> Peter Wood wrote:
>
> > If the above is true[2] (even if only in part) it would help to explain
> > the *relative* lack of support for the principles of Free software in
> > the lisp community. I have no idea about the numbers, but I think
> > it's a safe bet that there is a relationship between the year(s) of
> > origin of a language and the present day level of support for Free
> > software in that language's community.
> ...
> > [2] And I'm not sure it is. I'm speculating. And not suggesting that
> > its the only factor.
>
> I'm not convinced there's a lack of support for the principles
> of Free software in the Lisp community. Consider CLISP and
> CMU CL, for instance. Or cCLan or whatever it's called.
> Are you sure what you're seeing isn't just that Kent and
> Erik aren't fans of "Free Software"?
>
> It certainly doesn't look to me as if the Lisp community
> is any less pro-free-software than, say, the C and C++
> communities. (Though those are much less well defined.)
You may be right, and the large amount of good-quality free software
in other languages may simply be due to the larger size of these
language communities. I was speculating, with the hope of seeing what
others think about this issue. I think that worked.
Regards,
Peter
From: Marcin Tustin
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <9kpdlh$glh$2@news6.svr.pol.co.uk>
Peter Wood <··········@worldonline.dk> wrote in message
······················@localhost.localdomain...
> If the above is true[2] (even if only in part) it would help to explain
> the *relative* lack of support for the principles of Free software in
> the lisp community. I have no idea about the numbers, but I think
> it's a safe bet that there is a relationship between the year(s) of
> origin of a language and the present day level of support for Free
> software in that language's community.
I was against free software (At least as popularised by BSD and the FSF)
before I joined the lisp community.
From: Gavin E. Mendel-Gleason
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <m37kw5rmix.fsf@xerxes.jacobian.net>
Peter Wood <··········@worldonline.dk> writes:
The lack of free software in the lisp community is due to a variety of causes.
One of the main causes is the belief in the CL community that it is appropriate to
reinvent the wheel. Wheel reinvention in common lisp is usually pretty strait forward,
and the method by which a wheel is used effectively is almost always domain specific.
The language is extremely general and powerful, and allows you to make something
that fits your specification in less time then most other languages given a
sufficiently complicated problem.
Good general solutions are hard to come by. Usually something that works for a particular
program is not very useful for another program. There are of course exceptions. New
syntax like:
(defmacro foo (a b c &rest body)
(with-gensyms (x y z)
`(let ((,x ,a)
(,y ,b)
(,z ,c))
;code here
)))
or even better:
(defmacro foo (a b c &rest body)
(with-aliases ((x a)(y b)(z c))
;code here
))
Can be encorporated into a program to increase readability and safety. But macros like
these are not that common. Only a few examples of good general solutions to coding problems
in CL ever come to my mind. The Xerox walker code, the few examples in "On Lisp" by Paul Graham,
and thats about it.
The real problem is that there has (until now) not been a public forum in which
people have posted non trivial code for review and incorporation. This is no longer
a problem with things like www.telnet.net/cliki
If you don't like the "packages" that are in the public domain for the domain in which
you are creating your software, I would encourage you to contribute to something like
cliki. Given that it is easy to write extensible software (if you believe that [and I do])
then you should be able to contribute code that is usable by many other people while you
are solving your domain specific problem.
Blaming the gurus is not going to make something like CPAN exist, and is not constructive
in any way. It would be better to contribute what you have created to the free software
community using what these gurus have taught you. Their services have been essentially
free! We should commend them for helping us to speak lisp fluently!
> Reini Urban <······@x-ray.at> writes:
>
> > larry a price <·······@garcia.efn.org> wrote:
> > : 3.yes you do scare off the newbies.
> >
> > no. honestly said, erik amuses a lot of newbies. ranting is a lot of fun,
> > esp. in block mode. he's harsh, but always right. I'd rather fear kent's
> > occasional anti-free software rants might turn them off.
> > --
> > Reini Urban
> > http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/acadwiki/AutoLispFaq
>
> If someone is genuinely interested in learning about Lisp, enduring
> kmp's anti-software diatribes is a small price to pay for his
> technical advice.
>
> That said, this touches on some speculations I have about the
> transmission of values and 'apprenticeship'.
>
> Assuming that when Lisp was 'born' society was generally more
> conservative[1], perhaps this has contributed to a slightly more
> conservative Lisp community today. On the face of it, 'Lisp' is a
> technical subject, devoid of political attitudes, so learning it ought
> not to perpetuate the (non-technical) attitudes of the teachers.
>
> Perhaps the 'face of it' is wrong. In the Eastern 'guru' traditions,
> a disciple must accept *everything* the guru says, and this is
> believed to improve the learning process. Maybe the Eastern way just
> formalises the principle that learning is imitation (in the
> beginning). Perhaps the more conservative[1] attitudes of the
> original Lispers have filtered down to today's (yesterday's ? ;-) )
> lispers.
>
> If the above is true[2] (even if only in part) it would help to explain
> the *relative* lack of support for the principles of Free software in
> the lisp community. I have no idea about the numbers, but I think
> it's a safe bet that there is a relationship between the year(s) of
> origin of a language and the present day level of support for Free
> software in that language's community.
>
> Regards,
> Peter
>
> [1] Conservative in a general sense. Not necessarily 'how you vote'.
> [2] And I'm not sure it is. I'm speculating. And not suggesting that
> its the only factor.
--
Gavin E. Mendel-Gleason
(let ((e-mail-address ·········@VGIHKRR.TKZ"))(loop with new-string = (make-string (length e-mail-address))
for count from 0 to (1- (length e-mail-address)) for char-code = (char-code (aref e-mail-address count))
for new-char-code = (if (and (> char-code 64)(< char-code 123))(+ (mod (+ 13 char-code) 52) 65) char-code)
do (setf (aref new-string count) (code-char new-char-code)) finally (return new-string)))
From: Craig Brozefsky
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <878zgkf29i.fsf@piracy.red-bean.com>
········@pacbell.net (Gavin E. Mendel-Gleason) writes:
> Peter Wood <··········@worldonline.dk> writes:
>
> The lack of free software in the lisp community is due to a variety of causes.
I agree with your diagnosis of "causes" for a lack, but lately I've
been thinking that calling it a "lack" is not accurate. There really
is alot of great Free Software out there for CL now adays, and I think
that when scaled to the size of our community, it is comparable to
other language communities.
> One of the main causes is the belief in the CL community that it is
> appropriate to reinvent the wheel. Wheel reinvention in common lisp
> is usually pretty strait forward, and the method by which a wheel is
> used effectively is almost always domain specific.
I've found this to be true for my own work. Perhaps I'm exhibiting an
unhealthy amount of NIH syndrome, but I often will design and
implement a new tool if a cursory examination of the available free
tools (which is made easier by Cliki and CLOCC) does not reveal
anything that fits my needs very closely. I justify this to myself by
saying that diversity is still needed in our tools and that having
more than one tool for a domain, which is at least somewhat compatible
with the existing ones, let's people try different approaches, and
perhaps the real solution which will find wide use is a combination of
the two approaches. Software dialectics if you will.
> Blaming the gurus is not going to make something like CPAN exist,
> and is not constructive in any way.
It's not directly constructive, but it's people thinking and
interacting, it's what people do. It seems to me that this forum is
an outlet for people who need some place to get rid of the energy
generated by working all day, or by their own attempts to come to
terms with CL and the present state of computer science. I know that
after a day of hacking CL I like to pop in and see what others are
doing.
> It would be better to contribute what you have created to the free
> software community using what these gurus have taught you. Their
> services have been essentially free! We should commend them for
> helping us to speak lisp fluently!
Agreed. I could not imagine trying to learn CL, and at least in my
own mind succeeding, without the help of those who one might call
gurus.
--
Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com>
http://www.red-bean.com/~craig
The outer space which me wears it has sexual intercourse. - opus
From: Kent M Pitman
Subject: Re: Apprenticeship [was Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?]
Date:
Message-ID: <sfw8zgk6jwd.fsf@world.std.com>
Craig Brozefsky <·····@red-bean.com> writes:
> > It would be better to contribute what you have created to the free
> > software community using what these gurus have taught you. Their
> > services have been essentially free! We should commend them for
> > helping us to speak lisp fluently!
>
> Agreed. I could not imagine trying to learn CL, and at least in my
> own mind succeeding, without the help of those who one might call
> gurus.
To be honest, I don't know who counts as a guru or who doesn't. I
don't like the term and am never sure if I'm counted among those being
referred to here. There are people one can't learn from and people
one can learn from; statistically, some might have higher likelihood
of being helpful on any given occasion, but I'm never quite sure the
criterion for likely-to-be-helpful or even likely-to-be-right falls on
the mystic guru line, if I even understood that term at all. It
reminds me a bit of one of my favorite songs, Carly Simon's "You're So
Vain" where the mere act of objecting to the song about you is proof
of the title's claim. I can't bear the ego of saying "oh, that's
so obviously me", so I feel hampered in any conversation where gurus are
the subject. And yet, guru or not, I do have an opinion.
So speaking in the hypothetical, anyway, if it were simply a matter
of paying back me for any help I'd given, I'd feel better compensated
to see someone make money on Lisp than to see them give away their
software free; moreover, economically, it would help me more if you
charged people for that software than if you drove down the price of
software by giving it back free.
So there might be reasons to do the free software route, but at least
in my case, payback for free advice is not it. If anything, as
someone noted, I should be feeling guilty for offering free advice.
It's a complicated ethical game. I do so in a belief that people need
enough bootstrapping to get momentum, and I don't offer free advice to
arbitrary levels of project complexity--just to newbies getting a
start. (In that sense, free software and my free advice here are not
anaalogs of each other.) But even then, perhaps I and others here are
undercutting the ability of someone else to offer a course. And were
that so, I'd feel quite sorry. I see the help given by myself and
others here as something of an invesment in creating a community that
can perhaps ultimately sustain itself economically.
Others' mileage will surely vary.
Reini Urban <······@x-ray.at> wrote:
> larry a price <·······@garcia.efn.org> wrote:
> : 3.yes you do scare off the newbies.
>
> no. honestly said, erik amuses a lot of newbies. ranting is a lot of fun,
> esp. in block mode. he's harsh, but always right. I'd rather fear kent's
> occasional anti-free software rants might turn them off.
Bah!
[thinks: hmmm, a pompously gnomic response is called for]
Any newbie who can't think for themself is a newbie not worth having.
[thinks: cool!]
Single data-point: Neither Erik nor Kent (nor anyone) scared me away. A
state-supplied gerbil does all my thinking.
--
Duncan Harvey
"Smiling and waving. Before letting himself fall."
-- Anja Garbarek, The Diver
Steve Long <·········@isomedia.com> writes:
> Any ideas for implementing this functionality in the XML world, a
> direction that much of the sofware world seems to be heading?
HyTime (ISO/IEC 10744:1992) is the SGML architecture for linking and
addressing, scheduling and rendition. But, the XML community being
what it is, they will no doubt (in the name of simplicity) produce a
completely new, incompatible, piece-meal standard, which will in the
end be even more complex, make the same mistakes as SGML did, add some
more of its own, throw out the useful features of SGML/HyTime, and add
a couple of useless ones instead.
And since no XML implementor will be bright enough to understand the
produced standard, no really conforming implementations will come
forth anyway, and any remaining interoperability between
implementations will be purely by chance.
Regs, Pierre.
--
Pierre R. Mai <····@acm.org> http://www.pmsf.de/pmai/
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
We cause accidents. -- Nathaniel Borenstein
From: Lars Bjønnes
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <87wv503itt.fsf@siteloft.com>
Steve Long <·········@isomedia.com> writes:
> Any ideas for implementing this functionality in the XML world, a
> direction that much of the sofware world seems to be heading?
<URL: http://www.w3.org/XML/Linking >
--
Lars
On Wed, 18 Jul 2001 17:33:43 GMT, Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
> Since documentation strings are routinely discarded by most CL systems,
> the best way to do this would be to use an interface that could take a
> package name, a symbol name, and the documentation type. This would be a
> lot easier to implement on top of the generic function documentation than
> interfacing with magic values of the documentation string.
>
I would prefer this "scheme" to any that ties down symbol property
names, or specifies a particular location (in the source file, in a
"parallell" documentation file or in a db) , or in some particular file
or text format. In particular, I would not want to have HTML as the
common agreed-upon format.
There are obvious advantages in that there is no requirement for the
symbol's documentation to be loaded into the running (development)
environment. The function provider is free to choose whatever tool that
suits him in the development phase, as well as the way his external
audience should see the finished documentation.
Lars
>>>>> "Marcin" == Marcin Tustin <·······@GUeswhatthisbitisfor.mindless.com> writes:
Marcin> Actually, how powerful is the document string feature? (I'll go read about
Marcin> it later)? Has anyone found the need to build something more like javadoc
Marcin> (or Doxygen)? (I do mean javadoc, not api documentation).
I'm not familiar with javadoc, but perhaps Mark K's user_man package
is what you are looking for. (See the CMU AI archives). It extracts,
I think, the docstrings of functions and produces TeX output for the
function and docstring.
Ray
From: Erik Naggum
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <3204468580853022@naggum.net>
* Raymond Toy
> I'm not familiar with javadoc, but perhaps Mark K's user_man package
> is what you are looking for. (See the CMU AI archives). It extracts,
> I think, the docstrings of functions and produces TeX output for the
> function and docstring.
I think this is a bad way to use documentation strings. This is also why
I think literate programming is bunk. The best case of documentation
strings put to real use that I know of is GNU Emacs. Even with Emacs,
there is a separate manual, written to be _read_, that describes a lot
more stuff in a pedagogical order and with an eye to physical proximity
of related details and information. Documentation strings are somewhat
like hypertext at its worst (i.e., not much better than the Web): They
are intended to be read in a very well-defined context of pre-existing
knowledge. Just like the argument list of a function should not be used
to tell those who do not know what it does how to use it, documentation
strings should not be considered the final word. Extracting them into an
external file in randomized order (such as alphabetically by symbol name)
is worse than useless -- a programmer who used them intelligently would
arrive at them through a path of discovery that has no relation to simple
collation orders.
The more standardized something is, the more one must expect people to
know it. A brief documentation string would not suffice for symbols in
the common-lisp package, because anything that could be written briefly
would already be known to the reader. The need for access to the full-
blown documentation in a nicely formatted and consistent form arises from
the fact that people will look for different minute details and should be
able to end their search quickly because they are in known territory.
Writing good documentation is hard, because intelligent people bore
easily and just put down documentation that explains the obvious, yet do
not use documentation that fails to be readable. What should be in the
documentation is stuff that people cannot figure out for themselves
faster than reading it. That is why I love specifications to be online
and why I think hypertext in specifications is such a wonderful use of
the technology. This is why I wrote hyperspec.el. But now I want the
same level of documentation for vendor-supplied pacakges that come with
tons of high quality documentation, although more of a tutorial kind than
specifications, since it is written after the fact, rather than before.
The reason I think literate programming is so stupid is the same reason I
found SGML's promise of "one source, multiple publications" to be so
hollow and ignorant. A piece of text has an audience, a context, and a
set of expectations associated with it. Until we can program computers
to deal with this, _people_ need to write text for different audiences,
different contexts, and different expectations. When I look at code, I
expect the documentation there to help me understand it. When I read the
documentation, I hope to understand the system design. If the system
design expectation is attempted filled by giving me a mere dump of the
code documentation sans code, I have reason to accuse people of fraud.
When I read specifications, I expect it to become the background noise of
my own expectations when I deal with a conforming system. (This is why
lack of conformance is so much more annoying than bugs in stuff that does
nto purport to conform to a specification; I have to become _conscious_
of my expectation that the specification is actually implemented, and
that means having to test for it and not being able to believe it. This
is like asking people if they understand every word you use, instead of
assuming that you agree to speaking the same language.)
Also, please note that a lot more than functions have documentation.
That often tends to be forgotten in systems that primarly have functions
as exportable interface concepts. Classes, slots, types, packages,
variables, and a lot more stuff have documentation in Common Lisp. It is
sometimes hard to understand how people who invented these things could
be so futuristic that they would foresee such needs. (It is likewise sad
to see vendors completely ignoring the specification and reinventing the
wheel badly when the "need" suddenly arises and half-assed stuff like the
"web" suddenly appears.)
#:Erik
--
There is nothing in this message that under normal circumstances should
cause Barry Margolin to announce his moral superiority over others, but
one never knows how he needs to behave to maintain his belief in it.
Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> wrote:
: (It is likewise sad to see vendors completely ignoring the specification
: and reinventing the wheel badly when the "need" suddenly arises and
: half-assed stuff like the "web" suddenly appears.)
Nevertheless the ... "web" made it, the lispmachine or Xanadu not.
Worse WAS better, esp. in this pragmatic context.
For extracting docstrings with simple text scanning I also have a simple
perl script (exefied to win32) at my pages somewhere (lspdoc) which
generates winhelp and html. But mine uses the autolisp commenting
conventions, which has no docstrings.
BTW: Corman Lisp puts the CLHS page entry in a symbol property in the
interactive environment. (I extended it to CLtL2 also).
Only the page name, not the whole url.
This needs less memory than emacs and is much faster, but
emacs of course has all the other features we love.
--
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/acadwiki/AutoLispFaq
Reini Urban <······@x-ray.at> writes:
> BTW: Corman Lisp puts the CLHS page entry in a symbol property in the
> interactive environment. (I extended it to CLtL2 also).
> Only the page name, not the whole url.
> This needs less memory than emacs and is much faster, but
> emacs of course has all the other features we love.
Actually, Emacs keeps its docstrings on disk. So you only pay the
price of keeping them in memory if you use them.
Thomas F. Burdick wrote:
>Reini Urban <······@x-ray.at> writes:
>
>> BTW: Corman Lisp puts the CLHS page entry in a symbol property in the
>> interactive environment. (I extended it to CLtL2 also).
>> Only the page name, not the whole url.
>> This needs less memory than emacs and is much faster, but
>> emacs of course has all the other features we love.
>
>Actually, Emacs keeps its docstrings on disk. So you only pay the
>price of keeping them in memory if you use them.
Oops, I knew that. But why don't they store just the offset into the DOC
file as symbol property? Just like corman lisp does it.
RANT: maybe because their int is too short :)
Disk IO vs Memory probably.
--
Reini Urban
http://tv.mur.at/film/
From: Roland Kaufmann
Subject: Re: So, where's the "Javadoc" for COMMON Lisp?
Date:
Message-ID: <tl2bsmboah1.fsf@space.at>
>>>>> "Erik" == Erik Naggum <····@naggum.net> writes:
Erik> * Raymond Toy
>> I'm not familiar with javadoc, but perhaps Mark K's user_man
>> package is what you are looking for. (See the CMU AI
>> archives). It extracts, I think, the docstrings of functions
>> and produces TeX output for the function and docstring.
Erik> I think this is a bad way to use documentation strings.
Erik> This is also why I think literate programming is bunk. The
Erik> best case of documentation strings put to real use that I
Erik> know of is GNU Emacs. Even with Emacs, there is a separate
Erik> manual, written to be _read_, that describes a lot more
Erik> stuff in a pedagogical order and with an eye to physical
Erik> proximity of related details and information.
True, but the purpose of literate programming (LP) [1] is *not* to
generate _User Documentation_ from (annotated) source code, but to
describe the implementation in more detail than usually done with
comments.
For example, Knuth's TeXbook, i.e. the user manual of TeX is not a
literate program (although it does contain some TeX macros with
explanations), but "TeX, the Program" is. Few people bother to read
the latter, because it is not necessary if you just want to use TeX.
[snip]
Erik> Writing good documentation is hard, because intelligent
Erik> people bore easily and just put down documentation that
Erik> explains the obvious, yet do not use documentation that
Erik> fails to be readable. What should be in the documentation
Erik> is stuff that people cannot figure out for themselves faster
Erik> than reading it. That is why I love specifications to be
Erik> online and why I think hypertext in specifications is such a
Erik> wonderful use of the technology. This is why I wrote
Erik> hyperspec.el. But now I want the same level of
Erik> documentation for vendor-supplied pacakges that come with
Erik> tons of high quality documentation, although more of a
Erik> tutorial kind than specifications, since it is written after
Erik> the fact, rather than before.
Erik> The reason I think literate programming is so stupid is
Erik> the same reason I found SGML's promise of "one source,
Erik> multiple publications" to be so hollow and ignorant.
What actually works (with LP) is to have one source from which the
code and _documentation of the implementation_ can be extracted.
Depending on the LP tools used, the documentation can include
cross-references, indices etc. Probably not such a big deal for Lisp
users, who have introspective tools available, but useful for
languages like C.
Erik> A piece of text has an audience, a context, and a set of
Erik> expectations associated with it. Until we can program
Erik> computers to deal with this, _people_ need to write text for
Erik> different audiences, different contexts, and different
Erik> expectations. When I look at code, I expect the
Erik> documentation there to help me understand it. When I read
Erik> the documentation, I hope to understand the system design.
This would be something like the architecture documentation, right?
Unfortunately, I have seen few good examples of this kind of
document. With Emacs, you can get some ideas about its architecture
from the Emacs Manual, some more from the Emacs Lisp Manual, the Emacs
paper, but I know of no document which describes the "design" in a way
detailed enough to make one feel comfortable with changing things.
Erik> If the system design expectation is attempted filled by
Erik> giving me a mere dump of the code documentation sans code, I
Erik> have reason to accuse people of fraud. When I read
Erik> specifications, I expect it to become the background noise
Erik> of my own expectations when I deal with a conforming system.
Erik> (This is why lack of conformance is so much more annoying
Erik> than bugs in stuff that does nto purport to conform to a
Erik> specification; I have to become _conscious_ of my
Erik> expectation that the specification is actually implemented,
Erik> and that means having to test for it and not being able to
Erik> believe it. This is like asking people if they understand
Erik> every word you use, instead of assuming that you agree to
Erik> speaking the same language.)
I have a similar problem with documentation, or more generally with
"broken rules"--once I see that there are (grave) mistakes, I am
getting sceptical and start wondering how much I can trust it. LP
does help here by reducing the distance between code and
documentation, so it is easier to keep them in sync. One still has to
update the other documents (user manual, architecture document) by hand/
Erik> Also, please note that a lot more than functions have
Erik> documentation. That often tends to be forgotten in systems
Erik> that primarly have functions as exportable interface
Erik> concepts. Classes, slots, types, packages, variables, and a
Erik> lot more stuff have documentation in Common Lisp. It is
Erik> sometimes hard to understand how people who invented these
Erik> things could be so futuristic that they would foresee such
Erik> needs. (It is likewise sad to see vendors completely
Erik> ignoring the specification and reinventing the wheel badly
Erik> when the "need" suddenly arises and half-assed stuff like
Erik> the "web" suddenly appears.)
Could you elaborate?
[1] From what I gathered as a long time reader of comp.prog.literate
and occasional user of LP.
--
best regards
Roland Kaufmann
Roland Kaufmann <···············@space.at> wrote in message
····················@space.at...
> What actually works (with LP) is to have one source from which the
> code and _documentation of the implementation_ can be extracted.
> Depending on the LP tools used, the documentation can include
> cross-references, indices etc. Probably not such a big deal for Lisp
> users, who have introspective tools available, but useful for
> languages like C.
I've been following this discussion, and a question, at the risk of
sounding ignorant, but...
What introspective tools/features exist in/for Cl?
Larry Loen <······@rchland.vnet.ibm.com> writes:
> What I think I need now is what I needed at a comparable point in my
> Java journey -- a simple, on-line, indexed, HTML version of all the
> functions described.
You are aware of the fact that the text of the ANSI Common Lisp
standard is available in HTML form as something called the HyperSpec,
from www.xanalys.com?
This will give you a complete reference of the whole
standard-specified functionality of your implementation. For
everything else, you'll have to take a look at the documentation that
comes with your implementation.
If you use Emacs, you will probably also want to use one of the Emacs
<-> HyperSpec interfaces, which will look up the HyperSpec entry to
the symbol-at-point at the touch of a button. A couple of them come
with the ILISP distribution.
LispWorks on Windows/Linux already interfaces to the HyperSpec and
Xanalys' vendor documentation in an automated way.
For other implementations/editors/environments YMMV.
Regs, Pierre.
--
Pierre R. Mai <····@acm.org> http://www.pmsf.de/pmai/
The most likely way for the world to be destroyed, most experts agree,
is by accident. That's where we come in; we're computer professionals.
We cause accidents. -- Nathaniel Borenstein
Larry,
I used javadoc was a tool for reading my class documentation exported in an HTML format. Lisp entities can carry a documentation string that you can
access programmatically and write out as HTML, but someone (i.e., you)
have to include the documentation string.
Some ways to educate yourself...
Books besides the "Gentle approach":
"Object-Oriented Common Lisp", Stephen Slade (sp)
"Common Lisp, the Language", Guy Steele (a must if you are going to do any extensive amount of work)
"On Lisp", Paul Graham (macros -- a more difficult subject but very useful)
Submit questions to this newsgroup. Sure, folks sometimes pontificate on this subject or that, and sometimes they can be a bit short with newbies
(especially grad students looking for help with their homework!) but
I've learned an enormous amount from these lads (and lasses).
SLong
Larry Loen wrote:
> Thanks to people posting here, I've read the "Gentle Introduction" and even coded up a few interesting programs in LISP.
>
> What I think I need now is what I needed at a comparable point in my Java journey -- a simple, on-line, indexed, HTML version of all the functions
> described.
>
> Something very much like Javadoc does.
>
> I don't really want another book (I have a couple more, but nowadays, books are awkward and I flit around several computers and between home and
> work). As much as I admire Knuth, I don't want stuff in tex format (which I don't yet have any way of handling, especially a whole directory's
> worth).
>
> If it isn't HTML, it does have to be in a format that isn't Unix-specific and one which will work on a variety of platforms readily without me
> learning another damn tool.
>
> In short, I need a place to go to "find out" what I don't know about COMMON Lisp, function-by-function as I need it.
>
> Larry