WiRED: Lisp and Smalltalk on "Endangered Species" list
Mark Watson
history of programming languages.
The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
listed as "endangered species" :-(
-Mark
-- Mark Watson, author and Java consultant
-- www.markwatson.com - Open Source and Open Content
-- www.knowledgebooks.com - Commercial artificial intelligence software
Craig Brozefsky
> The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
> history of programming languages.
>
> The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
> listed as "endangered species" :-(
Yah, that's an authoritative voice in our world...
Kenny Tilton
>
> The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
> history of programming languages.
>
> The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
> listed as "endangered species" :-(
Hey, we're just happy to be remembered! Now let's see who goes to whose
funeral, Lisp or Wired.
:)
--
kenny tilton
clinisys, inc
---------------------------------------------------------------
""Well, I've wrestled with reality for thirty-five years, Doctor,
and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.""
Elwood P. Dowd
sv0f
<kti...@nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>Mark Watson wrote:
>>
>> The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
>> history of programming languages.
>>
>> The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
>> listed as "endangered species" :-(
>
>Hey, we're just happy to be remembered! Now let's see who goes to whose
>funeral, Lisp or Wired.
>
>:)
I recently inherited a stack of Wireds from the late 1990s.
It's absolutely hilarious to read their pompous predictions
about a future that we know has not come to be.
(Example from the 10/97 issue I scanned yesterday: By 2000,
all video will be streamed via the internet, traditional
television and cable companies will be defunct, RealNetworks
will be your one-stop media superstore, and the only real
question is whether they will still be an independent company
(worth $100,000,000,000) or part of Microsoft.)
Given their track record, I'm actually uplifted by this news!
Barry Margolin
>I recently inherited a stack of Wireds from the late 1990s.
>
>It's absolutely hilarious to read their pompous predictions
>about a future that we know has not come to be.
>
>(Example from the 10/97 issue I scanned yesterday: By 2000,
>all video will be streamed via the internet, traditional
>television and cable companies will be defunct, RealNetworks
>will be your one-stop media superstore, and the only real
>question is whether they will still be an independent company
>(worth $100,000,000,000) or part of Microsoft.)
>
>Given their track record, I'm actually uplifted by this news!
To their credit, they were hardly the only ones predicting this. By many
accounts, broadband was supposed to revolutionize the Internet, enabling a
host of content-delivery applications like this. Cable TV companies
upgraded their infrastructures with the expectation of video-on-demand and
interactive TV, but the killer apps never materialized; now all they do
with it is provide cable modem service and additional digital TV channels,
and they're losing money as a result.
The track record of futurists has been pretty poor for a long time -- where
are all the flying cars? We don't have *any* of the technology that "2001:
A Space Osyssey" predicted -- even picturephones, which should have been
easy (compared to space colonization), are still just a curiosity rather
than everyday appliances.
--
Barry Margolin, bar...@genuity.net
Genuity, Woburn, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.
Paul Wallich
Barry Margolin <bar...@genuity.net> wrote:
>In article <none-11060...@129.59.212.53>, sv0f <no...@none.org> wrote:
>>I recently inherited a stack of Wireds from the late 1990s.
>>
>>It's absolutely hilarious to read their pompous predictions
>>about a future that we know has not come to be.
>>
>>(Example from the 10/97 issue I scanned yesterday: By 2000,
>>all video will be streamed via the internet, traditional
>>television and cable companies will be defunct, RealNetworks
>>will be your one-stop media superstore, and the only real
>>question is whether they will still be an independent company
>>(worth $100,000,000,000) or part of Microsoft.)
>>
>>Given their track record, I'm actually uplifted by this news!
>
>To their credit, they were hardly the only ones predicting this. By many
>accounts, broadband was supposed to revolutionize the Internet, enabling a
>host of content-delivery applications like this. Cable TV companies
>upgraded their infrastructures with the expectation of video-on-demand and
>interactive TV, but the killer apps never materialized; now all they do
>with it is provide cable modem service and additional digital TV channels,
>and they're losing money as a result.
>
>The track record of futurists has been pretty poor for a long time -- where
>are all the flying cars? We don't have *any* of the technology that "2001:
>A Space Osyssey" predicted -- even picturephones, which should have been
>easy (compared to space colonization), are still just a curiosity rather
>than everyday appliances.
Most futurists (and everyone else) have a very difficult time
distinguishing things that scale from things that don't. Especially when
the scaling effects are nonlinear (as with picturephones or AI winter).
And, of course, some things come true without having the effects that
people thought they would have (we all have Dick Tracy's wrist radio, but
it hasn't really changed the world, nor has the replacement of millions
of jobs by automation led to increased leisure...)
And, as broadband companies or Doug Lenat found, even a relatively
small error (less than a factor of 2) in estimating adoption rate can
really mess up your business plan.
James A. Crippen
> Most futurists (and everyone else) have a very difficult time
> distinguishing things that scale from things that don't.
Most futurists don't have any more reason to be listened to than
science fiction authors. And most SF authors do actual research for
what they write, whereas futurists tend to just spew crud off the top
of their heads, much like usenet posters.
Usenet is free*. Wired costs money. I'd rather read usenet.
* Or at least, it's free in the sense that access to it is a side
effect of something else that I pay for.
> Especially when the scaling effects are nonlinear (as with
> picturephones or AI winter). And, of course, some things come true
> without having the effects that people thought they would have (we
> all have Dick Tracy's wrist radio, but it hasn't really changed the
> world, nor has the replacement of millions of jobs by automation led
> to increased leisure...)
Indeed, there's more jobs now *because* of automation than what
automation replaced. It takes maybe *two* people to watch the
machines that do the task one persone used to do alone. And the
machines are so complex now that they need another one or two people
to fix them when they break. But machines don't complain about work
environments and don't ask for raises, and most importantly don't form
labor unions.
> And, as broadband companies or Doug Lenat found, even a relatively
> small error (less than a factor of 2) in estimating adoption rate can
> really mess up your business plan.
I think the *real* reason why much of what was predicted has not come
to pass is because in this consumerism and capitalism based society it
takes both money, advertising clout, and investment capital to make
any new invention successful. The days of the lone independent
inventor are numbered. Even though the capability of human
comprehension has improved with increased levels of education the idea
persists that one person can't possibly understand any field well
enough to invent something revolutionary. So most people go around
with the idea that it takes a committee backed by a large corporation
or institution (government, academic, industrial, etc) to make new
things. Of course, committees don't usually get much done. Look at
Common Lisp, that's a great committee example...
The human race will decree from time to time: "There is something at
which it is absolutely forbidden to laugh."
-- Nietzche on Common Lisp
'james
--
James A. Crippen <ja...@unlambda.com> ,-./-. Anchorage, Alaska,
Lambda Unlimited: Recursion 'R' Us | |/ | USA, 61.20939N, -149.767W
Y = \f.(\x.f(xx)) (\x.f(xx)) | |\ | Earth, Sol System,
Y(F) = F(Y(F)) \_,-_/ Milky Way.
Paul F. Dietz
> Most futurists don't have any more reason to be listened to than
> science fiction authors. And most SF authors do actual research for
> what they write, whereas futurists tend to just spew crud off the top
> of their heads, much like usenet posters.
Most SF authors are trying to *entertain*. If they accurately
predict the future it is only by accident.
Paul
Dvd Avins
"[F]uturists", unlike SF authors, make their living talking by making
predictions.
-- Attaining and helping others attain "Aha!" experiences, as satisfying as
attaining and helping others attain orgasms.
Clark Wilson
says...
> The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
> history of programming languages.
>
> The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
> listed as "endangered species" :-(
>
When I first looked at the chart (and it is cool) I thought that also.
But I think that the symbols for Lisp are orange, not red.
Green is "Active: thousands of users"
Orange is "Protected: taught at universities, compilers available"
Red is "Endangered: usage dropping off"
So my reading of the three entries on the Lisp branch (in chronological
order) was:
Lisp -- protected
Common Lisp -- active
ANSI Common Lisp -- protected
Clark Wilson
eternal Lisp newbie
Christopher Browne
> In article <none-11060...@129.59.212.53>, sv0f <no...@none.org> wrote:
>>I recently inherited a stack of Wireds from the late 1990s.
>>
>>It's absolutely hilarious to read their pompous predictions
>>about a future that we know has not come to be.
>>
>>(Example from the 10/97 issue I scanned yesterday: By 2000, all
>>video will be streamed via the internet, traditional television and
>>cable companies will be defunct, RealNetworks will be your one-stop
>>media superstore, and the only real question is whether they will
>>still be an independent company (worth $100,000,000,000) or part of
>>Microsoft.)
>>
>>Given their track record, I'm actually uplifted by this news!
>
> To their credit, they were hardly the only ones predicting this. By
> many accounts, broadband was supposed to revolutionize the Internet,
> enabling a host of content-delivery applications like this. Cable
> TV companies upgraded their infrastructures with the expectation of
> video-on-demand and interactive TV, but the killer apps never
> materialized; now all they do with it is provide cable modem service
> and additional digital TV channels, and they're losing money as a
> result.
It seemed obvious to me that this was _preposterous_ because the sort
of point-to-point services being proposed needed spectacular amounts
of bandwidth going across quite long distances.
"Video on demand" requires a STAGGERING lot of bandwidth, and the
notion that the infrastructure could be paid for on the basis of not
needing to go to Blockbuster for videos was really flimsy. It's NOT
going to get paid for out of people redirecting $5/week they might
spend on videos to network infrastructure.
Of course, there is an obvious alternative route...
"If you can figure out an application of your idea to porn, you've got
it made." -- Peter da Silva
"Has anyone ever thought about the fact that in general, the only web
sites that are consistently making money are the ones dealing in
pornography? This brings new meaning to the term, "obscene
profits". :)" -- Paul Robinson <postm...@paul.washington.dc.us>
The commercial viability of VCRs was assured by the ability that it
provided to vitalize the pornography industry. Rather than the risks
of going, trenchcoated, to the local porn theatre, perverts could pay
considerably more, but attain the benefit of viewing smut in the
relative safety and comfort of their own homes. That resulted in
enough cash flow to get volumes high enough for prices to fall to the
point where VCRs became attractive for the "legitimate" movie
industry.
> The track record of futurists has been pretty poor for a long time
> -- where are all the flying cars? We don't have *any* of the
> technology that "2001: A Space Osyssey" predicted -- even
> picturephones, which should have been easy (compared to space
> colonization), are still just a curiosity rather than everyday
> appliances.
I was very disappointed with the movie _Puppet Masters_; one of the
major things it _lost_ in the translation from Heinlein to film was
the flying cars.
Picturephones are technically easy; they're commercially unacceptable
because they expose peoples' ugly mugs to the world from home. If
picturephones became popular, so also would men's makeup kits. (I'm
deadly serious on this...)
--
(concatenate 'string "aa454" "@freenet.carleton.ca")
http://www.cbbrowne.com/info/linuxdistributions.html
"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
Christopher C. Stacy
Well, maybe: a screen saver that has flying cons cells instead of toasters, anyone?
Andy
news:usn3t5...@grant.org:
> Where are the flying cars? There were supposed to be flying
> cars?
You didn't get the memo ?
Kenny Tilton
"Christopher C. Stacy" wrote:
>
> Where are the flying cars? There were supposed to be flying cars?
Yes. And moving sidewalks. John Prine did some good work in this area.
In a way the predictions have all come true, except the win has been in
the transportation of information (the Web), not people. Back then when
those Jetson predictions were being made, folks were limited by their
idea of the forms progress could take. The astonishing things of the day
were jet airplanes and rocketships and even the automobile was making
rapid advances; predictions blindly got stamped in the same coin of
personal transportation.
Espen Vestre
> (Example from the 10/97 issue I scanned yesterday: By 2000,
> all video will be streamed via the internet, traditional
> television and cable companies will be defunct, RealNetworks
> will be your one-stop media superstore, and the only real
> question is whether they will still be an independent company
> (worth $100,000,000,000) or part of Microsoft.)
We would have been a good deal closer to broadband nirvana if people
hadn't started believing in these acid trip fantasies about the
laws of economy suddenly being turned upside down. :-(
--
(espen)
Paul Foley
> "Christopher C. Stacy" wrote:
>>
>> Where are the flying cars? There were supposed to be flying cars?
> Yes. And moving sidewalks. John Prine did some good work in this area.
I guess there are flying cars -- the car (as in cons, not vehicle)
reference appears to have flown over your head :-)
--
Oh dear god. In case you weren't aware, "ad hominem" is not latin for
"the user of this technique is a fine debater."
-- Thomas F. Burdick
(setq reply-to
(concatenate 'string "Paul Foley " "<mycroft" '(#\@) "actrix.gen.nz>"))
Chris Harrington
of current info. It just takes a couple of coorporate "IT" managers to read
this sort of dribble and move on from Smalltalk or Lisp...maybe .NET...all
the hype says it will be huge!
Chris
"Craig Brozefsky" <cr...@red-bean.com> wrote in message
news:7usn3tm...@piracy.red-bean.com...
Ed L Cashin
...
> So my reading of the three entries on the Lisp branch (in chronological
> order) was:
>
> Lisp -- protected
> Common Lisp -- active
> ANSI Common Lisp -- protected
I wonder what they meant by "Common Lisp" as distinct from "ANSI
Common Lisp". The only thing I can think of would be pre-ANSI CL
implementations ... isn't gcl one of those?
In that case, it would be weird to say that the old versions are
active and the current ones are just protected.
--
--Ed L Cashin | PGP public key:
eca...@uga.edu | http://noserose.net/e/pgp/
Clark Wilson
> ...
>
> I wonder what they meant by "Common Lisp" as distinct from "ANSI
> Common Lisp". The only thing I can think of would be pre-ANSI CL
> implementations ... isn't gcl one of those?
>
> In that case, it would be weird to say that the old versions are
> active and the current ones are just protected.
>
I forgot to mention that CLOS is also listed as green -- i.e., "Active:
thousands of users". It has its own little side branch from the Lisp
branch.
chw
Barry Margolin
Clark Wilson <wils...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>Green is "Active: thousands of users"
>Orange is "Protected: taught at universities, compilers available"
>Red is "Endangered: usage dropping off"
>
>So my reading of the three entries on the Lisp branch (in chronological
>order) was:
>
>Lisp -- protected
>Common Lisp -- active
>ANSI Common Lisp -- protected
Well, I'd think that Lisp should be closer to Green, because of Emacs Lisp
and AutoLisp.
Barry Margolin
Clark Wilson <wils...@hotmail.com> wrote:
>I forgot to mention that CLOS is also listed as green -- i.e., "Active:
>thousands of users". It has its own little side branch from the Lisp
>branch.
So who are these thousands of people using CLOS without using Common Lisp?
Sounds like a neat trick.
I think that inconsistency really destroys the credibility of the research.
Unless by Common Lisp they mean "Using CL but avoiding the CLOS features".
Clark Wilson
@hotmail.com says...
> In article <3D064E2A...@markwatson.com>, ma...@markwatson.com
> says...
> > The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
> > history of programming languages.
> >
> > The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
> > listed as "endangered species" :-(
> >
>
> When I first looked at the chart (and it is cool) I thought that also.
> But I think that the symbols for Lisp are orange, not red.
>
I failed to notice the text at the top of the page. The obscure takes
me a little while to notice, the obvious I notice much later. :-)
The blurb says, in part: "Among the most endangered are Ada, APL, B
(the predecessor of C), Lisp, Oberon, Smalltalk, and Simula."
I dunno.
Here are the sources listed at the bottom of the two-page spread:
Paul Boutin
Brent Hailpern, associate director of computer science at IBM Research
The Retrocomputing Museum
Todd Proebsting, senior researcher at Microsoft
Gio Wiederhold, computer scientist, Stanford University.
chw
Christopher C. Stacy
Clark> The blurb says, in part: "Among the most endangered are Ada, APL, B
Clark> (the predecessor of C), Lisp, Oberon, Smalltalk, and Simula."
I see at least as many job ads for APL programmers (and then some
more if you count the modern APL descendants) as for Common Lisp.
Julian Stecklina
> Mark Watson wrote:
> >
> > The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
> > history of programming languages.
> >
> > The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
> > listed as "endangered species" :-(
>
> Hey, we're just happy to be remembered! Now let's see who goes to whose
> funeral, Lisp or Wired.
Are there any languages that really died? Most of them have evolved into
something new or do I just not know what languages existed before I
was born? :)
Regards,
Julian
--
Meine Hompage: http://julian.re6.de
Ich suche eine PCMCIA v1.x type I/II/III Netzwerkkarte.
Ich biete als Tauschobjekt eine v2 100MBit Karte in OVP.
Julian Stecklina
[...]
> >The track record of futurists has been pretty poor for a long time -- where
> >are all the flying cars? We don't have *any* of the technology that "2001:
> >A Space Osyssey" predicted -- even picturephones, which should have been
> >easy (compared to space colonization), are still just a curiosity rather
> >than everyday appliances.
Do you remember the Wrath of Khan or the corresponding Star Trek
episode? They said in 1999 a bunch of genetic-engineered supermen were
sent hibernating into deep space. Seems that nobody is perfect in
predicting the future. :)
Gisle Sælensminde
> In article <MPG.17707948...@news.teranews.com>, wilsonch0
> @hotmail.com says...
>> In article <3D064E2A...@markwatson.com>, ma...@markwatson.com
>> says...
>> > The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
>> > history of programming languages.
>> >
>> > The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
>> > listed as "endangered species" :-(
>> >
>>
>> When I first looked at the chart (and it is cool) I thought that also.
>> But I think that the symbols for Lisp are orange, not red.
>>
>> ...
>
> I failed to notice the text at the top of the page. The obscure takes
> me a little while to notice, the obvious I notice much later. :-)
>
> The blurb says, in part: "Among the most endangered are Ada, APL, B
> (the predecessor of C), Lisp, Oberon, Smalltalk, and Simula."
Ada is certainly not dead (or near dead). There are several companies
making compilers, and they seem to have a sufficient customer base to
keep it going. The language is still big in some niche sectors like
safeity-critical, embedded software. Now when the C++ hype seems to be
over, the pressure to "rewrite to a more modern language like C++" is
less than it used to be. The number of postings on comp.lang.ada is
of the same magnitude as this group.
Simula (my first language at university), is near dead. As far as
I know no universities teach it any longer. One of the reasons
was that the compiler we used (Lund simula), was no longer
maintained it or ported it to new architechtures. They then
switched to java(this was in 1996). There is still a Simula user
group (ASU, The Association of SIMULA Users), that holds annual
conferences, so the language is not completly dead.
There was a discussion on comp.lang.ada once, where someone tried
to find a language that actually was dead, and in all cases
some other poster managed to find some examples of actual systems
that still used the langauge. Maybe B is dead?
--
Gisle Sælensminde ( gi...@ii.uib.no )
With sufficient thrust, pigs fly just fine. However, this is not
necessarily a good idea. It is hard to be sure where they are going
to land, and it could be dangerous sitting under them as they fly
overhead. (from RFC 1925)
Paul Wallich
Julian Stecklina <der_j...@web.de> wrote:
>Paul Wallich <p...@panix.com> writes:
>
>
>[...]
>
>> >The track record of futurists has been pretty poor for a long time -- where
>> >are all the flying cars? We don't have *any* of the technology that "2001:
>> >A Space Osyssey" predicted -- even picturephones, which should have been
>> >easy (compared to space colonization), are still just a curiosity rather
>> >than everyday appliances.
>
>
>Do you remember the Wrath of Khan or the corresponding Star Trek
>episode? They said in 1999 a bunch of genetic-engineered supermen were
>sent hibernating into deep space. Seems that nobody is perfect in
>predicting the future. :)
Just for the record, I didn't write a single word of that. I don't
necessarily disagree with it, but the apparent attribution is wrong.
paul
Christopher Browne
> In article <MPG.17711e1bd...@news.teranews.com>, Clark Wilson wrote:
>> In article <MPG.17707948...@news.teranews.com>, wilsonch0
>> @hotmail.com says...
>>> In article <3D064E2A...@markwatson.com>, ma...@markwatson.com
>>> says...
>>> > The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
>>> > history of programming languages.
>>> >
>>> > The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
>>> > listed as "endangered species" :-(
>>> >
>>>
>>> When I first looked at the chart (and it is cool) I thought that also.
>>> But I think that the symbols for Lisp are orange, not red.
>>>
>>> ...
>>
>> I failed to notice the text at the top of the page. The obscure takes
>> me a little while to notice, the obvious I notice much later. :-)
>>
>> The blurb says, in part: "Among the most endangered are Ada, APL, B
>> (the predecessor of C), Lisp, Oberon, Smalltalk, and Simula."
>
> Ada is certainly not dead (or near dead). There are several companies
> making compilers, and they seem to have a sufficient customer base to
> keep it going. The language is still big in some niche sectors like
> safeity-critical, embedded software. Now when the C++ hype seems to be
> over, the pressure to "rewrite to a more modern language like C++" is
> less than it used to be. The number of postings on comp.lang.ada is
> of the same magnitude as this group.
There seems to be a fair bit of Ada activity these days.
There's <http://www.redrocketconsortium.com/zbc/> building a small
"ERP" system atop Ada.
SourceForge has 45 Ada-based projects; compare with 187 Lisp projects
and 110 Scheme projects.
That's hardly a "rigorous" standard, but if you wanted to look at the
details, I think you'd find that some portion of those projects _are_
fairly active.
People are assortedly keeping CORBA and GTK interfaces to GNU Ada
reasonably up to date, which is a pretty positive sign that _someone_
cares about this.
> Simula (my first language at university), is near dead. As far as I
> know no universities teach it any longer. One of the reasons was
> that the compiler we used (Lund simula), was no longer maintained it
> or ported it to new architechtures. They then switched to java(this
> was in 1996). There is still a Simula user group (ASU, The
> Association of SIMULA Users), that holds annual conferences, so the
> language is not completly dead.
> There was a discussion on comp.lang.ada once, where someone tried to
> find a language that actually was dead, and in all cases some other
> poster managed to find some examples of actual systems that still
> used the langauge. Maybe B is dead?
Maclisp is probably effectively pretty dead, as despite there being
emulator environments, there aren't active "native" environments for
it.
Icon is probably marginally more "alive" than Simula. Modula-3 and
Eiffel are both in there somewhere, probably of similar interest to
Ada. (It's somewhat too bad that all three have stayed viable; it
would likely be a better thing if some "folding together" could allow
combining some of their communities to build a bigger community of
support...)
--
(concatenate 'string "aa454" "@freenet.carleton.ca")
http://www3.sympatico.ca/cbbrowne/languages.html
Why don't sheep shrink when it rains?
Costas
wrote:
>Kenny Tilton <kti...@nyc.rr.com> writes:
>
>> Mark Watson wrote:
>> >
>> > The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
>> > history of programming languages.
>> >
>> > The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
>> > listed as "endangered species" :-(
>>
>> Hey, we're just happy to be remembered! Now let's see who goes to whose
>> funeral, Lisp or Wired.
>
>
>Are there any languages that really died? Most of them have evolved into
>something new or do I just not know what languages existed before I
>was born? :)
Snobol has not evolved although its author Ralph Griswold created
another language called Icon using some concepts of pattern matching.
Now it looks like Icon is dead.
The Wired article names some IBM sources. I am surprised that they
think Smalltalk will become extinct. Maybe they meant Visual Age
Smalltalk.
Dvd Avins
writes:
>Now it looks like Icon is dead.
I have one friend who still uses Icon as his language of choice. IIRC Python
and Ruby are what he says he'd use if Icon wasn't around.
Christopher Browne
> In article <3d07adfd...@News.CIS.DFN.DE>, cos...@nospam.com (Costas)
> writes:
>
>>Now it looks like Icon is dead.
>
> I have one friend who still uses Icon as his language of choice. IIRC Python
> and Ruby are what he says he'd use if Icon wasn't around.
The (quarterly? annual?) Icon newsletter is now dead.
Icon is still pretty nice.
--
(reverse (concatenate 'string "gro.gultn@" "enworbbc"))
http://www.cbbrowne.com/info/sap.html
"Linux is not ready for the Enterprise. There is not a single
voice-controlled app for any of the mission critical functions of the
Enterprise. Conspicuously absent are warp core control, phaser bank
activation, interstellar navigation, transporter operation, and the
all-important self-destruct sequence. Until these and thousands of
other important apps are written and deployed, Linux will just be a
toy in the Enterprise." -- Kevin Novak, Network Computing Magazine
Bijan Parsia
[snip]
> The Wired article names some IBM sources. I am surprised that they
> think Smalltalk will become extinct. Maybe they meant Visual Age
> Smalltalk.
I'm given to understand that different parts of IBM think very
differently. And that it's pretty standard for several of those parts to
totally diss Visual Age Smalltalk (VAST). However, it seems to be doing
*very* well with a fairly recently release major update (to 6), which, for
the first time I know if, is available in and easily downloaded trial
edition. Cool! I'll have to try it out.
Cheers,
Bijan Parsia.
sv0f
<kti...@nyc.rr.com> wrote:
>"Christopher C. Stacy" wrote:
>>
>> Where are the flying cars? There were supposed to be flying cars?
>
>Yes. And moving sidewalks. John Prine did some good work in this area.
And I thought he was just a musician
(http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/search-handle-form/103-8946311-2717467).
Frank A. Adrian
> where
> are all the flying cars?
Where are the flying cars?!?! Look at this link for an explaination of why
we have no flying cars!
http://www.viewaskew.com/tv/leno/flyingcar.html
faa
P.S. Lovers of Kevin Smith films will already know why...
Martin Pomije
> The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
> history of programming languages.
>
> The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
> listed as "endangered species" :-(
>
>
> -- Mark Watson, author and Java consultant
> -- www.markwatson.com - Open Source and Open Content
> -- www.knowledgebooks.com - Commercial artificial intelligence software
This is a good time to have a laugh at WiReD's expense.
I hope that you aren't using the web, because its already
been replaced... by Pointcast!
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push_pr.html
James A. Crippen
> In article <MPG.17711628a...@news.teranews.com>,
> Clark Wilson <wils...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >I forgot to mention that CLOS is also listed as green -- i.e., "Active:
> >thousands of users". It has its own little side branch from the Lisp
> >branch.
>
> So who are these thousands of people using CLOS without using Common Lisp?
> Sounds like a neat trick.
>
> I think that inconsistency really destroys the credibility of the research.
> Unless by Common Lisp they mean "Using CL but avoiding the CLOS features".
In most CL implementations nowadays you *can't* do that. Whether you
want to or not your DEFSTRUCTs and DEFTYPEs are being stuffed into the
Grand Unified Class Hierarchy somewhere.
Syntax:
slot-value /object/ /slot-name/ => /value/
Gee SLOT-VALUE only works on objects. Must be a CLOS function.
But...
(defstruct foo (slot-a t) (tab-b nil))
(setf bar (make-foo))
(slot-value bar 'tab-b) => NIL
Well how about that! A structure is an object. Who'da thunk it? So
no, you can't escape CLOS anymore. It's there whether you want it or
not. Sounds to me like they had no fscking clue what they were
talking about and got their information from the Yahoo!(R)
Directory(TM) or something. "Oh look, there's the section Lisp and
underneath it there's this thing called CLOS. Hmm. Let's assume
there's a hundred users for each web page they list..."
I must be l33t. I was just offered a subscription to Wired for
PROFESSIONALS at only $10 a year. For that kind of money I'd rather
buy a few bottles of Spaten Optimator and get drunk instead.
'james
--
James A. Crippen <ja...@unlambda.com> ,-./-. Anchorage, Alaska,
Lambda Unlimited: Recursion 'R' Us | |/ | USA, 61.20939N, -149.767W
Y = \f.(\x.f(xx)) (\x.f(xx)) | |\ | Earth, Sol System,
Y(F) = F(Y(F)) \_,-_/ Milky Way.
James A. Crippen
> In article <MPG.17707948...@news.teranews.com>, wilsonch0
> @hotmail.com says...
>
> The blurb says, in part: "Among the most endangered are Ada, APL, B
> (the predecessor of C), Lisp, Oberon, Smalltalk, and Simula."
Smalltalk and Lisp are endangered? Uhh... Just because *you*
(rhetorical You, I mean) haven't used the language in twenty years
doesn't mean it's dead.
PL/I should be listed as endangered if not dead. And BLISS (now that
VMS is mostly in C). And what about REXX? That's moribund now that
OS/2 has lost favor. BASIC sounds pretty endangered -- I'd bet that
your average computer nerd kid nowadays wouldn't know real BASIC if
they were confronted with it. Not so sure about Ada, I'm sure there's
probably lots of crusty green-painted DoD hardware running it still.
What about RPG? Or JCL?
But Lisp and Smalltalk? Hardly. Smalltalk was on the decline but
when Squeak came out the Balloon got a big breath of fresh air.
There's plenty of people playing with it nowadays.
> I dunno.
>
> Here are the sources listed at the bottom of the two-page spread:
>
> Paul Boutin
> Brent Hailpern, associate director of computer science at IBM Research
> The Retrocomputing Museum
> Todd Proebsting, senior researcher at Microsoft
> Gio Wiederhold, computer scientist, Stanford University.
What kind of credentials does Paul Boutin hold? Why is he the only
one without an affiliation?
What I really wonder is if any of these people are involved in
compilers, formal language theory, or if they're in the ACM SIGPLAN.
Probably not. They're probably involved in OO Programming Patterns or
database theory. Unqualified to know about programming language use.
Actually, I'd really be interested in serious research done on what
programming languages are in use in what fields, and what kinds of
user bases they have. Accurate research. Something that SIGPLAN
would host a talk for at their next conference. Anyone have pointers?
James A. Crippen
> Kenny Tilton <kti...@nyc.rr.com> writes:
>
> > Mark Watson wrote:
> > >
> > > The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
> > > history of programming languages.
> > >
> > > The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
> > > listed as "endangered species" :-(
> >
> > Hey, we're just happy to be remembered! Now let's see who goes to whose
> > funeral, Lisp or Wired.
>
>
> Are there any languages that really died? Most of them have evolved into
> something new or do I just not know what languages existed before I
> was born? :)
There are plenty. But most people never heard much about them in the
first place. Lots of people invent toy languages every year, but most
of them never make it beyond a user base of one or two people.
As for Real Languages that had actual user communities, there are
plenty that have actually died, even in 'recent' history (ie, since
the mid-70s). Consider BLISS. BLISS was extremely popular in the
PDP-10 and VAX crowds outside of academia. It was almost poised to
become the language monopoly that C turned into. It was well ported
amongst DEC hardware, which was most of what was on the net at the
time. VMS was written in an admixture of BLISS and Pascal. I don't
think *anyone* uses BLISS anymore unless they're into retrocomputing
or are trying to keep a wheezing old machine running. (BLISS... All
those dots!)
BCPL, the predecessor to B (which was basically a completely untyped
version of C), is quite certainly dead. BCPL I don't think ever
gained a really large mindshare, but it was certainly actively used
for a while. BCPL is quite certainly dead nowadays.
PL/I was the Ada of the 70s, the C++ of the 70s. PL/I was *the*
programming language that tried to be all things to all people. It
had everything, even Lisp-style list processing (but not the syntax).
It's actually a halfway decent language if you give it a chance. As
good as C anyway, maybe better in some ways. But it died. And I
don't think it even left much in the way of successors, either.
If you go back to the Stone Age you'll find lots of weird old
languages that died horribly when minicomputers came along. If you
wanna see a *huge* list of languages, both dead and alive, see
http://wuarchive.wustl.edu/doc/misc/lang-list.txt
I don't know if this list is still being maintained. It ought to be,
it's a valuable resource.
Dvd Avins
Crippen) writes:
>And what about REXX? That's moribund now that
>OS/2 has lost favor. BASIC sounds pretty endangered -- I'd bet that
>your average computer nerd kid nowadays wouldn't know real BASIC if
>they were confronted with it.
I believe Replic-Action still uses REXX for users who want to get into its
guts. And are VB and LotusScript not dialects of BASIC while CL is a dialect of
early Lisp?
Chris Beggy
> Mark Watson <ma...@markwatson.com> wrote in message news:<3D064E2A...@markwatson.com>...
>> The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
>> history of programming languages.
>>
>> The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
>> listed as "endangered species" :-(
>>
>> -Mark
>
> This is a good time to have a laugh at WiReD's expense.
>
> I hope that you aren't using the web, because its already
> been replaced... by Pointcast!
> http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/5.03/ff_push_pr.html
LOL! Those were the days!
Chris
Lieven Marchand
> Julian Stecklina <der_j...@web.de> writes:
>
> > Kenny Tilton <kti...@nyc.rr.com> writes:
> >
> > > Mark Watson wrote:
> > > >
> > > > The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
> > > > history of programming languages.
> > > >
> > > > The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
> > > > listed as "endangered species" :-(
> > >
> > > Hey, we're just happy to be remembered! Now let's see who goes to whose
> > > funeral, Lisp or Wired.
> >
> >
> > Are there any languages that really died? Most of them have evolved into
> > something new or do I just not know what languages existed before I
> > was born? :)
The crux of this discussion is going to be what you consider
"dead". Language use, or at least the common awareness of language
popularity, seems always to have been governed by something like
Zipf's law. A few languages, typically two or three, take up most of
the mind share, and all the rest doesn't register much.
> BCPL, the predecessor to B (which was basically a completely untyped
> version of C), is quite certainly dead. BCPL I don't think ever
> gained a really large mindshare, but it was certainly actively used
> for a while. BCPL is quite certainly dead nowadays.
At http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/users/mr/BCPL.html, you can find a new
multiplatform implementation.
> PL/I was the Ada of the 70s, the C++ of the 70s. PL/I was *the*
> programming language that tried to be all things to all people. It
> had everything, even Lisp-style list processing (but not the syntax).
> It's actually a halfway decent language if you give it a chance. As
> good as C anyway, maybe better in some ways. But it died. And I
> don't think it even left much in the way of successors, either.
I know of an active PL/I consultant who makes a good living out of
keeping some legacy stuff on IBM dinosaurs running. I also know of
openings for Jovial jobs. I think the same phenomenom that makes CL
jobs hard to find on job sites also plays in these cases.
--
Bored, now.
Lieven Marchand <m...@wyrd.be>
Jason Kantz
| The track record of futurists has been pretty poor for a long time -- where
| are all the flying cars? We don't have *any* of the technology that "2001:
| A Space Osyssey" predicted -- even picturephones, which should have been
| easy (compared to space colonization), are still just a curiosity rather
| than everyday appliances.
I went to a talk by Robert Lucky, who was an engineer at Bell Labs way
back when. He said they had some people do an analysis of the market
for picture phones to predict how they would sell.
The prediction was that sales would start off real slow and then take
off. So AT&T started selling picture phones and sales started off
real slow ... and then ...
well, the prediction was half right.
Jason Kantz
Keith Ray
> Paul Wallich <p...@panix.com> writes:
>
>
> [...]
>
> > >The track record of futurists has been pretty poor for a long time -- where
> > >are all the flying cars? We don't have *any* of the technology that "2001:
> > >A Space Osyssey" predicted -- even picturephones, which should have been
> > >easy (compared to space colonization), are still just a curiosity rather
> > >than everyday appliances.
>
>
> Do you remember the Wrath of Khan or the corresponding Star Trek
> episode? They said in 1999 a bunch of genetic-engineered supermen were
> sent hibernating into deep space. Seems that nobody is perfect in
> predicting the future. :)
According to (fiction) books by Greg Cox, it did happen, but it was a
secret. Check it out. Better than the average Star Trek book.
--
C. Keith Ray
Mike Smith
> Where are the flying cars?!?! Look at this link for an explaination of why
> we have no flying cars!
>
> http://www.viewaskew.com/tv/leno/flyingcar.html
Maybe there's still hope. This company didn't get the memo:
http://www.moller.com/skycar/m400/
The only sales price mentioned is a remarkably cheap $9.50...
;)
--
- Mike Smith
michae...@comcast.net
Dave Pearson
> Maybe there's still hope. This company didn't get the memo:
>
> http://www.moller.com/skycar/m400/
>
> The only sales price mentioned is a remarkably cheap $9.50...
>
> http://www.moller.com/sales/
And <URL:http://www.simaviation.com/fsdmisc%5B8%5D.htm> exists (fifth item
down) if you want to get some practice in while you're saving up for the
more expensive version.
--
Dave Pearson: | lbdb.el - LBDB interface.
http://www.davep.org/ | sawfish.el - Sawfish mode.
Emacs: | uptimes.el - Record emacs uptimes.
http://www.davep.org/emacs/ | quickurl.el - Recall lists of URLs.
Paolo Amoroso
wrote:
> Ada is certainly not dead (or near dead). There are several companies
> making compilers, and they seem to have a sufficient customer base to
> keep it going. The language is still big in some niche sectors like
> safeity-critical, embedded software. Now when the C++ hype seems to be
An Ada system will help explore some of the most mysterious and fascinating
worlds in the Solar System. The Cassini-Huygens spacecraft will enter an
orbit around Saturn in 2004. A few months later the Huygens probe will land
on Titan, the second largest moon in the Solar System, and the only one
with an atmosphere--and possibly also fluids on its surface. The curiosity
os seeing how the surface of Titan looks like is eating me alive...
95% of the software on board of the Cassini spacecraft is written in Ada.
This is probably one of the most ambitious space missions.
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://www.paoloamoroso.it/ency/README
Will Hartung
"Clark Wilson" <wils...@hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:MPG.17707948...@news.teranews.com...
> > history of programming languages.
> >
> > The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
> > listed as "endangered species" :-(
> >
>
> But I think that the symbols for Lisp are orange, not red.
It may be cool, but it has some interesting errors.
I got my issue last night and looked at this thing, there are some comic
references that I saw in it.
Accoring to this thing, Erik has been vindicated. Note that Scheme is not
related to Lisp at all, not even influenced. No little branches from Lisp to
Scheme. Scheme is a descendant of Algol.
Also note that Forth is dead...completely...Black Box. No compilers, no
users. Oh.
On the other hand, Self 4.0 is going gangbusters. More news.
Objective-C didn't have any credit from Smalltalk (the dead and dying
Smalltalk, but don't tell that to the Squeak community). It would be
interesting to see where Obj-C would have been two years ago, before Apple
release OS X.
And I liked one of the reasons they attribute to language staying power: "A
Charismatic Leader -- Perl, Larry Wall".
"You know, Perl sucks hard, but I really like Larry, so..."
Just imagine trying to grok Perl code you wrote the week before, but that
has become indecipherable. Just chant under your breath "Go Larry, Go!".
Not to bash Perl, I just find the attribute amusing...No doubt Larry has an
affect on the Perl community, but I don't believe that's why the language is
as popular as it is.
So, anyway, this chart is a wonder of knowledge and research.
Regards,
Will Hartung
(wi...@msoft.com)
Joel Ray Holveck
Hence this thread.
> Accoring to this thing, Erik has been vindicated. Note that Scheme is not
> related to Lisp at all, not even influenced. No little branches from Lisp to
> Scheme. Scheme is a descendant of Algol.
Uh-oh. I'm modeling a class I'm teaching on CL after SICP. I'd
better cut that out, quick!
> Also note that Forth is dead...completely...Black Box. No compilers, no
> users. Oh.
Help! WiRED came out and I can't reboot my computer!
> On the other hand, Self 4.0 is going gangbusters. More news.
Self? Never heard of it!
> Objective-C didn't have any credit from Smalltalk (the dead and dying
> Smalltalk, but don't tell that to the Squeak community). It would be
> interesting to see where Obj-C would have been two years ago, before Apple
> release OS X.
Oh, back then it was related to Smalltalk. Just not anymore. :-)
> And I liked one of the reasons they attribute to language staying power: "A
> Charismatic Leader -- Perl, Larry Wall".
> "You know, Perl sucks hard, but I really like Larry, so..."
And how many Perl hackers have actually *met* Larry, let alone spoken
with him? (Larry sometimes tends to avoid fans. Not a bad thing,
just an observation.)
(PS: I like Perl (not as much as Lisp), I like Larry, I'm not bashing
anything but this article. Please don't start a bash session or holy
war off of this.)
> So, anyway, this chart is a wonder of knowledge and research.
You mean, you wonder where the knowledge and research are?
Cheers,
joelh
Kenny Tilton
Will Hartung wrote:
> Accoring to this thing, Erik has been vindicated. Note that Scheme is not
> related to Lisp at all, not even influenced. No little branches from Lisp to
> Scheme.
Check again, at mid-1972.
--
kenny tilton
clinisys, inc
---------------------------------------------------------------
""Well, I've wrestled with reality for thirty-five years, Doctor,
and I'm happy to state I finally won out over it.""
Elwood P. Dowd
Lyle McKennot
Thou shall not take The Name in vain.
>Note that Scheme is not
>related to Lisp at all, not even influenced. No little branches from Lisp to
>Scheme. Scheme is a descendant of Algol.
Everything is.
Except Fortan and Lisp.
>Also note that Forth is dead...completely.
Well, any movement you see is just the maggots on the dead corpse.
>And I liked one of the reasons they attribute to language staying power: "A
>Charismatic Leader -- Perl, Larry Wall".
Well, his "state of the onion " lectures are entertaining.
Actually, he is a christian of sorts and might even be one of those
charismatics who speaks in tongues....
James A. Crippen
> > Also note that Forth is dead...completely...Black Box. No
> > compilers, no users. Oh.
>
> Help! WiRED came out and I can't reboot my computer!
Well that's what you get for using one of them funny computers that
boots with FORTH (you know, like a Sun, or an Apple, or an IBM
RS/6000, or ...), instead of a *real* computer like an Intel x86 that
boots a 16-bit processor with segmented memory. Can't trust them
damned FORTH based booters -- gimme 16-bit 80286 machine code anyday!
It's *so* much easier to read! And it's not backwards, unless you use
the AT&T assembler...
> > On the other hand, Self 4.0 is going gangbusters. More news.
>
> Self? Never heard of it!
You're just out of the loop. That's what you get for using a
recursive language.
> > Objective-C didn't have any credit from Smalltalk (the dead and dying
> > Smalltalk, but don't tell that to the Squeak community). It would be
> > interesting to see where Obj-C would have been two years ago, before Apple
> > release OS X.
>
> Oh, back then it was related to Smalltalk. Just not anymore. :-)
"In other news, Apple today announced it would rewrite not only the
future, but the past as well. An ad campaign similar to the 1984
Macintosh campaign is currently in the works..."
> (PS: I like Perl (not as much as Lisp), I like Larry, I'm not bashing
> anything but this article. Please don't start a bash session or holy
> war off of this.)
Damn, does this mean I have to kill my running shell then? I guess I
could nohup XEmacs and try to reconnect to it...
> > So, anyway, this chart is a wonder of knowledge and research.
>
> You mean, you wonder where the knowledge and research are?
No, the knowledge and the research put into it are really a wonder....
James A. Crippen
> >Note that Scheme is not related to Lisp at all, not even
> >influenced. No little branches from Lisp to Scheme. Scheme is a
> >descendant of Algol.
>
> Everything is.
> Except Fortan and Lisp.
And COBOL.
Oh, and JCL too. And APL. Hmm... RPG-IV maybe?
(Truth is there's a large contingent of non-Algol related languages,
but nobody seems to program in them as much anymore. Pascal did too
many language designers in.)
> >Also note that Forth is dead...completely.
>
> Well, any movement you see is just the maggots on the dead corpse.
That just made me yarf. Wow.
> Actually, he is a christian of sorts and might even be one of those
> charismatics who speaks in tongues....
Oh, so *that's* why I can't read Perl? Or were you only referring to
the regular expression pattern matching part?
Lyle McKennot
>(Truth is there's a large contingent of non-Algol related languages,
>but nobody seems to program in them as much anymore. Pascal did too
>many language designers in.)
They didn't call him Wirth the Assassin for nothing.
His favorite weapon was a sharpened type declaration.
>> Actually, he is a christian of sorts and might even be one of those
>> charismatics who speaks in tongues....
>
>Oh, so *that's* why I can't read Perl?
You need to be "born again" and talk in tongues to be able to Perl
righteously.
John Markus Bjorndalen
>> Where are the flying cars?!?! Look at this link for an explaination of why
>> we have no flying cars!
>>
>> http://www.viewaskew.com/tv/leno/flyingcar.html
>
> Maybe there's still hope. This company didn't get the memo:
>
> http://www.moller.com/skycar/m400/
When I visited these guys in 87 they pointed at two problems that I
remember off the top of my head:
a) Engines. They needed highly efficient, low-weight engines.
He showed us some of the engines they were working on and sounded
pretty confident that they were solving this problem. Maybe they
had "good enough" egines even then (I don't remember).
b) Requiring a pilots licence to "drive" them would severly limit
their market.
There's been som talk about collision avoidance systems,
designating "lanes" (or rather altitudes) in the sky for densely
popluated areas etc. I'm not sure how far things have progressed
here.
The first problem is technical and can be solved by engineers. The
problem is just to get the price down enough for "most people" to buy.
Part of getting the price down is making them cheaper to build and
run, but another part is (usually at least ;-)) increasing the market.
And to do that, b) might be something they need to address. Maybe even
by getting a system with cheaper "skycar" pilot licenses.
Apart from that they probably also have some interesting problems if
they want to get the skycar approved both as a vehicle for driving on
the road, and as a flying vehicle that you can land even in densely
populated neighbourhoods (which I believe is not permitted for
ordinary planes, even in the USA).
In other words, I wouldn't be surprised if they actually have the most
challenging problems with regulations, not with the technology. And
regulations take time.
I hope they manage it soon. I've always wanted one of those ;-)
--
// John Markus Bjørndalen
Erik Naggum
| Accoring to this thing, Erik has been vindicated. Note that Scheme is
| not related to Lisp at all, not even influenced. No little branches from
| Lisp to Scheme. Scheme is a descendant of Algol.
Yes! :D
--
In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.
70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific process.
Julian Stecklina
> Well that's what you get for using one of them funny computers that
> boots with FORTH (you know, like a Sun, or an Apple, or an IBM
> RS/6000, or ...), instead of a *real* computer like an Intel x86 that
> boots a 16-bit processor with segmented memory. Can't trust them
> damned FORTH based booters -- gimme 16-bit 80286 machine code anyday!
> It's *so* much easier to read! And it's not backwards, unless you use
> the AT&T assembler...
The FreeBSD bootloader utilises Forth as well. :)
> > You mean, you wonder where the knowledge and research are?
>
> No, the knowledge and the research put into it are really a wonder....
I really would like to see this chart, but I currently have no access
to foreign print media. :-|
Regards,
Julian
--
Meine Hompage: http://julian.re6.de
Ich suche eine PCMCIA v1.x type I/II/III Netzwerkkarte.
Ich biete als Tauschobjekt eine v2 100MBit Karte in OVP.
Julian Stecklina
> >Note that Scheme is not
> >related to Lisp at all, not even influenced. No little branches from Lisp to
> >Scheme. Scheme is a descendant of Algol.
>
> Everything is.
> Except Fortan and Lisp.
I recently enjoyed a tutorial dealing with FORTRAN-77 and -90 and it
looked a lot like all those ALGOL-related languages. It reminded me
especially of PASCAL somehow.
James A. Crippen
> Lyle McKennot <sp...@spam.menot.com> writes:
>
> > >Note that Scheme is not
> > >related to Lisp at all, not even influenced. No little branches from Lisp to
> > >Scheme. Scheme is a descendant of Algol.
> >
> > Everything is.
> > Except Fortan and Lisp.
>
> I recently enjoyed a tutorial dealing with FORTRAN-77 and -90 and it
> looked a lot like all those ALGOL-related languages. It reminded me
> especially of PASCAL somehow.
F90 got a big injection of Algol. But F77 tried hard to stay pure.
But a few Algol-type constructs snuck in. Not many, and nobody seemed
to want to use them instead of computed goto.
For fun, try reading the ADVENT source someday. It's nightmarish.
Will Hartung
"Kenny Tilton" <kti...@nyc.rr.com> wrote in message
news:3D0A9265...@nyc.rr.com...
>
>
> Will Hartung wrote:
> > Accoring to this thing, Erik has been vindicated. Note that Scheme is
not
> > related to Lisp at all, not even influenced. No little branches from
Lisp to
> > Scheme.
>
> Check again, at mid-1972.
Aaiiee!!
Yes, you're right Kenny. There is a connection from Lisp to Scheme, and also
from Smalltalk to Objective-C. It took a careful study for me to find them,
however.
I need to get these glasses fixed.
Oh, wait...I'm not wearing glasses.
This will be crushing news to Erik, however. I don't know if he can bear it.
Regards,
Will
Joe Marshall
"Will Hartung" <wi...@msoft.com> wrote in message news:3d0e1ebf$1...@news.teranews.com...
>
> This will be crushing news to Erik, however. I don't know if he can bear it.
>
Surely he will draw upon the examples of Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus
Aurelius and react in his usual dispassionate, stoic way.
Erik Naggum
| This will be crushing news to Erik, however. I don't know if he can bear it.
I think denial has been underrated as a coping technique. There is no link.
Kenny Tilton
Erik Naggum wrote:
>
> * "Will Hartung" <wi...@msoft.com>
> | This will be crushing news to Erik, however. I don't know if he can bear it.
>
> I think denial has been underrated as a coping technique. There is no link.
Still no link, but check the NY Times archive, Science Times, going back
10-15 years or so. Study showed that the survivors of an atrocity
happiest decades later were those who moved on and never looked back.
Those who dwelt on the experience turned out the worst.
Just say "yes" to denial?
Erik Naggum
| Still no link, but check the NY Times archive, Science Times, going back
| 10-15 years or so. Study showed that the survivors of an atrocity
| happiest decades later were those who moved on and never looked back.
| Those who dwelt on the experience turned out the worst.
Kenny, with all due respect, we have our own archive of "atrocities" in
this newsgroup. Those who get over things, turn out the best, and those
who dwell on the experience and downright refuse to let go, turn out the
worst, often going to pieces in public most disgracefully. Don't need no
stinkin' study to grasp this, hence my frequent requet for people to just
get over it. My stance is: So Scheme happened. Please refrain from
reminding me. (I get pissed off when people remind me too much, though.
I recall a brilliant retort to a whining loser who clamored for someone's
opinion on him. "But what do you think of me?" "I don't think of you.")
(Incidentally, denial is a form of not coping with something. It is very
different from actually coping well with something. Leting bygones be
bygones is not denial, it is the healthiest and most mature reaction you
can have to anything that happens to you: You can _not_ chnage the past,
but you can learn from it and turn whatever happened into an asset. If
you can only build on "luck", and not build on setbacks or adversity, you
are not in control of your life or your destiny -- whatever constitutes
"luck" is. A certain U.S. president would do well to figure out, using
his meager intellectual prowess, what it means to deal _rationally_ with
a disaster, before he takes the whole Western world wih him into his
permanent victim mode and goes just as bananas about irrational revenge
as a few tribes in the Middle East, who also cannot get over _anything_.
I mean, now we know what happened to an an emotional doofus like Anakin,
right? The path to the Dark Side is paved with bad retentions.)
In a flash of on-topicness, I realized that Common Lisp community is
fraught with people who cannot let go of certain design decisions. The
most annoying failure to get over an arbitrary decision is the case of
symbols. The addition of the loop macro is another regretted decision.
Some have serious coping problems with the numeric contagion rules. It
seems to me that if someone needs an excuse not to use Common Lisp, the
best place to go look for ammunition is the Common Lisp community itself:
I know of no other community where so many people still remain in the
community after being so unhappy with some design choice that they cannot
get over it and therefore seize any opportunity to denounce the whole
language for its "failure" to do their bidding -- while still using it,
or at least not quitting the community fair and square. Re Scheme, it is
an unfortunate fact that a few misguided people discarded the wisdom of
much smarter people and regressed to a single namespace, but if you want
that kind of braindamage, you know where to get it -- there is no need to
carp on the decision made by Common Lisp to support _intelligent_ and
_human_ programmers as if you could possibly change anything by being a
resilient whiner.
Lars Brinkhoff
> Re Scheme, it is an unfortunate fact that a few misguided people
> discarded the wisdom of much smarter people and regressed to a
> single namespace, but if you want that kind of braindamage, you
> know where to get it
Let the flames torture my ignorant soul, but why is a single namespace
braindamaged? (I ask this out of genuine curiosity.)
Dvd Avins
writes:
>Study showed that the survivors of an atrocity
>happiest decades later were those who moved on and never looked back.
>Those who dwelt on the experience turned out the worst.
Correlation is not causation. I suspect that those most prone to be happy are
also most prone to let the past fade into the background.
-- Attaining and helping others attain "Aha!" experiences, as satisfying as
attaining and helping others attain orgasms.
Erik Naggum
| Let the flames torture my ignorant soul, but why is a single namespace
| braindamaged? (I ask this out of genuine curiosity.)
People invent Hungarian notation to deal with the multiple meanings of
homographs in single-namespace languages. There's your evidence that not
only do we intelligent humans already manage to deal with homographs and
homonyms and homophones just fine, context is a Good Thing. (Coarse-
grained context is also much better than fine-grained context simply
because there is room for fewer coarse-grained ones.)
Consider the names people would have if they had to have globally unique
names. That is what a single namespace does to programmers. Add a
perverse limitation to the number of letters there can be in a name, too,
and you have basically reinvented languages like C. And of course you
need _case_ to distinguish a stream from Stream from a STREAM.
So much evil follows from the decision to have one namespace that it is
hard to imagine that it can be the single source. People will look to
the nearest evil and denounce it while they happily employ another,
rather than rid themselves of the greatest evil: The one namespace to
rule them all.
James A. Crippen
> So much evil follows from the decision to have one namespace that it is
> hard to imagine that it can be the single source. People will look to
> the nearest evil and denounce it while they happily employ another,
> rather than rid themselves of the greatest evil: The one namespace to
> rule them all.
You asked for it.
One Namespace to rule them all, One Namespace to find them,
One Namespace to close them all and in the Darkness bind them,
In the land of Lisp-1 where the Shadows lie.
Duane Rettig
> Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.net> writes:
>
> > So much evil follows from the decision to have one namespace that it is
> > hard to imagine that it can be the single source. People will look to
> > the nearest evil and denounce it while they happily employ another,
> > rather than rid themselves of the greatest evil: The one namespace to
> > rule them all.
>
> You asked for it.
>
> One Namespace to rule them all, One Namespace to find them,
> One Namespace to close them all and in the Darkness bind them,
> In the land of Lisp-1 where the Shadows lie.
Ah, yes, the One Ring that corrupts all who wear it, which has to
be destroyed in order for middle-earth to survive...
--
Duane Rettig Franz Inc. http://www.franz.com/ (www)
1995 University Ave Suite 275 Berkeley, CA 94704
Phone: (510) 548-3600; FAX: (510) 548-8253 du...@Franz.COM (internet)
Alan Knight
> Mark Watson wrote:
>>
>> The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
>> history of programming languages.
>>
>> The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
>> listed as "endangered species" :-(
>
> Hey, we're just happy to be remembered! Now let's see who goes to whose
> funeral, Lisp or Wired.
Yes, I'd have been interested to see what Wired thought a couple of years
back about the longevity of, say, Visual Cafe vs. VisualWorks.
Remember, the standard of journalism is two independent sources constitues
confirmation. So if you asked three friends who work with computers, you've
more than confirmed your story.
--
Alan Knight [|], Cincom Smalltalk Development
kni...@acm.org
akn...@cincom.com
http://www.cincom.com/smalltalk
Bruce Hoult
wrote:
> I get pissed off when people remind me too much, though.
> I recall a brilliant retort to a whining loser who clamored for someone's
> opinion on him. "But what do you think of me?" "I don't think of you."
That's an exchange in Casablanca, between Rick and the soon to be late
Ugarte. But I'm sure that's not the first or last time it's been said.
-- Bruce
Will Hartung
"Bruce Hoult" <br...@hoult.org> wrote in message
news:bruce-A4AF1B....@copper.ipg.tsnz.net...
Sure, they had to have rehersals for the scene, and now, we have Erik. I'd
say all of your assertions are pretty well satisfied.
"Shut up Will!"
Regards,
Will Hartung
(wi...@msoft.com)
M. Roberts
Alan Knight wrote:
> Kenny Tilton <kti...@nyc.rr.com> wrote in
> news:3D06595F...@nyc.rr.com:
>
> > Mark Watson wrote:
> >>
> >> The July issue of WiRED Magazine has a cool two page spread on the
> >> history of programming languages.
> >>
> >> The only problem: they have Lisp and Smalltalk
> >> listed as "endangered species" :-(
> >
> > Hey, we're just happy to be remembered! Now let's see who goes to whose
> > funeral, Lisp or Wired.
>
> Yes, I'd have been interested to see what Wired thought a couple of years
> back about the longevity of, say, Visual Cafe vs. VisualWorks.
>
> Remember, the standard of journalism is two independent sources constitues
> confirmation. So if you asked three friends who work with computers, you've
> more than confirmed your story.
WiRED magazine contains a lot of dubious "futurist" speculation, but remember
that they also distribute industry news. In this particular situation, it
strikes me as cold comfort to tell ourselves that their standard of journalism
is inadequate, biased, or that stories that appear in most news venues do not
"reflect reality".
It's sort of a commonplace now that we live in a world ruled by fictions --
mass-merchandizing, product branding, advertising, hype, spin, PR, politics
conducted as a branch of advertising, etc. Pointing out that journalism is
another one of these fictions does not change the fact that people will tend
to believe what they read, see, and hear in the news media.
So, WiRED may have a dubious profile, but they have a formula of mixing
business/industry news and high-flown speculation that evidently appeals to a
large audience. WiRED has a circulation of 500,000 copies. Their magazine is
filled with high dollar advertising from the IT business. A lot of people who
have never heard of Smalltalk (and probably never will) are reading their
magazine, and stories like these are either forming or otherwise inflecting
their opinion about the history of programming languages.
Fact is, they printed a story that put Smalltalk on the endangered-species
list.
Smalltalkers can scoff at WiRED in one thread on our community news group, but
what seems more important to me is to get our story into the same
distribution. If VisualWorks has indeed outlived Visual Cafe, where's the
story in a high-profile publication with a circulation of 500,000 and
top-dollar advertising that makes hay of this fact?
M. Roberts
Cincom Systems, Inc.
Jock Cooper
I thought the line was "you despise me, don't you Rick" "I would if I gave you
any thought"
Geoff Summerhayes
Minor nitpick. It's close, but the exchange in Casablanca is:
"You despise me, don't you?"
"Well, if I gave you any thought I probably would."
--
Geoff
Ben Olasov
Bruce Hoult wrote:
There was an exchange like this in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead between architect
Howard Roark and an architectural critic.
Matt Curtin
> There was an exchange like this in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead
> between architect Howard Roark and an architectural critic.
I think it would be interesting to see how many programmers know their
Objectivism by comparison to the population as a whole, as well as the
same test for Common Lisp programmers vs. programmers of other
fait^H^H^H^Hlanguages.
It might go a long way toward explaining the kinds of idioms that have
developed over time about how to build software with Common Lisp.
--
Matt Curtin Interhack Corp +1 614 545 HACK http://web.interhack.com/
Author, Developing Trust: Online Privacy and Security (Apress, 2001)
Knight of the Lambda Calculus | Quod scripsi scripsi. --Pontius Pilate
Don Geddis
> > I recall a brilliant retort to a whining loser who clamored for someone's
> > opinion on him. "But what do you think of me?" "I don't think of you."
Bruce Hoult <br...@hoult.org> writes:
> That's an exchange in Casablanca, between Rick and the soon to be late
> Ugarte. But I'm sure that's not the first or last time it's been said.
It also occurs in Ayn Rand's "The Fountainhead". The novel has a journalist
who spends most of the book trying to ruin the career of the hero, an
architect, by reviewing all of his innovative and masterful buildings and
labeling them as terrible. Near the end the two meet, and the journalist asks
the architect what he thinks of him, much as written above.
-- Don
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org d...@geddis.org
To me, boxing is like ballet, except there's no music, no choreography, and the
dancers hit each other.
-- Deep Thoughts, by Jack Handey [1999]
Bruce Hoult
"Geoff Summerhayes" <sNuOmS...@hNoOtSmPaAiMl.com> wrote:
You're quite right. And the others also about _The Fountainhead_.
-- Bruce
Bruce Hoult
Matt Curtin <cmcu...@interhack.net> wrote:
> Marco Antoniotti <mar...@cs.nyu.edu> writes:
>
> > There was an exchange like this in Ayn Rand's The Fountainhead
> > between architect Howard Roark and an architectural critic.
>
> I think it would be interesting to see how many programmers know their
> Objectivism by comparison to the population as a whole, as well as the
> same test for Common Lisp programmers vs. programmers of other
> fait^H^H^H^Hlanguages.
I'll freely admit to owning copies of three novels (and a play) by Rand,
and quite a number of non fiction books as well. Plus works by Peikoff
(who I find boring, didactic, and frequently mistaken) and Kelley (who I
think makes a lot of sense).
Something I noted about fifteen years ago and should probably look into
more deeply sometime is an apparently extremely good fit and mesh
between Rand's ideas and those expressed by Persig in _Zen and the Art
of Motorcycle Maintenance_.
-- Bruce
Erik Naggum
| I'll freely admit to owning copies of three novels (and a play) by Rand,
| and quite a number of non fiction books as well. Plus works by Peikoff
| (who I find boring, didactic, and frequently mistaken) and Kelley (who I
| think makes a lot of sense).
I would less freely admit to this, but since you do :), I own everything she
ever published. (I am like that -- like one work of an author, place an
order for the rest of that author's production.) The single biggest reason I
have come to think of the whole Rand/Peikoff/Kelley thing as a waste of time
is not that what they write is wrong, it is that the very useful means of
deciding what is important from what is not, which is what a real philosophy
should be about, is insufficient to determine whether what they write is
right or wrong really is -- in other words: if the philosophy is right, I am
quite certain I would arrive at a different philosophy if I applied it fully,
except, probably, from some fairly sizable core that would be inapplicable as
such and not very interesting to talk about except with other philosphers,
but they refuse to deal with all the ludicrous nonsense that Rand and Peikoff
claim follow from the premises and principles, so there is little point in
that. (A very good friend of mine _is_ a philosopher and she and I have
these amazingly deep discussions that scare people in restaurants, but from
which we usually remember nothing in particular.) Furthermore, what Rand
writes is wrong and bad, is often right according to the very same principles
she explicitly favors, only starting from other values that do not appear to
be contradicting anything she says, so either she was not very good at
applying these principles, or they are somehow broken. I did not have the
time to sort out how these things worked because it appeared that the crucial
element of a philosophy -- that it be time-saving -- was absent, to put it
diplomatically. Peikoff is clearly an unstable nutcase. I do not consider
Kelley an objectivist at all (Peikoff is right about that), _because_ what he
writes and argues makes so much sense -- except for the part where he wants
to be an objectivist, the purpose of which I completely fail to grasp. If I
were in his shoes, I would just have replied "OK, be that way" to Peikoff and
went on to establish a name for myself, which is unfortunately much harder
since he insists on his attachment to Rand. I have met with him and talked
with him for a while, and he is at least smarter than I am, which is a good
starting point for a philosopher, but Peikoff is not. And (almost) all the
objectivists I have ever known or heard of have shown that her philosophy and
general outlook on things has a curiously stable "mental half-life" of about
10 years -- the point at which you realize that less than half of what you
believed to be true still is part of what you as basis for your decisions.
--
Guide to non-spammers: If you want to send me a business proposal, please be
specific and do not put "business proposal" in the Subject header. If it is
urgent, do not use the word "urgent". If you need an immediate answer, give
me a reason, do not shout "for your immediate attention". Thank you.
Bruce Hoult
wrote:
> * Bruce Hoult
> | I'll freely admit to owning copies of three novels (and a play) by Rand,
> | and quite a number of non fiction books as well. Plus works by Peikoff
> | (who I find boring, didactic, and frequently mistaken) and Kelley (who I
> | think makes a lot of sense).
>
> I would less freely admit to this, but since you do :), I own
> everything she ever published.
I can't claim that. A majority, certainly, but not all.
> The single biggest reason I have come to think of the whole
> Rand/Peikoff/Kelley thing as a waste of time is not that what they
> write is wrong, it is that the very useful means of deciding what
> is important from what is not, which is what a real philosophy
> should be about, is insufficient to determine whether what they
> write is right or wrong really is -- in other words: if the
> philosophy is right, I am quite certain I would arrive at a
> different philosophy if I applied it fully, except, probably, from
> some fairly sizable core that would be inapplicable as such and not
> very interesting to talk about except with other philosphers, but
> they refuse to deal with all the ludicrous nonsense that Rand and
> Peikoff claim follow from the premises and principles, so there is
> little point in that.
I believe that a person and their works can have value even if they are
imperfect. I find little fault in the early works of Rand, but after
1960 or so things went downhill. The whole 60's "cult" thing is
repugnant to me, along with the attendent principle that "if Rand said
it then it must be correct". She still has to make a proper argument
rather than a pronouncement and there are a number of instances in which
it seems pretty clear to me that she failed to properly apply her own
principles. The issues of pollution, smoking, and women in positions of
political power are obvious examples. All of which are from the last 15
or so years of her life.
> I did not have the time to sort out how these things worked
> because it appeared that the crucial element of a philosophy --
> that it be time-saving -- was absent, to put it diplomatically.
Do you mean that for a philosophy to be useful (true?), it must provide
canned solutions to a large class of problems, and thus save you the
bother of thinking?
That seems incorrect on the face of it. It's also valid to say that no
canned solution exists, but that certain principles should be applied
together with reason.
> Peikoff is clearly an unstable nutcase.
Not very bright, I would have said. There is the germ of a good idea in
_Parallels_, but the man just belabours it so, and uses repeated
assertions in place of logic.
> I do not consider Kelley an objectivist at all (Peikoff is right
> about that), _because_ what he writes and argues makes so much
> sense -- except for the part where he wants to be an objectivist,
> the purpose of which I completely fail to grasp.
Well, I'd say he's an "objectivist", but not an "Objectivist". Is he
trying to horn in on Rand's legacy? I shouldn't have thought there was
much benefit to that these days. Or is he just paying homage to his
philosophical roots?
> And (almost) all the objectivists I have ever known or heard of
> have shown that her philosophy and general outlook on things has a
> curiously stable "mental half-life" of about 10 years -- the point
> at which you realize that less than half of what you believed to be
> true still is part of what you as basis for your decisions.
Hmm. It's about twenty years since I first idly thumbed through a copy
of _Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal_ that was lying on a coworker's desk.
I borrowed it, then _Atlas Shrugged_, and then bought the rest. So I
should be down to 25% by now. But I don't think so. The things that my
bullshit filter passed as being good or interesting ideas back then are,
as far as I can tell, still now deeply rooted in my value system.
The one thing I could *never* get into was _Introduction to Objectivist
Epistomology_. Somehow it just didn't ring true. I mean, *parts* of it
did, but to me Persig's ideas in ZATAOMM form a better foundation for
Rand's ethics and politics than do Rand's own writings. And they agree
on just an amazing number of points, including (perhaps most striking),
the relationship between conscious decisions, unconscious decisions, and
one's internalised value system.
-- Bruce
Nils Goesche
> In article <32337000...@naggum.net>, Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.net>
> wrote:
>
> > I did not have the time to sort out how these things worked
> > because it appeared that the crucial element of a philosophy --
> > that it be time-saving -- was absent, to put it diplomatically.
>
> Do you mean that for a philosophy to be useful (true?), it must
> provide canned solutions to a large class of problems, and thus
> save you the bother of thinking?
>
> That seems incorrect on the face of it. It's also valid to say
> that no canned solution exists, but that certain principles
> should be applied together with reason.
It would already be a great time-saver if philosophers provided
us with some pinciples together with methods of discussing and
reasoning that can be trusted to be correct and not totally
incomplete or contradictory, so we can /start/ trying to find
answers to questions that bother us, without constantly having to
adjust and question those very principles themselves. ``There is
no solution'' would be a perfectly fine answer to some given
question, of course, but without a working framework you won't be
able to prove even that.
Regards,
--
Nils Goesche
Ask not for whom the <CONTROL-G> tolls.
PGP key ID #xC66D6E6F
Erik Naggum
| I believe that a person and their works can have value even if they are
| imperfect.
This is very true. However, there is a difference between relevant and
irrelevant traits that affect how you have to interpret principles they
espouse. E.g., did Ayn Rand lead the kind of life that she said her
philosophy had made possible? No, she did not. She actually lied about
several important aspects of her life. She wanted so very much to be a
self-made success, she made parts of it up herself, instead, and denied that
people had helped her at crucial points in her life. This, to me, was quite
important -- the standards she set were obviously extremely hard to follow,
yet when she faced problems following them, she made them even harder to
follow. This is the "it's right because I say so" principle of truth, which
flies directly in the face of everything she wanted to build and defend.
Indeed, it is such things that caused me to consider possible inherent,
serious problems in her philosophy. (Peikoff is even worse, he believes
something is right because Rand said so, and if there ever were a worse way
to insult her philosophy, none of her detractors have managed to make it.)
| I find little fault in the early works of Rand, but after 1960 or so things
| went downhill. The whole 60's "cult" thing is repugnant to me, along with
| the attendent principle that "if Rand said it then it must be correct".
Yes, precisely. But we must remember that Rand herself was very much opposed
to all this cult thing, until there was evidently lots of money in it, at
which point some other curious thing happened to her ethics and philosophy.
| Do you mean that for a philosophy to be useful (true?), it must provide
| canned solutions to a large class of problems, and thus save you the bother
| of thinking?
No, not at all. The time-saving function of a philosophy are at a much
higher level. I would argue that Aristotle's syllogisms are time-saving
devices of this kind -- laying down principles of logic means that you waste
so much less time with random noise that can lead anywhere except where you
want to go. I recently mentioned that relevance is orthogonal to truth,
which sprung up in a discussion with my father over the role of Kant's
philosophy in the development of equally strong anti-religious philosophies
despite the fact that he intended to protect religion from the onset of
science. Kant seems to have confounded truth and relevance, because the
religious belief he wanted to defend also does. I have argued that a
religion or a philosophy cannot speak about facts of the world -- if it does,
it is now or will eventually be wrong -- but it can and should speak about
the relevance and ranking of facts and observations. A philosophy or method
of scientific inquiry and the like will give you the means to establish the
relevance of the facts you have observed, instead of you trying all sorts of
ranking orders and stumbling on various ones that makes sense some of the
time. So on the contrary, it does _not_ save you the bother of thinking, it
makes sure that you make thinking mistakes so more seldom if you know what
you are doing than if you simply try to "think" without a method or a guiding
principle.
| Hmm. It's about twenty years since I first idly thumbed through a copy of
| _Capitalism, the Unknown Ideal_ that was lying on a coworker's desk. I
| borrowed it, then _Atlas Shrugged_, and then bought the rest. So I should be
| down to 25% by now. But I don't think so. The things that my bullshit
| filter passed as being good or interesting ideas back then are, as far as I
| can tell, still now deeply rooted in my value system.
Most of the people I have known who have read Rand have done so at an
impressionable age. My data set could be skewed by this, but the stuff that
remains is definitely stable at this time with me, too. I have no idea how
much or little it might be, however.
What struck me in many "believers" (it is, unfortunately, the right term) was
that they did not manage to sift the arbitrary choices from the central ones.
E.g., one guy I know colored his hair the same as Roark's, which I considered
_nuts_. Peikoff once had to "admit" that he liked horror movies and was not
all that thrilled with skyscrapers. *GASP* So somewhere along the lines,
people got the wrong message, they hung on to her conclusions, not to the
method of discovery and reasoning from important observation to conclusion.
| The one thing I could *never* get into was _Introduction to Objectivist
| Epistomology_. Somehow it just didn't ring true. I mean, *parts* of it did,
| but to me Persig's ideas in ZATAOMM form a better foundation for Rand's
| ethics and politics than do Rand's own writings. And they agree on just an
| amazing number of points, including (perhaps most striking), the relationship
| between conscious decisions, unconscious decisions, and one's internalised
| value system.
But this was her first attempt to do "real" philosophy. Yes, it failed.
This is where I decided it would be more worth my while to seek additional
problems to ponder and additional thoughts of giants elsewhere. I happen to
find Pirsig most fascinating myself. Probably not an accident.
Patrick W
"Erik Naggum" <er...@naggum.net> wrote in message
news:32337513...@naggum.net...
> [...] I have argued that a religion or a philosophy cannot speak
> about facts of the world -- if it does, it is now or will eventually
> be wrong -- but it can and should speak about the relevance and
> ranking of facts and observations. A philosophy or method of
> scientific inquiry and the like will give you the means to establish
> the relevance of the facts you have observed, instead of you trying
> all sorts of ranking orders and stumbling on various ones that makes
> sense some of the time. So on the contrary, it does _not_ save you
> the bother of thinking, it makes sure that you make thinking mistakes
> so more seldom if you know what you are doing than if you simply
> try to "think" without a method or a guiding principle.
The method or guiding principle you're describing sounds similar to what was
once called "culture" (as opposed to modern "kulcha" --
fashion/food/entertainment). Culture, in the sense of collective confidence
or 'certainty' in the assignment of value to observations and deeds, has
(for better AND worse) been eroded by the rise of reason. Reason is unable
to ascribe value/relevance to its own observations and conclusions without
becoming caught in an infinite recursion.
It seems to me that the "system" or "method" you're seeking must eventually
short-circuit reason. (The method may be consistent with rational thought,
but can it be _generated_ by reason? I don't think so). As far as my puny
brain can determine, instead of "this is TRUE because I SAY it is", sooner
or later we must encounter "this is VALUABLE because I (or we) WILL have it
thus". I hear this whispered between the lines of almost all philosophers.
(Except Ayn Rand, who quietly *shrieks* it ;-).
I'm curious to know how far you've travelled in your quest for this "system"
or "method". Do you regard the development of a system of ranking to be an
act of creation or of discovery? Or have you hit upon something new that
makes this a false dichotomy?
[Lisp reference here]
Erik Naggum
| Culture, in the sense of collective confidence or 'certainty' in the
| assignment of value to observations and deeds, has (for better AND worse)
| been eroded by the rise of reason.
I think it just became more abstract. We no longer have consensus on what
the facts are, we have consensus on the method of ascertaining that some
claim is true. The scientific method has a bad habit of shaking people's
beliefs in what is true if they fail to grasp what _remains_ true as the
precise facts change. I believe that consensus is even more important now
than it was in monocultural dictatorshiplike structures, because we no longer
have any useful consensus of facts, public policy, values, etc, so we need a
consensus on higher principles. E.g., instead of _which_ laws to have, we
agree on the rule of law principle. Instead of having to agree on specific
things, we instead agree on how to resolve our differences. Instead of
agreeing on which programming language to use, we agree on the need for
specifications for those we choose, and how to write those specifications.
Instead of agreeing on what to do, we are often satifisfied with agreeing on
what _not_ to do.
| Reason is unable to ascribe value/relevance to its own observations and
| conclusions without becoming caught in an infinite recursion.
Precisely. You have to _choose_ some core values and axioms for your system.
To find them, you can reason from things you "like" before you started to
think about them back to some fundaemental values and from those forward to
logical consequences, but then you will probably have to repeat this process
as you wind up with things you do not like that much after all, and change
your values in this iterative process.
Like, my favorite line of reasoning is that I may be frightened by the news I
read of violent people from the Middle East who form gangs in Oslo and kill
people in their own gang and in other gangs, and momentarily feel threatened
by some superficial quality like skin color. Many people here remain at this
stage. Then I may notice that there are non-dangerous people who look
exactly the same, but that the people who _are_ dangerous all emit the same
signals as the dangerous "natives" that I have already learned to avoid and
that there was no need to update my threat sensors at all. Then I realize
that the very concept of attaching values to superficial qualities was wrong
and proceed to search for other instances of same, and then I come across a
curious group of people who only realized that attaching values to _one_
superficial quality was wrong. Instead of racists, they became anti-racists
-- people who are willing to mistreat others they _believe_ are racists based
on some superficial quality like a choice of word or disliking bad people who
just happen to have a different skin color -- and they never understand that
the basic principle of reacting to other people based on your fears of the
group _you_ think they belong to, is bad. They cannot even understand that
this could be wrong. "Racists are bad, yes? So what's wrong with beating
them up?" They do not realize that this is _exactly_ what racists think
about people with a different skin color. The same goes with those moronic
black racists, who, instead of getting the point that mistreating people
based on race is wrong, only think that mistreating _blacks_ based on race is
wrong, and turn around to mistreat other races based on race. I _marvel_ at
the lack of intelligence in both anti-racists and black racists, who I
consider about twice as bad as racists, because they have seen how bad racism
is, and they _still_ employ the principles they so despise, but the fact that
many people have _not_ figured out that reacting to an _individual_ based on
your feelings towards a group you _think_ they belong to is wrong, shows me
that thinking in principles requires effort and serious consideration, and
that most people have never learned a method of thinking and deliberation --
they just along with whatever they feel like, and end up incredibly wrong.
I happen to like the fundamental value of "human life" as a starting point
and "personal happiness" and "intelligence and reason" go with it, as I see
it. Other people evidently value "feeling safe" over "happiness" and that
means that "reason" is no longer a value, either, because reasoning requires
effort and thinking tends to involve risk, disappointment, failure, and the
opposite of "safe" -- you may realize that what you once thought to be good
is in fact really bad, not by itself, but because of ramifications you had
not thought about. E.g., if sexism is bad, using "he" to refer to any man(!)
is bad, so you use "they", but then make the very grave mistake of thinking
that those who still use "he" are sexist (because of this superficial quality
of appearance and stupid, stupid groupthink), upon which conclusion you have
just killed off your entire cultural heritage as "sexist". This is so bad
and so stupid that the decision to use "they" instead of "he" _must_ be
reconsidered in light of its horrible consequences. It is now using "they"
instead of "he" that is sexist, because those who use "they" consider those
who _innocently_ use "he" as sexist and they _wrongly_ sensitize a culture to
an issue that was not there. Sure, there were sexists, too, but you can find
those by other and much more accurate means than by counting occurrences of
"he". In fact, the real sexists go scot free, because they can just adapt to
a "they" form while any reader would understand that they denigrate females
and tolerate only males and use the "they" form ironically and sarcastically,
which the stupid word-counting anti-sexists would not understand because the
simple formulaic detector they use is provides as many false positives as it
produces false negatives. Sufficiently advanced political correctness is
indistinguishable from sarcasm.
| It seems to me that the "system" or "method" you're seeking must eventually
| short-circuit reason.
Yes, of course. Logic by itself does not produce valid conclusions -- it
only says that conclusions from invalid logic are useless and that only
conclusions from good premises lead to good conclusions. How you find those
good premises is another task entirely, but at least you can work within a
secure framework where you know that your conclusions will hold and that if
you do not "like" your conclusions, it is not your reasonsing that you have
to examine, but your premises. You can thus show that something is bad
somewhere "down there" if you can arrive at bad conclusions through logic.
This is an very valuable debugging tool that people who do not consider
reason to be valuable do not have. Thus, they tolerate bad premises and just
switch the conclusions around as they like, disregaring their bad logic.
| (The method may be consistent with rational thought, but can it be
| _generated_ by reason? I don't think so.)
Well, I think it can, but not with a uni-directional application of reason
and logic from some a priori principles. (The funny thing with a priori
principles is that they are _discovered_ through what _must_ have been
identical to that of a posteriori principles, but because some people are
hysterical about induction, they invent all these complex things to wrap it
up in something that looks to the unwary eye like deduction. I find that
most humorous.)
So when you say "short-circuit", I tend to interpret that as that you do not
like feedback loops in your system. I disagree. I think feedback loops are
just wonderful. Circular reasoning is not invalid if there is some external
input to it in each step, i.e., if you apply exactly the same steps round and
round, you will not end up in the same place. More than that, I think this
is a wonderful way of discovering "strange attractors" in human thinking. I
would venture that if you kept at this process long enough, you would find
that certain things are reached no matter where you start, and that those are
the real fundamental principles of human philosophy. In all likelihood, they
are quite counterintuitive.
| As far as my puny brain can determine, instead of "this is TRUE because I SAY
| it is", sooner or later we must encounter "this is VALUABLE because I (or we)
| WILL have it thus". I hear this whispered between the lines of almost all
| philosophers. (Except Ayn Rand, who quietly *shrieks* it ;-).
Most philosophers start out from believing that Good sort of exists a priori.
I think this is entirely false. I think good arises out of knowing that most
people would not like to be hurt or die, and then you find ways to erect a
system of defense mechanisms that is such that anyone who tries to be bad is
more hurt than he can hurt others. That is, if you had evil in mind, you
would know that not only the person you hurt would respond, but his community
would hurt you back. (Anarchy is the absence of this community right to
respond through a recognized authority, and it is the worst aspect of USENET.
It leads to "I feel bad, therefore I am allowed to defend myself"-responses
instead of the much more mature "I feel bad, how can I avoid that"-responses
that you do in a community that seriously frowns up those who take the law
into their own hands.š)
The feeling of safety in society comes from the fact that you know that the
police, defense, etc, will pummel the bad guys and that the bad guys know
this. You can feel safe because there is a much greater evil ready to crush
those who try to be evil on their own, and you know that this greater evil is
used only measured and controlled ways and with many safety precautions,
quite unlike the "privately operated evil" that comes from defending yourself
or presenting a sufficiently credible counter- threat on your own. When the
terrorists managed to break through the safety net and commit their evil act
on 9/11, many people (false) believed that the whole safety net had broken
down. Ye of little faith! If anything, the safety net was much, much
stronger mere minutes after the accident had become public knowledge. At
that moment, every single American, and probably a lot of people world-wide,
would present such a strong counter-threat to villains that any bad guy who
wanted to try, would probably be killed. Crime dropped to near zero in New
York City -- it was not because the bad guys got better -- I think it was
because the bad guys knew they had strong reason to fear the public they had
previously not feared, like the passangers on the fourth plane discovered
that they could die, anyway, so the most serious personal barrier to taking
up a fight against an evil force vanished.
| I'm curious to know how far you've travelled in your quest for this "system"
| or "method". Do you regard the development of a system of ranking to be an
| act of creation or of discovery? Or have you hit upon something new that
| makes this a false dichotomy?
Very good question, to which I have no answer I would not have to make up on
the spot, so I won't, but I believe the feedback loop that is consciousness
makes creation and discovery a false dichotomy for certain aspects of
philosophy and psychology, that is, I believe that we tend to do something
and explain why it was good after the fact -- rationalization instead of
rational argumentation. (For instance, certain psychological theories are
obviously false for any shade of normal people, yet turn true for those who
believe in them, much like some religions do, upon which these psychologists
do an _amazing_ amount of harm to people who have been defined as "patients",
so they lose their normal set of human rights. Quite interesting, really.)
We also have this curious lack of overlap between the reasonable and the
rational. (Ayn Rand made several serious mistakes in not understanding this
difference (I was told Russian does not have separate words for the two), and
hence defended a lot of things that are simply reasonable were as if they
were rational, which led to many disquietingly irrational arguments and odd
lines of reasoning defending or attacking something too much.) Believing
that only the rational is reasonable is probably not harmful, but refusing to
accept something as reasonable because you do not have the right premises to
make it rational probably is, as it means that your set of premises is more
fixed than it should be.
I generally believe that it is impossible to learn what is right unless you
make lots of mistakes and are willing to make lots of mistakes, but the key
is to make the most intelligent mistakes and make them only once, if you can.
I believe that the only way you can learn from experience is if you are able
to be surprised that the world is not what you expected it to be, and that
means you have to be alert and observant in addition to be able to make most
of your expectations "testable", as the more you get right, the more subtle
the uexpected will turn out to be, but not necessarily caused by small "bugs"
in your thinking. Most people resist the consequences of discovering bugs in
their thinking, and prefer to solve the problem of cognitive dissonance with
fear and loathing and defending themselves. I personally find that very odd.
It is like screaming to the world "you be different! be what I want!", and
is the absolute height of irrationality.
Well, I'll stop now.
-------
š Is there a (legal) term for this in English? Curiously, Norwegian has a
short word, "selvtekt", for taking the law into your own hands.
Dvd Avins
>Curiously, Norwegian has a
> short word, "selvtekt", for taking the law into your own hands.
We non-Vikings make do with a longer word: vigilantism (which is pronounced
vigilante-ism.
Erik Naggum
| We non-Vikings make do with a longer word: vigilantism
Sorry, it is not the same thing at all. It is a crucial matter of intent and
premeditation. Vigilance committees and he like are organized to take care
of some problem. A person who just decides not to wait for the police and
take revenge or "clean up" on his own, is not a vigilante. If he brings a
gun on the subway for the express purpose of defending himself, he would be a
vigilante, but that is a subset of what "selvtekt" covers.
Dvd Avins
>| We non-Vikings make do with a longer word: vigilantism
>
> Sorry, it is not the same thing at all. It is a crucial matter of intent
>and
> premeditation. Vigilance committees and he like are organized to take care
> of some problem. A person who just decides not to wait for the police and
> take revenge or "clean up" on his own, is not a vigilante. If he brings a
> gun on the subway for the express purpose of defending himself, he would be
>a
> vigilante, but that is a subset of what "selvtekt" covers.
I've never heard of a vigilance committee, but people who take revenge
(including most especially those who do so out of after-the-fact anger) on
those who harm the revengers neighbors are commonly referred to as vigilantes.
Matt Curtin
> Logic by itself does not produce valid conclusions -- it only says
> that conclusions from invalid logic are useless and that only
> conclusions from good premises lead to good conclusions.
This is so horribly misunderstood by so many people. Confusion among
logical, reasonable, and correct is so rampant that having a
discussion that deals with matters of opinion is difficult unless you
know your company ahead of time.
Usenet is a great example of this. Read an advocacy newsgroup
sometime. Ugh.
> (Ayn Rand made several serious mistakes in not understanding this
> difference (I was told Russian does not have separate words for the
> two)
Correct. Russian-English dictionaries will offer /razumnyj/ for
something based on reason under the head-word "rational". It can also
be used to describe a person endowed with reason, or someone who is
intelligent.
"Reasonable" would also be /razumnyj/, or perhaps /blagorazumnyj/
(literally, "good" + "reasonable"). The important part of all of
these constructions is /um/, which by itself means "mind", and as a
stem for another word will carry the connotation of using the mind.
/Myslayacshij/ can also be used to describe someone who has reason.
My Russian isn't good enough to break that down further. I don't
understand its connotations or how the word gets built up. Perhaps
someone more expert could enlighten us.
Russian also has /ratsional'yj/ but if you try to use the word to mean
Rational as Rand would use it, the listener won't understand what you
mean, and probably offer you a correction of /razumnyj/. It seems to
have meaning only in a mathematical context.
> ¹ Is there a (legal) term for this in English? Curiously, Norwegian
> has a short word, "selvtekt", for taking the law into your own
> hands.
"Vigilante" might be the best option. Originally, vigilantes were
members of volunteer "vigilance committees" (in the U.S. in the
nineteenth century), but now the word is often used as an adjective to
describe someone who decides to do things himself. I've seen this
most often online, but it seems present elsewhere.
In particular, a search for "vigilante" on www.FindLaw.com shows a few
usages that suggest it might be a good equivalent for Norwegian's
"selvtekt". In all three of the uses quoted here, "vigilante"
suggests self-appointed power or authority. Note that in the first
case, it even draws a distinction between a bounty hunter and a
vigilante.
http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/misc/okculr.html
Does this plan constitute establishment of a "bounty hunter" system?
Certainly. It does not, however, constitute a vigilante
system. Concomitant with the authority to grant licenses, Congress
would place in the tribunal the authority to promulgate strict
requirements and guidelines for private entities to qualify for such
licenses. This authority would be based on whatever parameters
Congress chose to enact, just as statutes authorize a government
agency to promulgate rules to effect the beneficent purposes of the
statute. Therefore, it is incorrect [*402] and simplistic to assert
that this control system, in which violators would risk loss of
their license and their prize, would spawn gangs of reckless
international gunslingers rather than foster an entrepreneurial
cadre of trained professionals.
http://supreme.lp.findlaw.com/supreme_court/briefs/99-1613/99-1613.mer.ami.legalaid.pdf
In 1995, staff at a federal prison in Florence, Colorado banded
together to systematically beat prisoners whom they believed
disrespected their authority. Mike McPhee, Vigilante Guards May Do
Time, Denver Post, July 27, 2000, at
http://www.denverpost.com/news/news0727.htm.
http://writ.corporate.findlaw.com/dean/20011012.html
There has been a new rash of hate crimes against Arabs, Muslims,
Sikhs, or anyone thought by the uninformed vigilante to be a
potential terrorist or sympathizer.
/Oxford English Dictionary/ online offers some quotes that might be
helpful.
Hence vigi {sm} lantism (orig. U.S.), the principles or activities
of vigilantes or vigilance committees.
1937 Sun (Baltimore) 27 Sept. 2/7 A public investigation of
`vigilantism' in strike areas was announced today through the American
League Against War and Fascism. 1942 W. STEGNER Mormon Country 96
Perhaps even those incidents were purely unofficial and spontaneous
acts of devout Mormons, the Mormon equivalent of lynch law and
vigilantism. 1953 Economist 19 Sept. 775/3 In the United States,
neither private vigilantism nor the government seems prepared to treat
a favourable verdict as final. 1979 Times 6 Dec. 3/1 Africa was
confronted, he said, with a choice between a system of collective
security and a system of international vigilantism. 1985 Listener 10
Jan. 9/1 The one genuine, spontaneous popular institution in the West
was vigilantism.
Boris Smilga
> > (Ayn Rand made several serious mistakes in not understanding this
> > difference (I was told Russian does not have separate words for the
> > two)
>
> Correct. Russian-English dictionaries will offer /razumnyj/ for
> something based on reason under the head-word "rational". It can also
> be used to describe a person endowed with reason, or someone who is
> intelligent.
This is true, but not 100% true: we also have the word /racional'nyj/,
which first appeared, I think, about two centuries ago, adopted from
Latin via either Polish or German. To my native speaker's ear it
sounds like rather technical, sometimes with connotations of
"productivity".
When given this word as a query, Google retrieves pages where this
word appears in the following contexts: as a name of a mobile
telephony rate plan of a dozen different providers [tarif
"racional'nyj"]; in the name of a Belorussian savings fund
["Racional'nyj dom" = "Rational house"]; in the title of a translation
of the book "Anti-Americanism: Irrational and Rational", by Paul
Hollander; in a page with advice on cough treatment in children
[Protivokashlevaja terapija: racional'nyj vybor = Cough therapy: a
rational choice]; in an article on the organisation of medical
insurance in the City of Moscow [racional'nyj podhod = a rational
approach]; in an advertisement of a "School of Rational Yoga" ["Shkola
Racional'noj Jogi"]; etc. (these results are from the first 20
matches).
> "Reasonable" would also be /razumnyj/, or perhaps /blagorazumnyj/
> (literally, "good" + "reasonable"). <...>
A better translation of /blagorazumnyj/ is "prudent".
> <...> The important part of all of
> these constructions is /um/, which by itself means "mind", and as a
> stem for another word will carry the connotation of using the mind.
Again, this is more complex: the stem of the word is /razum/ ("mind"),
while /um/, which is the principal part of the stem, is rather
something along the lines of "wits" or "intellect".
> /Myslayacshij/ can also be used to describe someone who has reason.
> My Russian isn't good enough to break that down further. <...>
Rather, /mysljaschij/. It is a participle of the verb /myslit'/ which
is a rather exalted word that means "to think". E.g. Descartes's
"Cogito ergo sum" ("I think therefore I am") is commonly translated as
"Ja myslju -- sledovatel'no, ja suschestvuju"; the everyday word for
"think" is /dumat'/. On the other hand, the related noun /mysl'/ is
just the very standard translation of "thought" or "idea".
> Russian also has /ratsional'yj/ but if you try to use the word to mean
> Rational as Rand would use it, the listener won't understand what you
> mean, and probably offer you a correction of /razumnyj/. It seems to
> have meaning only in a mathematical context.
I must apologise: I started my reply before reading this part of your
article. See my remarks on the usage of /racional'nyj/ above.
Certainly, it is also the word which is used for "rational" as in
"rational numbers".
> > ╧ Is there a (legal) term for this in English? Curiously, Norwegian
> > has a short word, "selvtekt", for taking the law into your own
> > hands.
Btw., Russian has a word for this which is /samoupravstvo/; it is
defined by the article 330 of the Criminal code of the Russian
Federation (see, e.g., http://zakon.kolokol.ru/R/L/6581/) as "an
unauthorised action, contrary to the order instituted by a law or
another legal document, whose [i.e. action's -B.Sm] rightfulness has
been brought in question by an organisation or a citizen, if said
action had caused substantial damage".
Curiously, the Administrative offences code of the RF (specifically,
its article 19.1 -- see http://zakon.kolokol.ru/R/P/11097) gives
another definition of the same word: "an unauthorised execution [by a
person] of his actual or assumed right, contrary to the order
instituted by a federal law or another normative legal document, which
has not caused substantial damage to citizens or juridical persons".
Feel the subtlety here?!
The translations in both cases are mine, so please don't try to bring
them up before a Russian court (-;
Yours truly,
B. Smilga.
Gordon Joly
May I recommend "Where the Action is - The Foundations of Embodied
Interaction" by Paul Dourish (2001) MIT Press.
http://www.dourish.com/embodied/
" ... 'embodiment' is at the centre of phenomenology, an important
strain of philosophical thought beginning at the end of the nineteenth
century. Phenomenology rejects the Cartesian separation between mind
and body on which most traditional philosophical approaches are
based..."
"Drawing from the writings of a number of phenomenologists, and
especially from Heidegger, Schutz and Wittgenstein, Where the Action
Is develops an understanding of embodied interaction organised in
terms of the creation, manipulation and communication of meaning, and
the establishment and maintenance of practice. Rather than embedding
fixed notions of meaning within technologies, embodied interaction is
based on the understanding that users create and communicate meaning
through their interaction with the system (and with each other,
through the system)."
Gordo
Erik Haugan
> More than that, I think this is a wonderful way of discovering
> "strange attractors" in human thinking.
This is a fascinating idea. I have come to accept that our more or less
arbitrarily chosen axioms have only limited temporal and cultural
validity, but strange attractors could, if they exist, provide firmer
ground to base a more durable value system upon. I must explore this
line of thought further.
Patrick W
> [...] The scientific method has a bad habit of shaking people's
> beliefs in what is true if they fail to grasp what _remains_ true as the
> precise facts change. I believe that consensus is even more important
now
> than it was in monocultural dictatorshiplike structures, because we no
longer
> have any useful consensus of facts, public policy, values, etc, so we
need a
> consensus on higher principles.
Sure. We tease out the relatively stable generalities from unstable
particulars. In theory we can do this for principles of evaluation, as well
as for principles of truth. Obviously this is very difficult when methods of
evaluation are intimitely dependent on 'facts' of unstable veracity. So,
yes, the idea that relevance/value is (or ought to be) orthogonal to truth
is, I think, a very good one.
> E.g., instead of _which_ laws to have, we agree on the rule of law
principle.
Indeed, this provides the framework for the _exercise_ of a set of
principles, but it necessarily postpones the formulation of a global ranking
system for the resolution of specific controversies, which is its ultimate
purpose. We might as well leap up to the next level of abstraction and
declare: "we agree to the principle of living by best principles, and shall
in due course determine what these best principles may be". And work
downwards from there ;-)
I wonder if there is *always* a higher level of abstraction to which we can
ascend in order to resolve tensions between currently incompatible values? I
don't know; I'm only improvising, but it seems to me that sooner or later
the arbitrary exercise of power will intervene; and that which has been
ordained by a power *subsequently* becomes valued by virtue of having won.
Law is a highly sublimated form of this kind of power. It actually depends
quite heavily on the *stability* of our table of values, but provides little
in the way of guidance for formulating them (other than precedent, which
itself has a questionable principle hard-wired into it). But obviously I
agree that the principle *of* law is orthogonal to the principles *in* law.
> Precisely. You have to _choose_ some core values and axioms for your
system.
> To find them, you can reason from things you "like" before you started
to
> think about them back to some fundaemental values and from those forward
to
> logical consequences, but then you will probably have to repeat this
process
> as you wind up with things you do not like that much after all, and
change
> your values in this iterative process.
Yes. this is a perfectly adequate process for a personal philosophy.
> So when you say "short-circuit", I tend to interpret that as that you do
not
> like feedback loops in your system.
Personally? It's probably more correct to say that I like them too much.
This is, for me, the most fascinating phenomenon in the universe.
"short-circuit" was a bad choice of words, because I was actually referring
to the beginning of the process, not the end of the process. In other words,
interrupting the circuit of tail-chasing indecision and choosing some core
axioms and values to _begin_ with is what I meant by "short-circuiting".
> [...] I think this
> is a wonderful way of discovering "strange attractors" in human
thinking. I
> would venture that if you kept at this process long enough, you would
find
> that certain things are reached no matter where you start, and that
those are
> the real fundamental principles of human philosophy. In all likelihood,
they
> are quite counterintuitive.
I had not thought of them in terms of "strange attractors", but I have long
been fascinated by these latent patterns of mind. I also find it quite
interesting to track the changing metaphors we use to point to these
suspected patterns. It's interesting that the 'gods' and 'demons' that
became internalised with the dawn of science are now being projected
outwards again with metaphors like 'archetypes' and 'memes'. Even 'viruses'.
> [...] I believe the feedback loop that is consciousness
> makes creation and discovery a false dichotomy for certain aspects of
> philosophy and psychology, that is, I believe that we tend to do
something
> and explain why it was good after the fact -- rationalization instead of
> rational argumentation.
I wish I had something new to add here, but much of my life's experience
confirms this.
> (For instance, certain psychological theories are
> obviously false for any shade of normal people, yet turn true for those
who
> believe in them, much like some religions do, upon which these
psychologists
> do an _amazing_ amount of harm to people who have been defined as
"patients",
> so they lose their normal set of human rights. Quite interesting,
really.)
I'm not sure whether you're referring to mainstream psychiatry or to
crazy/ier sects within it. But since we can't get much further away from
Lisp, I might as well pitch in here. I would very much like to see a revival
of interest in the existential/phenomenological approach to psychiatry
investigated by Laing and Esterson (among others) in the 1960s (before Laing
himself went a little too far toward the deep end). They had some marvellous
ideas which have, unfortunately, been swallowed up by the biological /
mechanistic 'disease model' of mental illness. One crucial point, that many
genuinely stupid researchers overlook, is that their work on the
interpersonal relationships was (and is) completely orthogonal to the
question of whether (or how) the brains of psychotic people function
differently from those of typical people. It's a pity that these ideas have,
for all practical purposes, have been lost to psychiatry -- and, strangely,
even psychology to a large extent.
But now we're wandering _too_ far astray.
Erik, thanks for sharing your ideas. As always, much food for thought.
Paolo Amoroso
> I generally believe that it is impossible to learn what is right unless you
> make lots of mistakes and are willing to make lots of mistakes, but the key
> is to make the most intelligent mistakes and make them only once, if you can.
Some time ago a friend of mine gave me as a gift the book "To Engineer is
Human - The Role of Failure in Successful Design" by Henry Petroski. He
jotted down the following dedication on the inside cover: "Paolo: may all
your mistakes be meaningful ones".
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://www.paoloamoroso.it/ency/README
Gareth McCaughan
> "Christopher C. Stacy" wrote:
> >
> > Where are the flying cars? There were supposed to be flying cars?
>
> Yes. And moving sidewalks. John Prine did some good work in this area.
>
> In a way the predictions have all come true, except the win has been in
> the transportation of information (the Web), not people. Back then when
> those Jetson predictions were being made, folks were limited by their
> idea of the forms progress could take. The astonishing things of the day
> were jet airplanes and rocketships and even the automobile was making
> rapid advances; predictions blindly got stamped in the same coin of
> personal transportation.
Whereas now, of course, the same thing could never happen.
Dear me, no. :-)
--
Gareth McCaughan Gareth.M...@pobox.com
.sig under construc
Reini Urban
> In article <MPG.17707948...@news.teranews.com>,
> Clark Wilson <wils...@hotmail.com> wrote:
> >Green is "Active: thousands of users"
> >Orange is "Protected: taught at universities, compilers available"
> >Red is "Endangered: usage dropping off"
> >
> >So my reading of the three entries on the Lisp branch (in chronological
> >order) was:
> >
> >Lisp -- protected
> >Common Lisp -- active
> >ANSI Common Lisp -- protected
>
> Well, I'd think that Lisp should be closer to Green, because of Emacs Lisp
> and AutoLisp.
Whereas AutoLISP certainly is endangered nowadays.
--
Reini Urban
http://xarch.tu-graz.ac.at/autocad/news/faq/autolisp.html
ted
I cons, therefore I am.
-ted
Joe Marshall
"ted" <tedsa...@rcn.com> wrote in message news:3D2BD7BC...@rcn.com...
> Philosophy of Lisp programmers:
>
> I cons, therefore I am.
Unless, of course, you are collected. Then you are ephemeral.
Gordon Joly
"Intelligence is in the mind of the beholder."
Gordo