SUMMA SUMMARUM LISP
Janos Blazi
The whole thing started when my headmaster told me (I teach) that LISP had
fallen into oblivion and was dead. I then interrupted him and maintained
that LISP was a wonderful idiom and a lot of things are (still?) being done
in LISP. (I had done some EMACS LISP programming at the time.)
But I then looked at the shelves in the local bookshop that is a university
book shop and then a second look at the shelves in the library of the
university and I was negatively overwhelmed, as I could find almost nothing
on LISP (or in the library a lot of outdated stuff but no current books).
(I found a German book on LISP in which the authors admitted that they had
been seriously thinking about covering CL but they still preferred Nils'
LISP instead, as ... In Nils' LISP you say "(de ...)" instead of "(defun
...)" but de is probably better, as ... Usually a book is bad if the authors
are not conpetent. But these authors overflow with knowledge. And still,
something had gone wrong. )
(2)
I have taken a look at the online book by LAMKINS and after reading it for
two hours I have decided that it is wonderful, just the book I was looking
for. But he cannot find a publisher as his publisher also believes that
"LISP is...(sacrilege)".
(3)
If LISP finally finds its niche like PL/I, so this is no solution for LISP.
LISP seems to be a wonderful idiom if you think like a mathematician (you
don't have to be one!) and would have deserved much, much more. I am a
mathematician. (Well, at least theoretically: I teach math.)
(4)
But LISP IS esoteric. Its being different from BASIC and C is really its
strength. Therefore newcomers need a lot of handholding and please, please
no esoteric acronyms.
(5)
I asked about Tk as it is simple and FREE and works on WIN32 and on LINUX. I
have been considering LISP for my teaching but then I cannot dispense with a
LISP-GUI. If you consider big applications it may be very nice to have one
part of the program in LISP and the GUI part in C++, but this is no solution
for schoolchildren between fifteen and twenty.
And it partly depends on these kids that LISP finally take the place it
deserves.
(6)
I shall not give up LISP and I shall ask questions. If one of you is willing
to answer, please do not tell me that I was an idiot to ask such a trivial
question (as somebody did yesterday). (It was not clear to me that compiling
is done from within LISP with (compile-file ...)).
Janos Blazi
Fernando D. Mato Mira
[Germany, school, math]
Why didn't you say you could use Linux before? I'm working on a new release of
something, but it requires Motif.
You should like it (comes from GMD).
Get CMUCL.
--
((( DANGER )) LISP BIGOT (( DANGER )) LISP BIGOT (( DANGER )))
Fernando D. Mato Mira
Real-Time SW Eng & Networking
Advanced Systems Engineering Division
CSEM
Jaquet-Droz 1 email: matomira AT acm DOT org
CH-2007 Neuchatel tel: +41 (32) 720-5157
Switzerland FAX: +41 (32) 720-5720
www.csem.ch www.vrai.com ligwww.epfl.ch/matomira.html
Robert Monfera
> If LISP finally finds its niche like PL/I, so this is no solution for LISP.
Even though it's tempting to compare Lisp against other languages of
longevity like PL/1 or COBOL, one needs to see what drives them
individually. PL/1 and COBOL aren't only used because on some
mainframes the option is limited (e.g., to C), or that they are easy for
implementing particular functions (like mergesort), but because there is
a tremendous amount of legacy code that still needs to work for some
more time. That is partially true for Lisp (-> AI winter), but:
It is the stream of newcomers, new clients and new applications that
ensure CL's continued success. There are lots of Lispers out there who
joined in _after_ the AI winter, including myself.
Also, look up some previous postings from Erik Naggum (about a few
months back), in which he disputes motivations behind "jumping on the
Lisp bandwagon" (search words: lie, skill, resume, competency,
employer).
> LISP seems to be a wonderful idiom if you think
This is so true :-)
> (4)
> But LISP IS esoteric. Its being different from BASIC and C is really its
> strength. Therefore newcomers need a lot of handholding and please, please
> no esoteric acronyms.
I looked up the dictionary definition of esoteric: "Intended for or
understood by only a particular group.". The first part (intention)
obviously does not apply: CL is a general-purpose, widely available
language. The second part (understanding) is true: programming as a
whole or publishing or surgery is esoteric in this sense. That's
valuable too, as you point out - it gives you an advantage.
From a certain point of view CL is less esoteric than C, as it does not
force you to think about type safety, pointers, array boundaries,
overflows and memory management. Ask a 10(?)-year-old about the sum of
742598273456987234 and 42039845726340872 or three times one third.
Regards
Robert
Dave Pearson
> But LISP IS esoteric.
Perhaps something is "lost in the translation" here but I don't get the
above. I checked the definition of "esoteric" on my local dictionary server,
here is what it says:
,----
| Esoteric \Es`o*ter"ic\, a.
| Marked by secrecy or privacy; private; select; confidential;
| as, an esoteric purpose; an esoteric meeting.
`----
That doesn't sound like my experience of CL (or any "lisp" I've played
with).
Let me tell you something about my experience with CL. I don't "do" CL, I
don't generally "do" any Lisp. I do, however, "dabble" with Lisp. This
started around two to three years back when I wanted to make emacs do
something for me. I was faced with the task of trying to learn lisp.
Now, my initial reaction was "why does this editor use such a stupid
language?". After a little bit of thought I realised that that was the wrong
question, the real question was "why do I think the language used by this
editor is stupid?".
After a little more thought I decided to try the elisp programming tutorial.
To cut a long story short I was knocking up the emacs oriented tools I
wanted in no time. I won't claim the code was pretty, I won't claim it was
well designed, I won't even claim that it has survived to this day (it
hasn't). The important point here is that I did it.
How did I do it? I read the docs, purchased a book or two and asked one or
two questions. At *no* point in that process did I find "secrecy" or
"privacy". At *no* point in that process did I find anything that could be
considered "esoteric".
Since then I've started to dabble with CL itself. My book shelf has a couple
of books on the subject sat on it, they get read from time to time. I read
this group, I scan the various web sites now and again. Every so often I'll
"dabble" with some CL code.
My point here? Despite my ignorance about various issues in CL I've never
met with "secrecy" and "privacy", I've never found it to be "esoteric".
Sure, sometimes I can't easily figure something out and I'll "swear at the
language", but, soon after I'll find that I was only blaming the language
for my own ignorance.
> Its being different from BASIC and C is really its strength. Therefore
> newcomers need a lot of handholding and please, please no esoteric
> acronyms.
This doesn't make any sense at all. As a newcomer to lisp (and, even a
couple of years down the road, I'm still a newcomer (thru choice, not due to
the language)) I find the language no more esoteric than I found C when i
first tried to write a line of C code. Hell, you could say the same for
BASIC.
Stop putting the blame on the language ("lisp is esoteric") and stop seeing
secrecy and privacy where there is none ("lisp is esoteric"). In my humble
experience there is a *lot* of quality material out there for the taking,
all you have to do is take it and work with it.
[Aside]
As to the talk about this group and the "community" we've seen over the past
few days. Well, all I can say is that while I've yet to write a line of
"commercial" lisp code I can honestly say that the issues I've read here for
the last couple of years and the things I've gained from reading people's CL
code have had an impact on my "real world" coding.
I like to think that that impact is a positive one.
Thanks from one c.l.l lurker.
--
Take a look in Hagbard's World: | boxquote.el - "Boxed" text quoting.
http://www.acemake.com/hagbard/ | binclock.el - emacs binary clock.
http://www.hagbard.demon.co.uk/ | uptimes.el - Record emacs uptimes.
emacs software, including.......| quickurl.el - Recall lists of URLs.
Janos Blazi
understand it. To say that LISP is esoteric is not a complaint; it describes
tha language as it is.
If you know some mathematics, the notion of a differentiable manifold is
VERY esoteric, but there are hundred books on the subject and some of them
are most definitely masterpieces.
LISP is for those who in some way like abstract thinking and this is a very
small group of people. A COBOL programmer on the other hand can write
thousands of lines of code a day.
Dave Pearson <davep...@hagbard.demon.co.uk> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
slrn81grvb.l...@hagbard.demon.co.uk...
David B. Lamkins
<caliper-7v9gsd/INN-2.2.1/abdo...@broadway.news.is-europe.net>, "Janos
Blazi" <jbl...@netsurf.de> wrote:
>I have taken a look at the online book by LAMKINS and after reading it for
>two hours I have decided that it is wonderful, just the book I was looking
>for. But he cannot find a publisher as his publisher also believes that
>"LISP is...(sacrilege)".
Please have a look at the FAQ. I intend to publish this on CD-ROM at some
point. Meanwhile, the rough draft is available on the web. If you'd like
to use it for a class, I'd be happy to discuss arrangements that will let
you mirror the content locally.
Dave
Tim Bradshaw
> LISP is for those who in some way like abstract thinking and this is a very
> small group of people. A COBOL programmer on the other hand can write
> thousands of lines of code a day.
So can a lisp programmer!
--tim
Dave Pearson
> To say that something is esoteric means that it only those who are
> initiated understand it.
So BASIC is esoteric then, right?
Simon András
> small group of people. A COBOL programmer on the other hand can write
> thousands of lines of code a day.
Or rather, he has to. While a LISP programmer can probably get the
same job done in dozens of lines.
Andras
Rainer Joswig
> (1)
> The whole thing started when my headmaster told me (I teach) that LISP had
> fallen into oblivion and was dead. I then interrupted him and maintained
> that LISP was a wonderful idiom and a lot of things are (still?) being done
> in LISP. (I had done some EMACS LISP programming at the time.)
> But I then looked at the shelves in the local bookshop that is a university
> book shop and then a second look at the shelves in the library of the
> university and I was negatively overwhelmed, as I could find almost nothing
> on LISP (or in the library a lot of outdated stuff but no current books).
>
> (I found a German book on LISP in which the authors admitted that they had
> been seriously thinking about covering CL but they still preferred Nils'
> LISP instead, as ... In Nils' LISP you say "(de ...)" instead of "(defun
> ...)" but de is probably better, as ... Usually a book is bad if the authors
> are not conpetent. But these authors overflow with knowledge. And still,
> something had gone wrong. )
Nils' Lisp is dead and never was really alive. The authors were
just inventing their own dialect - how stupid. It was
used one semester to torture students at the University of
Hamburg.
Hey, they had error messages like:
"Stapelspeicher defekt".
Fernando D. Mato Mira
> "Stapelspeicher defekt".
"Stapelspeicher"? Der steht `pop stack' im Worterbuch, `Stapel' bedeutet `stack' und `Speicher' bedeutet `storage' (?!)
Ich glaube sie meinen `_call_ stack'?
Fernando D. Mato Mira
> Rainer Joswig wrote:
>
> > "Stapelspeicher defekt".
>
> "Stapelspeicher"? Der steht `pop stack' im Worterbuch, `Stapel' bedeutet `stack' und `Speicher' bedeutet `storage' (?!)
> Ich glaube sie meinen `_call_ stack'?
Oder nur `stack'? (Nicht nur `call')
Janos Blazi
You think that a COBOL programmer has the same problems as a LISP
programmer?
János
Simon András <asi...@csusza.math.bme.hu> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
vcd66zq...@csusza.math.bme.hu...
Erik Naggum
| To say that something is esoteric means that it only those who are
| complaint; it describes tha language as it is.
this is not the normal usage of the word, and needs constant explaining.
the usual meaning of "esoteric" means "inaccessible".
| LISP is for those who in some way like abstract thinking and this is a
| very small group of people. A COBOL programmer on the other hand can
| write thousands of lines of code a day.
I fail to see the relevance of this comparison, which belittles fast
coders and good programmers alike and seems to claim that abstract
thinkers who can do practical work don't exist. none of this is news,
however, since you have made a number of sweeping generalizations that
make very little sense. I wish you'd stop to think about what you're
saying. the broader issues you bring up with these generalization have
mostly been seriously misguided, but just stating the generalization
makes it very hard to respond to them intelligently.
Lisp is probably more attractive to people who introspect and value
precision in their dealings with the world, while those who do neither
will find many of its decisions needlessly cumbersome to understand.
it's like being in need of cash and not deciding to rob someone because
you're capable of considering the ethical and psychological implications
of living on stolen money, compared to deciding not to rob someone
because you believe you might get caught (the static typing crowd).
for what it's worth, my experience indicates that people who care about
what they do and put serious emotional investment into doing a good job,
will be incompatible with the practices involved in programming certain
languages. I could not stomach the C++ paradigm that it not be possible
to _understand_ what the precise semantics of a language construct -- you
just have to humor the compilers and development systems and visually
inspect how constructs and features pan out in practice. this paradigm
is so different from what I have come to expect in the Common Lisp world
that it is all but impossible to revert to Unix and C programming where
you have to spend hours fiddling with half-documented, half-witted junk
to get something right so you can trust it.
C/C++/Java/Perl/etc are for people who want to make things that work.
Common Lisp is for peple who want to make things that don't break.
#:Erik
Janos Blazi
Now I have looked ip the word "esoteric":
In my Larousse:
"Ésoterique: (gr. esoterikos, réservé auc seuls adeptes). Qualification
donnée, dans les écoles des ancien philosphes, á leur doctrine secrète. ||
Incompréhensible aux personnes non initiées..."
In dictionary.com:
esoteric \Es`o*ter"ic\, a. Marked by secrecy or privacy; private; select;
confidential; as, an esoteric purpose; an esoteric meeting.
esoteric \Es`o*ter"ic\, n. (Philos.) (a) An esoteric doctrine or treatise;
esoteric philosophy; esoterics. (b) One who believes, or is an initiate, in
esoteric doctrines or rites.
So I think this is pretty much the same as what I meant. I did not looked it
up before. I had not consulted my LAROUSSE.
(2)
You always attribute the worst possible sense tp my words and the you
respond with personal attacks.
(3)
"C/C++/Java/Perl/etc are for people who want to make things that work.
Common Lisp is for peple who want to make things that don't break.
"
So what kind of generalisation is this? And all the other stuff you have put
forward?
(4)
You said my first letter was stupid and boring. Well, the newsgroup is not
your property. Neither is it my property. I came up with a question or with
a group of questions that were very important to me. I received a lot of
interesting, constructive and informative responses. And I received personal
attacks (like the question whether I smoked (drugs I supposed)).
But it is your unquestioned right to get bored whenever you want to. Then
please skip the thread.
To judge by the numbers of letters that were published many people did not
find this topic boring.
(5)
When I visited the university bookshop in my own town and there was only one
book on LISP and when after that I visited the big Harry Deutsch university
bookshop in Frankfurt and I found NOT A SINGLE VOLUME on LISP there, I new
that something must have gone wrong with LISP. And now I have found out the
reason.
(6)
I indeed questioned an attitude but I had not launched any personal attacks.
Never. There is absolutely no excuse to respond with such. There is no
excuse to use rude language ever.
I have not responded to you as I am a very peaceful man and I only wanted to
be told about the current state of affaires.
Janos Blazi
Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
31502089...@naggum.no...
Erik Naggum
| You always attribute the worst possible sense tp my words and the you
| respond with personal attacks.
_this_ is not only a personal attack, it is completely unwarranted and
falls squarely in the pattern you have established: generalizations that
you post without any backing whatsoever, apart from your opinionating.
| You said my first letter was stupid and boring.
please stop lying about what's in the public record. I did not say that.
if you can't differentiate between what you remember and what somebody
actually said, at least be smart and honest enough to admit it to
yourself -- that way you won't cause any hostility with people whom you
malign with your careless lies.
| And I received personal attacks (like the question whether I smoked
| (drugs I supposed)).
not from me you didn't. please do not lie, misrepresent, extrapolate,
exaggarete, defame, or juxtapose information such that false, unwarranted
conclusions are easier to make than warranted conclusions. please learn
to exercise some precision in your communication. your hostility to my
comments have that one source: I'm pointing out to you that you are full
of vague, denigratory statements that are very hard to counter because
they are principally devoid of counterable contents.
| When I visited the university bookshop in my own town and there was only one
| book on LISP and when after that I visited the big Harry Deutsch university
| bookshop in Frankfurt and I found NOT A SINGLE VOLUME on LISP there, I new
| that something must have gone wrong with LISP. And now I have found out the
| reason.
another conclusion is that something has gone wrong with the bookstores.
such is far more likely to be relevant, true, and also changeable (you
simply ask them to order books and stir interest in Lisp for them) than
that something has gone wrong with Lisp. your decision to conclude that
something _must_ (no less!) have gone wrong with Lisp is what I challenge
and you continue to refuse to recognize this challenge. I assume that is
because you are completely unaware that you made that assumption to begin
with, as you have been visibly unaware of all of your other assumptions
that take the form of broad, unbacked generalizations. I find your lack
of precision and unwillingness to be honest quite annoying. I'm sure you
are not used to precision or you would not respond with such hostility.
| I indeed questioned an attitude but I had not launched any personal
| attacks. Never. There is absolutely no excuse to respond with such.
| There is no excuse to use rude language ever.
amazing. YOU LIE ABOUT WHAT I SAY, and you exaggerate by using such
stupid terms as "always" and try to cast a characterization on me, too,
as you have on so many else, including COBOL programmers and abstract
thinkers. you have indeed engaged in offensive communication and you
continue even in the messages where you deny it. and now rude language
is your beef. my god, what's next? you're all form and no contents!
this is so typical of people who think something is wrong with Lisp. of
course, their lack of introspection forbids them from seeing anything
that causes them to mistakenly assume that what they see _must_ (sic!) be
the only possible reason. I'm sorry, but I have a hard time dealing with
people who make up their mind and then want the world to evolve around
them, only to label anyone who tells them the world isn't so are rude to
their poor little preconceptions.
| I have not responded to you as I am a very peaceful man and I only wanted
| to be told about the current state of affaires.
then stop lying and misrepresenting others, stop presenting as facts that
which is only conjecture on your part, and stop generalizing about that
which you do not know, and you will _learn_ from others, if that is your
true desire, which I don't think it is: you are most likely here to get
an excuse not to use Lisp, as suggested by every negative conclusion you
make. your incessant focus on the negative is what made your notes stand
out to begin with. just stop the negative trend in your _own_ head, and
the world will suddenly look as bright as it actually is, to you, too.
Lisp survives because Lisp people are able to see beyond mistaken German
bookstores. Lisp can die _only_ to the extent that people are willing to
blame it for something else that goes wrong in its vicinity. and Janos
Blazi is a serious hazard to Lisp in that regard, because Lisp gets _all_
the blame when just about anything negative happens to him.
this is what's wrong with the Lisp world, and how to fix it: just get rid
of the people who post negative drivel and find whoever wants to learn
and take care of them and nuture them, one by one. the Lisp community is
good at nurturing. it isn't good at dealing with crybabies. I don't
think this is a problem for anybody but the crybabies.
Janos, you should note that I just answered a guy's questions to his full
satisfaction, and that was because he wanted to solve a problem worth
solving. you don't. you're whining and crying. I think you should go
away, so this newsgroup and every other newsgroup and community can have
room for positive, constructive people who want to do something fun and
enjoyable with their lives. I'm seriouly upset with people like you,
because for every negative, lie, misrepresentation, or false accusation
posted in public, a lot of time is spent everywhere in trying to fix it
by correcting such mistakes. that you consider it rude to ask you to go
away and get upset is the least of my problems. at least if you do, I
won't have to deal with a continued stream of negative drivel from you.
#:Erik
Simon András
> Hey Andrew!
>
> You think that a COBOL programmer has the same problems as a LISP
> programmer?
As far as I can tell (I am not a programmer), there are lots of
problems *all* programmers have to deal with. Although COBOL programmers
set out to solve different problems than Lispers, in the process they
encounter a lot of (sub)problems they could handle more easily if they
had Lisp's control structures, datatypes, etc.
A few months ago I wrote a silly thing in Informix 4GL, a very simple,
Basic-like language for database applications. The result would've
been shorter and much less clumsy (and the process of writing it more
fun!) if I'd had things (multiple values, closures, local functions,
optional/keyword arguments,...) available which are natural for anyone
slightly exposed to Lisp. `Simple language' doesn't mean `simple
programs'. On the contrary.
Andras
Jim Driese
> * Janos Blazi
> | You always attribute the worst possible sense tp my words and the you
> | respond with personal attacks.
>
> _this_ is not only a personal attack, it is completely unwarranted and
> falls squarely in the pattern you have established: generalizations that
> you post without any backing whatsoever, apart from your opinionating.
>
> | You said my first letter was stupid and boring.
>
> please stop lying about what's in the public record. I did not [deleted]
Could you please take this to private email?
Jim Driese
Erik Naggum
| Could you please take this to private email?
no. for the probably the same reason you asked for it publicly.
think about it -- you won't need to post such questions again if you do.
#:Erik
Gareth McCaughan
> (1)
> Now I have looked ip the word "esoteric":
>
> In my Larousse:
> "Ésoterique: (gr. esoterikos, réservé auc seuls adeptes). Qualification
> donnée, dans les écoles des ancien philosphes, á leur doctrine secrète. ||
> Incompréhensible aux personnes non initiées..."
Well, Lisp wasn't studied in the schools of the ancient philosophers,
and it's not a secret doctrine. It's certainly incomprehensible to
people who aren't initiated. So is German, or English, or Norwegian,
or BASIC.
> In dictionary.com:
> esoteric \Es`o*ter"ic\, a. Marked by secrecy or privacy; private; select;
> confidential; as, an esoteric purpose; an esoteric meeting.
Lisp is the subject of several books, various national and
international standards, a few Usenet newsgroups, and some
web sites. So it's hardly "marked by secrecy or privacy",
or "private", or confidential. I suppose it might be "select",
but no one is stopping you being a Lisper if you want to.
> So I think this is pretty much the same as what I meant. I did not looked it
> up before. I had not consulted my LAROUSSE.
If it's what you meant, then what you meant wasn't a true
description of Lisp.
> (2)
> You always attribute the worst possible sense tp my words and the you
> respond with personal attacks.
Yes, Erik tends to do this to people he perceives are saying
stupid things. On the other hand, he happens to be one of the
smartest people in c.l.l, and when he says something is stupid
he's usually right, so you may find it's worth your while to
get past the harshness and take some notice of the points he
makes.
> (4)
> You said my first letter was stupid and boring.
He didn't. He said arguing about whether Lisp is dead is stupid
and boring, and he's right. He said this in response to your
bizarre question "Can ANYBODY answer my questions?" -- bizarre
because it came after *lots* of people had answered your
questions, in considerable detail.
> But it is your unquestioned right to get bored whenever you want to. Then
> please skip the thread.
> To judge by the numbers of letters that were published many people did not
> find this topic boring.
I find the topic of the alleged death of Lisp boring. But I
replied because (1) I like helping people and (2) when I see
something good (like Lisp) being attacked, I like to defend it.
> (5)
> When I visited the university bookshop in my own town and there was only one
> book on LISP and when after that I visited the big Harry Deutsch university
> bookshop in Frankfurt and I found NOT A SINGLE VOLUME on LISP there, I new
> that something must have gone wrong with LISP. And now I have found out the
> reason.
You think the Harry Deutsch bookshop in Frankfurt doesn't have any
Lisp books because Erik Naggum is rude sometimes? I don't understand.
--
Gareth McCaughan Gareth.M...@pobox.com
sig under construction
Rob Warnock
+---------------
| C/C++/Java/Perl/etc are for people who want to make things that work.
| Common Lisp is for peple who want to make things that don't break.
Ahhhh!!! Finally! A pithy counterargument to "Worse Is Better"!
-Rob
-----
Rob Warnock, 8L-846 rp...@sgi.com
Applied Networking http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
Silicon Graphics, Inc. Phone: 650-933-1673
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. FAX: 650-933-0511
Mountain View, CA 94043 PP-ASEL-IA
Janos Blazi
Janos Blazi, also called the "LISP killer" :)
Jim Driese <jdr...@seanet.com> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
381A21A0...@seanet.com...
> Erik Naggum wrote:
>
> > * Janos Blazi
> > | You always attribute the worst possible sense tp my words and the you
> > | respond with personal attacks.
> >
> > _this_ is not only a personal attack, it is completely unwarranted and
> > falls squarely in the pattern you have established: generalizations
that
> > you post without any backing whatsoever, apart from your opinionating.
> >
> > | You said my first letter was stupid and boring.
> >
> > please stop lying about what's in the public record. I did not
[deleted]
>
> Could you please take this to private email?
>
> Jim Driese
>
Janos Blazi
> stupid things. On the other hand, he happens to be one of the
> smartest people in c.l.l, and when he says something is stupid
> he's usually right, so you may find it's worth your while to
> get past the harshness and take some notice of the points he
> makes.
>
So you mean that while his words sometimes may lack the decency some
outsiders expect, the end justifies the means. And as he is so smart, if he
tells me that I am stupid then I should take that seriously as them I am
probably really stupid.
> > (4)
> > You said my first letter was stupid and boring.
>
> He didn't. He said arguing about whether Lisp is dead is stupid
> and boring, and he's right.
Yes, and this is the same as saying that I am stupid and boring. It is not
always the same but it is the sam in this context.
>
> > But it is your unquestioned right to get bored whenever you want to.
Then
> > please skip the thread.
> > To judge by the numbers of letters that were published many people did
not
> > find this topic boring.
>
> I find the topic of the alleged death of Lisp boring. But I
> replied because (1) I like helping people and (2) when I see
> something good (like Lisp) being attacked, I like to defend it.
>
O.K. There have always been heretics. When we look into the history of our
religion we see that heretics made the CHURCH clarify their positions and
the CHURCH was stronger after the heretics were defeated. (And as a
byproduct, the heretics were eliminated, but this is another story.)
> > (5)
> > When I visited the university bookshop in my own town and there was only
one
> > book on LISP and when after that I visited the big Harry Deutsch
university
> > bookshop in Frankfurt and I found NOT A SINGLE VOLUME on LISP there, I
new
> > that something must have gone wrong with LISP. And now I have found out
the
> > reason.
>
> You think the Harry Deutsch bookshop in Frankfurt doesn't have any
> Lisp books because Erik Naggum is rude sometimes? I don't understand.
>
No. I think, that big and great bookshop in Frankfurt has no books on LISP
as the books are not asked for. In Germany there are some murky books on
LISP and you cannot get the classics. I found a copy of Graham in my
bookshop but it was a German translation which I do not buy on principle.
Sometimes the translator thinks that he can "improve" the book. Ordering the
original English Edition would take 8 weeks. I have ordered the German
version from the library of the university though.
(I'll visit Berlin next week and I'll take a look there at the big Kierpert
store that is atleast twice bigger than the one in Frankfurt. I could not
compete with the wonderful FOYLES though :):):) )
And this means that in the interest in LISP has almost vanished. And you can
major in computer science from a German university (including my own
unversity) without even having been told about LISP or a similiar language.
(Well, you can major without proving that you can write programs at all in
any language, but this is a different story.)
Janos Blazi
Jim Driese
> YES, I AM SORRY.
> Janos Blazi, also called the "LISP killer" :)
>
> [deleted]
Thanks!
I rather enjoyed this thread (especially the post about Nils' Lisp and the
"Stapelspeicher defekt" error) although things were getting a little heated
toward the end. I'm hoping this is the end but you never know...
In Seattle, one will typically find three different Lisp books in stock at a
large bookstore (_CLTL_, _Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming_
(PAIP), and On Lisp). The books are current and well-written so I think Lisp
will be around for a while.
If you cannot teach Lisp in your class, perhaps you could have the class write
a Lisp interpreter in C as a project. That may be a bit much to ask of
students at the pre-college level but you would be the better judge of this.
Obviously, this will most likely be my last post on this thread since I think
it is time to move on. If the Lisp in C idea interests you, drop me an email.
Good Luck, "LISP Killer" ;-)
Jim Driese
Marco Antoniotti
So, there are no books on Lisp in big bookstores in Framkfurt (or
somewhere else in Germany) and in the library of the University.
While I admit that the lack of good published Lisp books on the
shelves of bookstores worldwide is a problem (Barnes and Nobles on
Astor Place in NY e.g. or on Shuttuck in Berkeley don't have much, but
Cody's on Telegraph in Berkeley carries the full array of "classics";
Feltrinelli's on Piazza Argentina in Rome has nil), I perceive
this as a problem of the (Lisp) community as a whole and of the status
of the overall available "greater Lisp programming environment". This
has nothing to do with your will or need to learn (Common) Lisp and
widen your programming horizons. If more people start using Lisp,
more books will start to appear on the shelves of the bookstores. The
opposite is not necessarily true.
It is certainly much easier to find *a lot* of books on Java and
C/C++. If you looked at the Ada landscape, the situation - bookwise -
would not be much different from Lisp. It is also true that many of
the books you find about Java and C/C++ are bad. I only have three C++
books: Lippman's, Stroustroup's and Copliens's. They are what you
really need. Period. For Java, it is enough to peruse the on-line
documentation.
Now. CL has many online resources, including Steele's "Common Lisp:
the Language" and the full ANSI standard. The other books (Graham's,
Norvig's and SICP) are avilable through Amazon or other Internet
booksellers in way less that 8 weeks (and usually cheaper than at your
bookstore).
So much for book availability.
As per your difficulties dealing with some of the attack "ad personam"
which you have suffered, please try to understand the following.
Every three months or so, somebody wanders on comp.lang.lisp and sends
a message with the title "Is Lisp dead?". I am serious. Check out
dejanews. Please understand that the people who write here *are*
zealots when it comes to (Common) Lisp. Having said so, I ask for
forgiveness on your part. You basically generated a Pavlovian
reaction in the news group. This reaction takes many forms: some
indeed unpleasant.
What will happen now? Will you throw in the towel and keep thinking
that (Common) Lisp is dead and that this newsgroup is a cult? Or will
you fire up Emacs (you are using Emacs, aren't you? :) ), and start
writing you multiply dispatching methods? (Something you cannot do in
other languages). I you you'll choose the second alternative. It's
good for you.
Cheers
--
Marco Antoniotti ===========================================
PARADES, Via San Pantaleo 66, I-00186 Rome, ITALY
tel. +39 - 06 68 10 03 17, fax. +39 - 06 68 80 79 26
http://www.parades.rm.cnr.it/~marcoxa
Fernando
<mato...@iname.com> wrote:
>Janos Blazi wrote:
>
>[Germany, school, math]
>
>Why didn't you say you could use Linux before? I'm working on a new release of
>something, but it requires Motif.
Something seems a bit vague... could you give more details? O:-)
//-----------------------------------------------
// Fernando Rodriguez Romero
//
// frr at mindless dot com
//------------------------------------------------
Clemens Heitzinger
> No. I think, that big and great bookshop in Frankfurt has no books on LISP
> as the books are not asked for. In Germany there are some murky books on
> LISP and you cannot get the classics. I found a copy of Graham in my
> bookshop but it was a German translation which I do not buy on principle.
> Sometimes the translator thinks that he can "improve" the book. Ordering the
> original English Edition would take 8 weeks. I have ordered the German
> version from the library of the university though.
Please get your logic straight. You say, "you cannot get the classics",
and in the next sentence you say you could even get a German translation
of Graham's ANSI CL?
I've got all my lisp books on very short notice, and I didn't have to go
to book shop (hint, hint).
> And this means that in the interest in LISP has almost vanished. And you can
> major in computer science from a German university (including my own
> unversity) without even having been told about LISP or a similiar language.
> (Well, you can major without proving that you can write programs at all in
> any language, but this is a different story.)
This tells us more about the state of German computer science education
(and the same applies to Austrian CS education) than about the interest
in lisp. There is interest in lisp and people are using it, or whom do
you think the four lisp vendors sell their products?
Anyway, counting the books in book stores maybe measures the popularity
of a programming language, but certainly neither its quality nor the
amount of thought that went into its design. (And yes, we recently had
a thread about quality vs popularity.)
--
Clemens Heitzinger
http://ag.or.at:8000/~clemens
Tim Bradshaw
> And this means that in the interest in LISP has almost vanished. And you can
> major in computer science from a German university (including my own
> unversity) without even having been told about LISP or a similiar language.
> (Well, you can major without proving that you can write programs at all in
> any language, but this is a different story.)
I hate to keep this thread alive, but I think this is wrong: it's the
*same* story. The same underlying problems in CS education cause both
these symptoms. Majoring in CS without being able to write programs
is about as bad as majoring in Physics without being able to solve
simple differential equations, and it says something truly awful about
the state of CS education, and not just in your university I'm sure.
Very sad.
--tim
Christopher R. Barry
> While I admit that the lack of good published Lisp books on the
> shelves of bookstores worldwide is a problem (Barnes and Nobles on
> Astor Place in NY e.g. or on Shuttuck in Berkeley don't have much, but
> Cody's on Telegraph in Berkeley carries the full array of "classics";
I was just at Cody's a few weeks ago. They had the 2 Graham books, but
they didn't have the Keene book, nor AMOP, nor PAIP. They didn't have
other rarer ones I've been keeping my eye out for either like OOP: The
CLOS Perspective.
Christopher
Janos Blazi
> Please get your logic straight. You say, "you cannot get the classics",
> and in the next sentence you say you could even get a German translation
> of Graham's ANSI CL?
>
TRANSLATION!! The proverb "TRADUTTORE, TRADITORE" should be taken very, very
seriously!
After all: Translations of such books are absolutely useless!
Pierre R. Mai
> they didn't have the Keene book, nor AMOP, nor PAIP. They didn't have
> other rarer ones I've been keeping my eye out for either like OOP: The
> CLOS Perspective.
The last one will be very difficult to get hold of, since it's been
seriously out-of-print for quite some time. It also seems to be a
rather popular book, in that noone seems to wish to part with it,
thereby reducing the number of available copies via second-hand
sources to epsilon, with epsilon being sufficiently close to 0 that
I've been unable to locate a copy for a couple of years... :-(
Regs, Pierre.
--
Pierre Mai <pm...@acm.org> PGP and GPG keys at your nearest Keyserver
"One smaller motivation which, in part, stems from altruism is Microsoft-
bashing." [Microsoft memo, see http://www.opensource.org/halloween1.html]
Andy Freeman
> And this means that in the interest in LISP has almost vanished. And
you can
> major in computer science from a German university (including my own
> unversity) without even having been told about LISP or a similiar
language.
> (Well, you can major without proving that you can write programs at
all in
> any language, but this is a different story.)
Actually, it's the same story. Universities are not trade schools.
Moreover, they don't really try to weed-out people who are wasting
space. In one respect, universities are a lot like the real world.
No one else is looking out for what you should be learning/paying
attention to. BTW - No one thinks that an undergraduate degree
means all that much. At best, it means that you might be able
to learn things in your supposed field of study.
It isn't lisp's fault, or your university's fault, that you didn't
learn everything that you didn't get an education.
-andy
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Janos Blazi
they had always used PASCAL and so they had a lot work invested into it and
had questions for the examinations e.t.c.
And they simply were not interested to introduce C for example (or any other
language) as that would have meant a lot of work. This is my opinion as they
say PASCAL is the best languge for beginners.
Janos Blazi
Andy Freeman <ana...@earthlink.net> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
7vg38c$bgs$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
Rainer Joswig
> Rainer Joswig wrote:
>
> > "Stapelspeicher defekt".
>
> "Stapelspeicher"? Der steht `pop stack' im Worterbuch, `Stapel' bedeutet `stack' und `Speicher' bedeutet `storage' (?!)
> Ich glaube sie meinen `_call_ stack'?
stack overflow
Rainer Joswig
> So, there are no books on Lisp in big bookstores in Framkfurt (or
> somewhere else in Germany) and in the library of the University.
Go to Lehmanns in Hamburg/Germany. They have Lisp books and can help.
Excellent service. I'm getting all my CS books (lots) there.
Last time I looked they had about ten (!) copies of Graham's "Common Lisp".
They have both, german and english editions. I have both, too.
Fachbuchhandlung für Informatik, Psychologie und Medizin.
Direkt in der Innenstadt in Hamburg
JF Lehmanns
Hermannstr. 17
20095 Hamburg
Telefon: 040/33 63 84
Fax: 040/33 89 55
Oeffnungszeiten: Mo-Fr 10.00-20.00, Sa 10.00-16.00, Advents-Samstage 10.00-18.00
e-Mail mailto:hh-...@lehmanns.de
Janos Blazi
there). And I love Hamburg. It is wonderful to walk from the wonderful Hotel
in the Möckebergstraße to the bookshop and look what they have.
But most unfortunately I live in Würzburg (600km? 500km?) and so it is not
the next bookshop near me.
Janos Blazi
Rainer Joswig <jos...@lavielle.com> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
joswig-3110...@194.163.195.67...
Erik Naggum
| So you mean that while his words sometimes may lack the decency some
| outsiders expect, the end justifies the means. And as he is so smart, if
| he tells me that I am stupid then I should take that seriously as them I
| am probably really stupid.
if your concern is _actually_ decency, start with yourself, right now:
you're the one responsible for the hostilities here at the moment. just
look at yourself and what indecency YOU write, for crying out loud!
if you can't distinguish between DOING something stupid and BEING stupid,
perhaps you are entirely justified in your own case, but I do distinguish
between them, ALWAYS. smart people also do stupid things, but stop doing
them when criticized or made aware of their mistakes. stupid people tend
to want to PROVE that whatever they were doing was not stupid when they
get any form of criticism, harsh or friendly alike, and keep doing them
just to spite their criticizers. so if the shoe fits, wear it, but don't
blame me for your hardship or your reactions, and above all: don't even
_attempt_ to blame me for your very own personal negativity.
| Ordering the original English Edition would take 8 weeks.
it takes two days for amazon.com to deliver it if you ask them! criminy!
the Internet appears to work in Germany, too, and the last time I shipped
goods to Germany, both the postal services and outfits like FedEx and DHL
were in reputable operation. perhaps you are unaware of your ability to
order books from any large bookstore in the U.S.? whatever your imagined
problem, the real problems are easy to solve and immaterial to anyone who
actually wants something to happen, as opposed to only wanting to whine
and blame others for their sorry state of affairs.
refusing to take part in this advancing communications world is simply
not smart, but I guess anyone's entitled to wait eight weeks just so he
doesn't have to dial an international phone number or use a credit card
or visit a web site or what have you. what they are not entitled to is
pretend that this is anybody's _fault_ but their own or a huge conspiracy
or whatever else makes it impossible to solve simple, straightforward,
and merely practical problems.
just f.....g do it! how hard can it _be_?
#:Erik, who gets _really_ tired of whining losers anywhere in the world,
thanks to the same advancing communications technology.
Marco Antoniotti
cba...@2xtreme.net (Christopher R. Barry) writes:
> Marco Antoniotti <mar...@parades.rm.cnr.it> writes:
>
> > While I admit that the lack of good published Lisp books on the
> > shelves of bookstores worldwide is a problem (Barnes and Nobles on
> > Astor Place in NY e.g. or on Shuttuck in Berkeley don't have much, but
> > Cody's on Telegraph in Berkeley carries the full array of "classics";
>
> I was just at Cody's a few weeks ago. They had the 2 Graham books, but
> they didn't have the Keene book, nor AMOP, nor PAIP. They didn't have
> other rarer ones I've been keeping my eye out for either like OOP: The
> CLOS Perspective.
All right, it was along shot. I was there in June and they had PAIP
and "OOP: The CLOS Perspective", looks like somebody bought them :)
Anyway, my point was that (1) yes: it is hard to find (Common) Lisp
books in bookstores (2) this is indeed a sign of the shrinking
programmers' base, and (3) this is not an encumbrance to getting these
books today, given that they are either available directly online or
thorugh Amazon and friends.
Paolo Amoroso
wrote:
Gareth McCaughan:
> > replied because (1) I like helping people and (2) when I see
> > something good (like Lisp) being attacked, I like to defend it.
> >
Janos Blazi:
> O.K. There have always been heretics. When we look into the history of our
> religion we see that heretics made the CHURCH clarify their positions and
> the CHURCH was stronger after the heretics were defeated. (And as a
In its long history, Lisp had its heretics too. And the Lisp community did
take their claims as occasions to clarify its position and to improve the
language. So we can probably say that after decades of debates, Lisp is
stronger now. But I guess those heretics were not newcomers.
Paolo
--
EncyCMUCLopedia * Extensive collection of CMU Common Lisp documentation
http://cvs2.cons.org:8000/cmucl/doc/EncyCMUCLopedia/
Pierre R. Mai
> | Ordering the original English Edition would take 8 weeks.
>
> it takes two days for amazon.com to deliver it if you ask them! criminy!
It's even better than this: amazon.com has a subsidiary in Germany
nowadays (amazon.de), which doesn't charge for shipping in Germany
(and IIRC Austria and Switzerland as well), even for american or
british books. And they are quite fast (the longest time I've yet
encountered was 2-3 weeks, and often they are quite a bit faster than
this, sometimes < 24h on foreign books!). And you don't get any
trouble with german customs, since amazon handles all of that (your
package is shipped from germany).
And amazon has most of the recommended CL books in their catalog,
often with extensive reviews and user comments/reviews (the links
below are not part of some partner program, so I won't get any money
from this):
* Graham, Paul: ANSI Common Lisp (1-2 weeks)
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0133708756/
* Slade, Stephen: Object-Oriented Common Lisp (24h)
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0136059406/
* Norvig, Peter: Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming
- Case Studies in Common Lisp (24h)
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/1558601910/
* Watson, Mark: Common Lisp Modules : Artificial Intelligence in the
Era of Neural Networks and Chaos Theory (on order)
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0387976140/
* Graham, Paul: On Lisp (1-2 weeks)
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0130305529/
* Steele, Guy L.: Common Lisp - The Language (1-2 weeks)
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/1555580416/
* Kiczales, Gregor et al: The Art of the Metaobject Protocol (1-2 weeks)
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262610744/
* Keene, Sonya E.: Object Oriented Programming in Common Lisp
- A Programmers Guide to the Common Lisp Object System (on order)
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0201175894/
Search results for Common Lisp can be viewed under:
http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/Subject-US/COMMON%20LISP%20%28Computer%20program/
Andy Freeman
<autonomous-7vgs79/INN-2.2.1/bel...@broadway.news.is-europe.net>,
I shouldn't have used the word "fault". I should have written
that it isn't the university's problem that you didn't get a
good education.
> And they simply were not interested to introduce C for example (or any
other
> language) as that would have meant a lot of work. This is my opinion
as they
> say PASCAL is the best languge for beginners.
Hmm, that "for beginners" might suggest to you that you need to
learn other things for other purposes. Unless, of course, being
a "beginner" is your goal....
Paolo Amoroso
> Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> writes:
>
> > | Ordering the original English Edition would take 8 weeks.
> >
> > it takes two days for amazon.com to deliver it if you ask them! criminy!
A few years ago I ordered a book at a university bookshop in Milan, Italy
(exercise for Marco: from the "efficiency pattern" guess which library I'm
referring to ;-) A month later I hadn't received the book yet. So I called
the publisher and discovered that their warehouse was just a couple km away
from the bookshop. I went there and I got the book, with a small discount.
Needless to say, I am a happy Amazon customer:
> * Kiczales, Gregor et al: The Art of the Metaobject Protocol (1-2 weeks)
> http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0262610744/
Recently I ordered this book from Amazon, together with a stock market
analysis book for a friend, and chose air mail as the shipping method.
About four weeks later I received Amazon's box as expected. But when I
opened it, I found four cute children books with such fascinating titles as
"Everyone Poops", "Your Bellybutton", "The Runaway Bunny" and "The Hungry
Caterpillar" :-)
From the shipping receipt it turned out that those books should have been
sent to a lady in New York, and that someone at Amazon had probably swapped
the boxes's contents. I guess the lady was a bit concerned of handing
metaobject stuff to her children: no kid should do this at home :-)
I notified Amazon's customer support. In their prompt reply, they
apologized about the problem. Since it would have been prohibitively
expensive for me to return the children books, they told me to keep them as
a gift and suggested to donate them to a school, which I did. Besides, they
resent my books _by courier_ free of charge.
Long live globalization! Long live good customer support! Long live freedom
of choice! :-)
Gareth McCaughan
>> Yes, Erik tends to do this to people he perceives are saying
>> stupid things. On the other hand, he happens to be one of the
>> smartest people in c.l.l, and when he says something is stupid
>> he's usually right, so you may find it's worth your while to
>> get past the harshness and take some notice of the points he
>> makes.
>
> So you mean that while his words sometimes may lack the decency some
> outsiders expect, the end justifies the means. And as he is so smart, if he
> tells me that I am stupid then I should take that seriously as them I am
> probably really stupid.
No. None of the above.
I mean:
- Although Erik is sometimes rude, he is also sometimes
extremely clever and insightful.
- If he tells you that you are saying something stupid,
then you may well be doing so even if you are not
yourself stupid.
>>> (4)
>>> You said my first letter was stupid and boring.
>>
>> He didn't. He said arguing about whether Lisp is dead is stupid
>> and boring, and he's right.
>
> Yes, and this is the same as saying that I am stupid and boring. It is not
> always the same but it is the sam in this context.
It's certainly not the same as saying that *you* are
stupid and boring. (How could it be?) It's only the same
as saying that *your article* was stupid and boring
if the whole point of your article was to discuss the
alleged death of Lisp. If that's so, then maybe the
article *was* stupid and boring :-).
>> I find the topic of the alleged death of Lisp boring. But I
>> replied because (1) I like helping people and (2) when I see
>> something good (like Lisp) being attacked, I like to defend it.
>>
> O.K. There have always been heretics. When we look into the history of our
> religion we see that heretics made the CHURCH clarify their positions and
> the CHURCH was stronger after the heretics were defeated. (And as a
> byproduct, the heretics were eliminated, but this is another story.)
Heretics make the church stronger when they come up with
new heretical ideas that provoke clearer theological thought.
I don't think the 1,000,001st person to say "This whole God
business is obvious rubbish" does a great deal to strengthen
the church. It seems to me that starting yet another "Is Lisp
Dead?" thread (OK, you didn't know it was Yet Another, but
it was) is more like the latter than it is like the former.
>> You think the Harry Deutsch bookshop in Frankfurt doesn't have any
>> Lisp books because Erik Naggum is rude sometimes? I don't understand.
>
> No. I think, that big and great bookshop in Frankfurt has no books on LISP
> as the books are not asked for.
Unfortunately, that's probably true. Now, I wonder whether saying
that Lisp is dead is likely to mean that *more* people will ask
for Lisp books in the bookshops, or *less*? :-)
> (I'll visit Berlin next week and I'll take a look there at the big Kierpert
> store that is atleast twice bigger than the one in Frankfurt. I could not
> compete with the wonderful FOYLES though :):):) )
Foyles always seems to me a bit like an entry in the International
Obfuscated C Code Competition. There are wonderful things in there,
but it's all arranged carefully to make them as hard as possible
to find. The only difference is that IOCCC entries are small.
> And this means that in the interest in LISP has almost vanished. And you can
> major in computer science from a German university (including my own
> unversity) without even having been told about LISP or a similiar language.
What counts as "similar"? (Here in Cambridge, for instance,
they don't study Lisp, but they do look at ML, which has some
features in common with it.)
Gareth McCaughan
> I wanted to buy the English version. Of course I would never buy a
> TRANSLATION!! The proverb "TRADUTTORE, TRADITORE" should be taken very, very
> seriously!
<irrelevant>
Douglas Hofstadter once remarked that it's a pity that that
particular proverb translates so perfectly into English ("translator,
traitor"). He suggested "Transductioner, treasoner" as a "better"
translation. :-)
</irrelevant>
Janos Blazi
You have taught me a lesson!
After I stopped cryingt I took my Oxford English Dictionary (my English is
very weak). But alas! the word "f.....g" was not in the dictionary. After
one hours study I saw that it contained no words with dots in them at all!
So I called the company and they told me that I probably had the "Standard
Edtion" which does not cotain such words. They asked me, why I wanted to
know the meaning of that word. So I told them about our discussion and then
they told me I have to buy the "Vulgar Edition". If it is not available at
my local bookshop I can order it from amazon.com. And then it is delivered
via FedEx or DHH and these companies are known to be very reliable. I
additionally gave me the advice to order a copy of the "Dictionary for
Historical Slang" at the same time as it may be of some help in the future.
Janos Blazi
Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
31503600...@naggum.no...
> * Janos Blazi
> | So you mean that while his words sometimes may lack the decency some
> | outsiders expect, the end justifies the means. And as he is so smart,
if
> | he tells me that I am stupid then I should take that seriously as them I
> | am probably really stupid.
>
> if your concern is _actually_ decency, start with yourself, right now:
> you're the one responsible for the hostilities here at the moment. just
> look at yourself and what indecency YOU write, for crying out loud!
>
> if you can't distinguish between DOING something stupid and BEING
stupid,
> perhaps you are entirely justified in your own case, but I do
distinguish
> between them, ALWAYS. smart people also do stupid things, but stop
doing
> them when criticized or made aware of their mistakes. stupid people
tend
> to want to PROVE that whatever they were doing was not stupid when they
> get any form of criticism, harsh or friendly alike, and keep doing them
> just to spite their criticizers. so if the shoe fits, wear it, but
don't
> blame me for your hardship or your reactions, and above all: don't even
> _attempt_ to blame me for your very own personal negativity.
>
> | Ordering the original English Edition would take 8 weeks.
>
> it takes two days for amazon.com to deliver it if you ask them!
criminy!
>
Robert Monfera
> Anyway, my point was that (1) yes: it is hard to find (Common) Lisp
> books in bookstores (2) this is indeed a sign of the shrinking
> programmers' base
There must have been a lot of shrinking after the AI winter, but chances
are that drop is way behind us.
I remember folks quoting the continuous increase of c.l.l. readers
during the last few years. I think relatively little of can be
attributed to the growth of the Internet, as universities and
development shops have had access for a long time.
The relative luck of Lisp books in book shops is a simple indication of
the fact that Lisp is not amongst the limelight languages in terms of
popularity and hype. As such, it is simply not as reasonable to keep
them on shelves. I have ordered books on-line for quite some time
before the idea of buying it from a bookstore occurred to me (when it
did, I found 4-5 of the more recent books in various outlets in New
York, which is not famous for being the headquarters of software
development or CS education).
Also, simply because Lisp is more stable and mature, there is no need to
print new books just because of new features of the next version. The
on-line sources, like CLHS, CLtL2 and now AMOP and David's book do a
very good service.
The strongest reason could be the effect of computing becoming an ever
more blue collar activity, as it becomes accessible to an ever wider
range of people. It leads to lots of mediocre people being managed the
McDonad's way. In the typical corporate IT environment, it pays off to
be conformist to the extreme, and there is mostly negative incentive for
innovation.
In my experience, it is hardly possible to buy _any_ kind of respectable
computing weekly or periodical at newsagents and bookstores - at least
in places like New York, Boston and London. I am not suggesting there
are no exceptions, but the point is that it's easier to buy 5 magazines
dealing with the latest portable computers than one magazine on CS or
_any_ language.
Robert
Erik Naggum
| You have taught me a lesson!
then why do you keep proving my point?
#:Erik
Espen Vestre
To all those of you who might think that lisp is dead in Germany
just because this guy claims he doesn't find any books in big
bookstores: Just a few days ago, I got a mail from former colleagues
at the university of Saarbrücken regarding their lecture in Common
Lisp this semeseter.
But there's more:
"Janos Blazi" <jbl...@netsurf.de> writes:
> But most unfortunately I live in Würzburg (600km? 500km?) and so it is not
> the next bookshop near me.
My reaction to this was: I wouldn't be suprised if they actually teach
Common Lisp at the university of Würzburg. And indeed:
After just a few minutes of searching I found:
http://www-fsv.informatik.uni-wuerzburg.de/EVV/show.phtml?id=1300
--
(espen)
Pierre R. Mai
> The relative luck of Lisp books in book shops is a simple indication of
> the fact that Lisp is not amongst the limelight languages in terms of
> popularity and hype. As such, it is simply not as reasonable to keep
> them on shelves. I have ordered books on-line for quite some time
> before the idea of buying it from a bookstore occurred to me (when it
> did, I found 4-5 of the more recent books in various outlets in New
> York, which is not famous for being the headquarters of software
> development or CS education).
To get a perspective of the relationship between the "aliveness" of
languages and the number of books about them that are available at
offline bookstores, it helps to look at the numbers in more detail:
If you walk into the JF Lehmann's bookstore near the Technical
University in Berlin, which is one of the best bookstores still
available w.r.t. computer science books, you will get the following
picture:
Language No. of books available
-------------------------------------------------
C/C++ 0.7-1.0 shelves
Java 0.5 shelves
"Visual *" 0.5-1.0 shelves
Perl&Python&Tcl 0.5 shelves
OOP/OOAD/... 0.5 shelves
Metatopics 0.5 shelves
All other languages 1 row (ca. 0.15 shelves)
So what are these strange, esoteric other languages, you ask? Surely
they must be little known also runs, probably only used in occult
universities for one course and then forgotten about! So let's see
what their quaint little names are:
- Ada
- Cobol
- Common Lisp
- Dylan
- Eiffel
- Forth
- Fortran
- Haskell
- ML
- Modula-2/3
- Oberon
- Pascal
- Prolog
- Scheme
- Smalltalk
For each of these languages you will normally find 0-2 books at JF
Lehmann's, depending on your luck.
So are all these languages dead? I'd wager that between them, the
written LoC (and even the number of LoC in operation) of the above
languages squashes the number of LoC of all the "cool" languages
combined. And new projects are indeed being undertaken in all of
them all the time.
So numbers of books on bookshelves is no measure at all about the
aliveness of languages at the current time. It _might_ be an
indication of the aliveness of a language in 20 years, though even
that seems unlikely.
> In my experience, it is hardly possible to buy _any_ kind of respectable
> computing weekly or periodical at newsagents and bookstores - at least
> in places like New York, Boston and London. I am not suggesting there
> are no exceptions, but the point is that it's easier to buy 5 magazines
> dealing with the latest portable computers than one magazine on CS or
> _any_ language.
It also seems to me that there has been an alarming drop in
high-quality professional publications in CS in the last decade. The
more PCs and programming got to be mass-market afairs, the more
high-quality publications either died of -- to be replaced by rubishy
hobbyist glossies -- or reduced their quality to levels acceptable to
the mass-market... So maybe the more interesting question would be:
Is CS dead? ;-(
Clemens Heitzinger
> Anyway, my point was that (1) yes: it is hard to find (Common) Lisp
> books in bookstores (2) this is indeed a sign of the shrinking
> programmers' base, and (3) this is not an encumbrance to getting these
> books today, given that they are either available directly online or
> thorugh Amazon and friends.
You are right on (1) and (3), but I think (2) is disputable. About four
years ago, when I looked for Lisp books in some book stores, there were
none. When I look nowadays, there are at least books about Emacs
(Lisp). So one might argue that the situation has in fact improved.
Anyway, whether one can find Lisp books in book stores is becoming
increasingly irrelevant, since you can get them sent to you for zero
shipping cost after a dozen mouse clicks.
And I don't have the impression that the programmers' base is shrinking.
I think it's expanding.
Rob Warnock
+---------------
| "Janos Blazi" <jbl...@netsurf.de> writes:
| > After all: Translations of such books are absolutely useless!
|
+---------------
Agreed. In fact, the English translation of Christian Queinnec's
"Les Langages Lisp" (called "Lisp In Small Pieces" in the English
version) is *very* good, IMHO...
-Rob
-----
Rob Warnock, 8L-846 rp...@sgi.com
Applied Networking http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
Silicon Graphics, Inc. Phone: 650-933-1673
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. FAX: 650-933-0511
Mountain View, CA 94043 PP-ASEL-IA
Janos Blazi
I am going to visit Berlin on the 4th. (I love Berlin and i tried to get
there but it is impossible.) Then I wanted to take look at Lehmann's and
also at Kiepert which seems to be even larger. (So you could meet me
there... :) )
But there are two other universities in Berlin. Do they have similar
bookshops? What about the "Freie Universität" in Dahlem for example? Can you
give me a hint?
Janos Blazi
Pierre R. Mai <pm...@acm.org> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
871zaa7...@orion.dent.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de...
Marco Antoniotti
chei...@ag.or.at (Clemens Heitzinger) writes:
...
> Anyway, whether one can find Lisp books in book stores is becoming
> increasingly irrelevant, since you can get them sent to you for zero
> shipping cost after a dozen mouse clicks.
>
> And I don't have the impression that the programmers' base is shrinking.
> I think it's expanding.
I hope so.
Fernando D. Mato Mira
I got that. But is:
overflow "=" error (defekt)
overflow = pop error
--
((( DANGER )) LISP BIGOT (( DANGER )) LISP BIGOT (( DANGER )))
Fernando D. Mato Mira
Real-Time SW Eng & Networking
Advanced Systems Engineering Division
CSEM
Jaquet-Droz 1 email: matomira AT acm DOT org
CH-2007 Neuchatel tel: +41 (32) 720-5157
Switzerland FAX: +41 (32) 720-5720
www.csem.ch www.vrai.com ligwww.epfl.ch/matomira.html
Fernando D. Mato Mira
> And I don't have the impression that the programmers' base is shrinking.
> I think it's expanding.
As I said before, it looks like the bottom of the Lisp pit was about 2
years ago, at the peak of the Java hype.
Linux demonstrates that it's indeed possible to break a seemingly
unstoppable Worse Is Better trend.
The availability of free CL/Scheme implementations is allowing Lisp to
piggyback on its success (as well as the mindset change w.r.t. GC that Java
provoked).
Fernando D. Mato Mira
Free shipping to Germany, Switzerland, Austria and LIchtenstein rules.
If the book is at most $2 more than the price at American sites, it's a win-win situation.
Janos Blazi
only ships German books free. I aften buy at amazon.com but they never told
me about the new possibility.
So thank you VERY MUCH.
(I hope I understood you correctly: I can order a book from the English
catalogue and receive it from amazon.de free??)
Fernando D. Mato Mira <mato...@iname.com> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
381D9048...@iname.com...
Fernando D. Mato Mira
> Gee this is valuable hint. I dod not know that. I thought that amazon.de
> only ships German books free. I aften buy at amazon.com but they never told
> me about the new possibility.
>
> So thank you VERY MUCH.
>
> (I hope I understood you correctly: I can order a book from the English
> catalogue and receive it from amazon.de free??)
You go to amazon.de, select `US-titel' when searching or browsing, and order
from there
(not from amazon.com).
Some `esoteric' books might be missing, but all the normal stuff is there.
They used to advertise `books at US prices', but I've seen important price
differentials
on occasion (eg: brand-new Dilbert books). Most of the time it's true (and
even marginally cheaper
due to exchange rate fluctuations sometimes).
Eugene Zaikonnikov
Janos Blazi <jbl...@netsurf.de> wrote in message
news:billiken-7vfb6m/INN-2.2.1/bre...@broadway.news.is-europe.net...
> I>
> > Please get your logic straight. You say, "you cannot get the classics",
> > and in the next sentence you say you could even get a German translation
> > of Graham's ANSI CL?
> >
> I wanted to buy the English version. Of course I would never buy a
> TRANSLATION!! The proverb "TRADUTTORE, TRADITORE" should be taken very,
very
> seriously!
>
_Lisp-Maailma_ (lisp world?) by Hyvonen and Seppanen (sorry for umlauts). It
was perfectly useful and allowed me to 'feel the language', avoiding the
need to ask basic questions in the newsgroup. And keep in mind that Russian
and Finnish are far more different languages than English and German.
--
Eugene.
Paolo Amoroso
wrote:
> additionally gave me the advice to order a copy of the "Dictionary for
> Historical Slang" at the same time as it may be of some help in the future.
This is an interesting scholarly work:
"Slang and Euphemism - A dictionary of oaths, curses, insults, ethnic
slurs, sexual slang and metaphor, drug talk, college lingo and related
matters"
Richard A. Spears
(Associate Professor of Linguistics, Northwestern University)
Second revised edition
SIGNET/Penguin Books, 1991
512 pages - 14,500 entries, 32,000 definitions and rich bibliography
ISBN 0-451-16554-3
price around US $7
I think it's a useful resource for non-native speakers. Here is, for
example, the definition of "fucking": "1. copulation. For synonyms see
SMOCKAGE. 2. an intensifier; the U.S. equivalent of ``bloody.'' Also
_fuckin'_."
R. Matthew Emerson
> This is an interesting scholarly work:
>
> "Slang and Euphemism - A dictionary of oaths, curses, insults, ethnic
> slurs, sexual slang and metaphor, drug talk, college lingo and related
> matters"
> Richard A. Spears
> (Associate Professor of Linguistics, Northwestern University)
> Second revised edition
> SIGNET/Penguin Books, 1991
> 512 pages - 14,500 entries, 32,000 definitions and rich bibliography
> ISBN 0-451-16554-3
> price around US $7
>
> I think it's a useful resource for non-native speakers. Here is, for
> example, the definition of "fucking": "1. copulation. For synonyms see
> SMOCKAGE. 2. an intensifier; the U.S. equivalent of ``bloody.'' Also
> _fuckin'_."
But I would say that it's a *much* nastier word than bloody. I would
certainly not call them equivalent. If you're accustomed to saying
"bloody" a lot, and use the so-called equivalent cited above when you
visit the U.S., you're going to shock a lot of people. :-)
My experience with human languages has been that non-native speakers
should be very careful when using language at the vulgar level. It's
handy to understand what it means and how it is used, but non-native
speakers are well-advised to avoid it entirely.
I myself have gotten pretty shocked responses when I trusted a French
slang dictionary for the appropriate level of usage. Talk about
embarrassing.
-matt
Pierre R. Mai
> This is very interesting.
>
> I am going to visit Berlin on the 4th. (I love Berlin and i tried to get
> there but it is impossible.) Then I wanted to take look at Lehmann's and
> also at Kiepert which seems to be even larger. (So you could meet me
> there... :) )
Kiepert's is the larger bookshop (although still smaller than your
average Waterstone's, Dillon's or what have you in London ;), but it's
CS area is both smaller and of less quality than JF Lehmann's, IMHO.
Kiepert's suffers severely from the Microsoft&C++/Java&Database&Web
illness that has afflicted all but a select few bookshops in the last
decade. In fact I find only one shelve out of the 12 (or so) shelves
in the section of interest, and that only fleetingly. OTOH Kiepert's
will have a copy of PAIP by Norvig (in that shelve), unless some
random soul has bought it...
Lehmann's is slightly better (it was quite good some time ago, but has
declined sharply in the past 2-3 years, IMHO), but currently the Lisp
content seems low (in the past they had Graham's ACL and Steele's
ClTl, as well as some Scheme and Dylan books, but now only a copy of
the german translation of SICP seems left).
> But there are two other universities in Berlin. Do they have similar
> bookshops? What about the "Freie Universität" in Dahlem for example? Can you
> give me a hint?
There are a couple of larger bookshops near Humboldt University
(actually near the Alex and in Friedrichstraße another
JF Lehmann's -- see www.jfl.de for a list of other JFL stores in
Berlin), and a couple of bookstores near the FU, though I've found
none of them better than the JFL near the TU. And I've mostly moved
to online ordering for computer literature anyway.
For it's english language literature department (and for it's modern
antiquariat) Kiepert's is worth a visit (or more) -- although they
often fail to cater to my tastes in english literature, quite unlike
many bookshops in London (and no, this isn't necesarily a matter of
quantity).
Anyway, have fun in Berlin...
Regs, Pierre (who is currently stranded in Berlin, after having lived
in real cities (London and Brussels)...)
Frank A. Adrian
few places where there were malapropisms. Even the code examples were
translated nicely. All-in-all, a masterful job of technical translation and
one which easily could be used as an example for technical writers, too!
faa
Rob Warnock <rp...@rigden.engr.sgi.com> wrote in message
news:7vjli6$vq...@fido.engr.sgi.com...
> Marco Antoniotti <mar...@parades.rm.cnr.it> wrote:
> +--------------
> | "Janos Blazi" <jbl...@netsurf.de> writes:
> | > After all: Translations of such books are absolutely useless!
> |
> | Hey, not always the translator is a traitor!
> +--------------
>
Frank A. Adrian
Paolo Amoroso <amo...@mclink.it> wrote in message
news:381f585c...@news.mclink.it...
> Recently I ordered this book from Amazon, together with a stock market
> analysis book for a friend, and chose air mail as the shipping method.
> About four weeks later I received Amazon's box as expected. But when I
> opened it, I found four cute children books with such fascinating titles
as
> "Everyone Poops", "Your Bellybutton", "The Runaway Bunny" and "The Hungry
> Caterpillar" :-)
These are indeed classics and even if YOU were disappointed that you didn't
get the book on metaobject protocols, I'm sure your friend would have gotten
much more out of these books than out of one about stock market analysis.
They would probably be much more relevant, as well :-).
> From the shipping receipt it turned out that those books should have been
> sent to a lady in New York, and that someone at Amazon had probably
swapped
> the boxes's contents. I guess the lady was a bit concerned of handing
> metaobject stuff to her children: no kid should do this at home :-)
This is true. It should only be handled under the supervision of trained
programming personnel. And God knows, NO ONE under the age of majority
should be doing this!
> Long live globalization! Long live good customer support! Long live
freedom
> of choice! :-)
I'll at least second the last two statements. But somehow, I don't
necessarily see the first as always supporting the last two.
faa
Frank A. Adrian
William Deakin
Andy Freeman wrote:
> Universities are not trade schools. Moreover, they don't really try to
> weed-out people who are wasting space.
Where are you from? I know Universities in the UK don't have a great
reputation for weeding out wasters (e.g. I passed ), but tell that to the
15 people (out of 90 or so) Physics undergraduates in my year who were
"encouraged", or in some case pushed, to leave.
> BTW - No one thinks that an undergraduate degree means all that much.
Again where is this mythical place? three years of study for not much, is
this not a little negative?
Best Regards,
:) will
Christopher R. Barry
> > BTW - No one thinks that an undergraduate degree means all that much.
>
> Again where is this mythical place? three years of study for not much, is
> this not a little negative?
IT employers generally are a lot more interested in what you've
actually _done_ professionally and how much time you've been doing
work professionally rather than what your education is or what you
claim your skills are. (Everyone is a C++, Java, Corba, and database
expert all of a sudden....)
Christopher
Janos Blazi
knows the meaning of the English word "ERICKING" (actually it was "beastly
Ericking")? But any educated Englishman from second half of the last cetury
would have know it.
Janos Blazi
R. Matthew Emerson <r...@nightfly.apk.net> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
87g0yq9...@nightfly.apk.net...
Janos Blazi
maybe). Could you give me some names and addresses?
Janos Blazi
Pierre R. Mai <pm...@acm.org> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
87r9iad...@orion.dent.isdn.cs.tu-berlin.de...
William Deakin
> IT employers generally are a lot more interested in what you've actually
> _done_ professionally...
Where is this place? In my year 98% of Computer Science degree students with
2.2 degrees or above got a jobs...
Best Regards,
:) will
Andy Freeman
The fact that people without experience, or with little more than
"school experience", get jobs does not imply that IT employers are
not more interested in actual experience than a degree. (Lots of
factors go into personnel decisions.)
Likewise, asking 15 out of 90 people to find another field of study
doesn't suggest that a University is all that interested in weeding
out people who are just wasting space, particularly if we're discussing
a physics program.
As far as the importance of an undergrad degree, my observation
that it's, at best, an indicator that one might be able to learn
something in a given field, comes from observing behavior outside
academia, both of "selectors" and of "producers". Surely it's
absurd to argue that a degree conferred at age 22, or the absence
thereof, says more about what a 45 year-old can do than what she's
done in the last 23 years, so the interesting question is what
a degree actually says about someone who just got it.
Note that I'm not saying that a degree says nothing. I'd rather
look at experience, a degree, and other things, but if any are
missing, I have to rely on what's there. All other things being
equal, a degree is a plus, it just isn't decisive, and it doesn't
express a number of important qualities.
-andy
Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.
Erik Naggum
| I once really needed the Dictionary for Historical slang. I bet none of you
| knows the meaning of the English word "ERICKING" (actually it was "beastly
| Ericking")? But any educated Englishman from second half of the last cetury
| would have know it.
just what does "personal attack" _not_ mean to you, Janos Blazi, and just
why are you allowing yourself to continue this? you're setting new lows
in comp.lang.lisp for offensive idiocy, in a style that is fairly unique.
does the world _really_ have to remind some of you Germans that you have
a history of prosecuting and killing people based on racial, tribal, and
other genetic properties, and that it looks particularly bad when some of
you guys keep posting stuff that tells us all you have learned nothing
from that "experience"? so you're fighting for Lebensraum for idiots in
this newsgroup, aren't you? you learn nothing from anything, so this
conclusion seems very well supported by the evidence you have posted.
Erann Gat, are you still there? can _you_ get this insufferable moron to
take a hint? feel free to use a fairly heavy and blunt instrument.
#:Erik
William Deakin
Andy Freeman wrote:
> The fact that people without experience, or with little more than "school
> experience", get jobs does not imply that IT employers are not more
> interested in actual experience than a degree.
No, since this is not what I said, I was pointing out that employers are
interested in nothing more that a computer science degree.
> (Lots of factors go into personnel decisions.)
Agreed.
> Likewise, asking 15 out of 90 people to find another field of study
> doesn't suggest that a University is all that interested in weeding out
> people who are just wasting space, particularly if we're discussing a
> physics program.
What does it mean then?
However, after an initially rocky start, I must agree with the great sense
in the rest of your posting.
Best Regards,
:) will
Janos Blazi
Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
31505454...@naggum.no...
Janos Blazi
made quite an impact. I do not remember then name of the author but he was
teacher and housemaster on the Isle of Man.
I read the term in a novel by Kipling (Stalky and Co) and nobody knew what
it meant. Finally I consulted the dictionary. That some LISP devotees may
have the same Chritian name, is purely coincidental.
Janos Blazi <jbl...@netsurf.de> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
beg-7vmllq/INN-2.2.1/bodybu...@broadway.news.is-europe.net...
> I once really needed the Dictionary for Historical slang. I bet none of
you
> knows the meaning of the English word "ERICKING" (actually it was "beastly
> Ericking")? But any educated Englishman from second half of the last
cetury
> would have know it.
>
Erik Naggum
| My grandparents died in Auschwitz. Thank you very much.
good, I got your attention, so maybe NOW you can FINALLY realize how
incredibly offensively YOU are behaving towards me, and JUST STOP IT!
thank you very much, indeed, for your COOPERATION in this regard.
#:Erik
Janos Blazi
in Ausschwitz? Or you have taught a jew a lesson?
All this clearly shows youe mentality and I am not going to qualify your
behaviour as the facts speak for themselves.
But the point is, that by now everybody who visits this newsgroup regularly,
should know it and they should be shouting with horror. Their only excuse is
that you are one of them and they are so few.
But is this a good excuse?
Janos Blazi
Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
31505658...@naggum.no...
Erik Naggum
| But the point is, that by now everybody who visits this newsgroup
| regularly, should know it and they should be shouting with horror.
this is exactly what I have been trying to make you realize about _your_
behavior, and it _should_ be sinking in by now, since I managed to offend
you sufficiently to jump-start your otherwise dormant brain. what amazed
me with you is that you are so dead set on proving that you are free of
all forms of fault. only people who are actually evil have this need.
the question before me is this: _when_ will you realize that you cannot
_both_ proclaim that you are opposed to rudeness and ill behavior _and_
be one of the most despicably disgusting people on this newsgroup, going
after people who have been "rude" to your stupidity. I have told you
before, and I'll say it again: GET OVER IT! (that seems to apply to more
things than just having experienced rudeness, however.) if someone is
not "sufficiently" kind to you, it is stupid beyond belief to go after
them, because you prove that you deserve whatever you got and more. you,
however, are the kind of person who goes after people, not their actions:
you can't even see the difference between calling an action stupid and
the man stupid, a difference any intelligent man can see. normal people
don't _identify_ with every one of their actions to the point where they
lose their sense of dignity if one of the actions is criticized -- but
you do, and then attack others for having shown this fact to you. you
should fix that, because you're seriously broken in they way you react to
criticism, and the criticism you hand out to others is _really_ stupid,
missing the mark by miles, such as the extraordinary lame attempt to once
again shift all blame for your lack of intelligence and good behavior
over on someone who "made you do it". but, hey, for all I know, that
could be your "cultura" and your "tradition" and you can't change it
without seriously damaging your ability to join your people. let me know
if this is the case, and I'll get off your back. at least as long as you
keep off mine, which I have come to trust you won't unless I zap you with
a cattle prod every time you climb back, but stranger things have
happened.
now, just behave well, Janos Blazi. it's you who want people to be nice
to eachother -- so just start with yourself. like right now.
#:Erik
Janos Blazi
First you said I am a nazi. It did not work so now you are taking an
antisemitic attitude, if I understood you correctly. But why? I have not
hurt your feelings. I have not even talked to you. O.K., you may have
misunderstood my remark about "Ericking", but it had nothing to with you, it
was an unfortunate coincidence and even the spelling was different. I did
not hink of you (I usually do not) and I did not even notice. But anyway, I
am sorry for that. But again I assure you, it had nothing to do with you.
Otherwise the reference to Englishmen from the last century would make no
sense.
So you said I was a stupid idiot. Yes, you did not say that expressis
verbis, but you hinted that I was not able to order a book, you hinted that
I was one of those stupid idiots who are manipulated by the mass media
(thougf we all are) etc. But that was all right. But then you started giving
me this filth, you started with the Nazis and swithced to the jews. When I
told you about my grandparents you were happy and did not show the slightest
remorse. What kind of man are you? How much filth is in you? Is nothing
sacred for you?
But all right. This is my last response to you. You may response once and I
shall read your response and I shall not answer any more. So please do not
talk to me again (bur for your last response).
János Blázi
Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.no> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
31505761...@naggum.no...
William Deakin
> the Isle of Man.
Run away, run away. Oh no, not the isle of man
klau...@my-deja.com
<aborigine-7vcqle/INN-2.2.1/al...@broadway.news.is-europe.net>,
"Janos Blazi" <jbl...@netsurf.de> wrote:
> (1)
> Now I have looked ip the word "esoteric":
>
> In my Larousse:
> "Ésoterique: (gr. esoterikos, réservé auc seuls adeptes).
Qualification
> donnée, dans les écoles des ancien philosphes, á leur doctrine
secrète. ||
> Incompréhensible aux personnes non initiées..."
>
> In dictionary.com:
> esoteric \Es`o*ter"ic\, a. Marked by secrecy or privacy; private;
select;
> confidential; as, an esoteric purpose; an esoteric meeting.
>
> esoteric \Es`o*ter"ic\, n. (Philos.) (a) An esoteric doctrine or
treatise;
> esoteric philosophy; esoterics. (b) One who believes, or is an
initiate, in
> esoteric doctrines or rites.
>
> So I think this is pretty much the same as what I meant. I did not
looked it
> up before. I had not consulted my LAROUSSE.
>
> (2)
> You always attribute the worst possible sense tp my words and the you
> respond with personal attacks.
>
> (3)
> "C/C++/Java/Perl/etc are for people who want to make things that work.
> Common Lisp is for peple who want to make things that don't break.
> "
>
> So what kind of generalisation is this? And all the other stuff you
have put
> forward?
>
> (4)
> You said my first letter was stupid and boring. Well, the newsgroup is
not
> your property. Neither is it my property. I came up with a question or
with
> a group of questions that were very important to me. I received a lot
of
> interesting, constructive and informative responses. And I received
personal
> attacks (like the question whether I smoked (drugs I supposed)).
>
> But it is your unquestioned right to get bored whenever you want to.
Then
> please skip the thread.
> To judge by the numbers of letters that were published many people did
not
> find this topic boring.
>
> (5)
> When I visited the university bookshop in my own town and there was
only one
> book on LISP and when after that I visited the big Harry Deutsch
university
> bookshop in Frankfurt and I found NOT A SINGLE VOLUME on LISP there, I
new
> that something must have gone wrong with LISP. And now I have found
out the
> reason.
>
You have been to the wrong bookstore in Frankfurt.
Next time, check out "Staak und Beirich, Fachbuchhandlung
für Informatik", Braubachstrasse 36, 60311 Frankfurt/Main.
They are having a great overall selection of titles and
also an AI section in the basement. E.g., Graham's books
"Commmon Lisp" and "On Lisp" and others are available there.
regards,
Klaus.
> (6)
> I indeed questioned an attitude but I had not launched any personal
attacks.
> Never. There is absolutely no excuse to respond with such. There is no
> excuse to use rude language ever.
>
> I have not responded to you as I am a very peaceful man and I only
wanted to
> be told about the current state of affaires.
>
> Janos Blazi
Erik Naggum
| I do not know why you are doing this.
to stop you in mid-action and make you think about what you're doing.
my purpose was to give you a few hints on how you are seriously annoying
people with a whole bunch of actions which you would be a smart person to
cease and desist performing. in other words: YOU COULD CHANGE YOUR
BEHAVIOR TO BE LESS ANNOYING TO PEOPLE. however, you are hintproof --
you don't even understand that you are annoying people in the first
place. if you get criticized for something, you take it personally, no
matter what people were _actually_ saying to you, and then go on to make
a whole lot of really insane comments about others and what they have
said, which _really_ annoys people. you don't see the difference between
"you behave like an X" and "you are an X", for _any_ value of X, which
makes it impossible to talk to you, because analogoy is a fundamental
means of communication. the way you respond now indicates to me that
you're hurting so badly inside that any further attempt to make you
reflect on yourself and your behavior towards others would probably make
you insane. your retaliatory actions were fantastically out of place and
counter-productive in the extreme, as the evidence would suggest you also
make an effort to understand your part in. you COULD have helped suggest
to us all that you weren't a bad guy by _actually_ behaving like a decent
human being, instead of switching to a moronic attack mode. it's your
choice. you chose the attacking moron. now, please understand that you
were criticized for some of your actions (and then your defense of them),
while you yourself have been spewing a lot of personal attacks at others
in "retaliation". if you don't want personal attacks, stay above them.
that is not what you did, and it caused what you have seen.
there are lots of people here who are willing to help anyone who wants to
learn Lisp. there are also lots of people here who have no patience with
those who do not want to learn Lisp but instead waste everybody's time
with a whole bunch of idiotic claims and "questions" that can be found by
anyone who does their own homework, including a little net searching,
reading recommended books, etc. patience with stupidity is not a virtue.
now, let's see if you can actually talk about any relevant issues.
#:Erik
Janos Blazi
bookshop SOMEWHERE but nobody knew where it was. I even asked some customers
there! Though I should have a plan of Frankfurt somewhere, it would be nice
to give me a hint where this Straße is.
Is there still another bookshop in Frankfurt I do not know about?
Thx in advance, Janos Blazi
<klau...@my-deja.com> schrieb in im Newsbeitrag:
7vov4b$gnq$1...@nnrp1.deja.com...
Ian Wild
>
> Oh, THAN YOU! When I asked at Harry Deutsch they told me there was another
> bookshop SOMEWHERE but nobody knew where it was. I even asked some customers
> there! Though I should have a plan of Frankfurt somewhere, it would be nice
> to give me a hint where this Straße is.
>
> Is there still another bookshop in Frankfurt I do not know about?
Oh come on ... I've seen "off topic" before, but
this is just plain silly.
Andy Freeman
> No, since this is not what I said, I was pointing out that employers
are
> interested in nothing more that a computer science degree.
And, what do they think that they are getting?
After being on the other side of the desk, and talking to others
similarly situated, I said that we/they are expecting little more
than "can learn something about Computer Science".
> > Likewise, asking 15 out of 90 people to find another field of study
> > doesn't suggest that a University is all that interested in weeding
out
> > people who are just wasting space, particularly if we're discussing
a
> > physics program.
>
> What does it mean then?
15 out of 90 in physics isn't weeding (unless, perhaps, we're
discussing about final year PhD students - it certainly isn't
weeding for 1st year University) - it's window-dressing.
-andy
William Deakin
> And, what do they think that they are getting?
Well, shaved monkeys probably. Or not. On re-reading, I should have added
the caveat "some employeers..."
> After being on the other side of the desk, and talking to others
> similarly situated, I said that we/they are expecting little more than
> "can learn something about Computer Science".
Yup. No argument there.
> 15 out of 90 in physics isn't weeding (unless, perhaps, we're discussing
> about final year PhD students - it certainly isn't weeding for 1st year
> University) - it's window-dressing.
che cosa? non capisco! What percentage of people is weeding then?
Best Regards,
:) will
Robert Monfera
> > 15 out of 90 in physics isn't weeding (unless, perhaps, we're discussing
> > about final year PhD students - it certainly isn't weeding for 1st year
> > University) - it's window-dressing.
>
> che cosa? non capisco! What percentage of people is weeding then?
I misread your original message, because you mentioned the word
weeding. I interpreted your sentence as saying only 15 stayed and 75
had to find another area of study. I learnt about what you really
referred to as 'weeding' when Andy responded to you.
By the way, universities (or courses) are varied in terms of the
difficulty of getting in versus the difficulty of surviving. I think
it's preferable to make entry relatively easy and weed out a large
portion of people later, as it gives a chance to people who do better at
higher level teaching than the comparatively superficial way of teaching
in grammar school, and weeds out people who can not meet the
requirements despite good marks or a successful exam.
An example: when you study physics in a grammar school, you are required
to _learn_ things like E=1/2mv^2. At university, you learn about
derivation and you can forget about all these specific expressions as
you can get them (and much more complex things) any time, and you move
on to learn about tensors etc. (OK, in some grammar schools, derivation
and some integration may be part of the curriculum.)
This is a bit like Lisp vs. le langage du jour - Lisp gives you powerful
and general tools, while Perl, PHP etc. give you specific tools (in form
of built-in facilities or available libraries) that are easy and handy
for simple tasks (e.g., making your program download your mail into a
database).
Robert
William Deakin
> I think it's preferable to make entry ... easy [,] and weed out ... people
> later, as it gives a chance to people who do better at higher level teaching
> ...
I have an Italian friend who complains about this method and prefers the UK
University system. This makes it a little harder to get into college in the
first place. But you lose a lot fewer (i.e. 15 out of 90) when you get there. I
don't know, I just know I spent a lot of time for three years focussed on
physics and passed (more or less) at the end...I then went on to spend another 3
1/2 years after this...but this is another story...
> and weeds out people who can not meet the requirements despite good marks or a
> successful exam.
This also comes down to economic stuff, like, who pays for your time at college?
The State?, Scholarships?, a loan you pay off? or your folks? Or a permution of
the these.
> An example: when you study physics in a grammar school, you are required to
> _learn_ things like E=1/2mv^2.
Hmmm. I remember deriving stuff like this before start Uni. First, using basic
calculus and then as a series expansion of E=mc^2. Whatever. As you say:
> in some grammar schools, derivation and some integration may be part of the
> curriculum.
{...elided a good lisp analogy...}
It is difficult for me to really comment on this. There was a resonably steep
hurdle to jump to get to the college I wanted to get to but once I got there it
wasn't so hard. I don't know, only what I have experienced in my education and
what I have talked about the education of other students I met, mostly from
round Europe.
I suppose what I am saying is this: there is a big difference the education a
degree gives dependant on where you go to school. In the UK this tends to be
very very focussed on a subject (you don't usually "major" in a subject in this
country, for example) but you can then end up a bit pointy. I didn't have to
write any essays on geometry or have to learn any other languages, for example.
But then again things are changing a bit.
Best Regards,
:) will
Reini Urban
>* Graham, Paul: ANSI Common Lisp (1-2 weeks)
> http://www.amazon.de/exec/obidos/ASIN/0133708756/
there exist's even a german translation. (but apparently not on
amazon.de)
ISBN 3-8272-9543-2, DM 69.95
see http://www.lisp.de/books.html
de: von dem gibt's sogar eine recht gute deutsche übersetzung.
(allerdings mit einigen -LaTex- fehlern)
10% zoll bei buchbestellungen von außerhalb der EU,
unter ca. öS 1500.- zollfrei (in Österreich), also chunk-wise zuschicken
lassen. (DM 200.- in D?)
--
Reini
Rainer Joswig
> But all right. This is my last response to you.
A wise decision.