Thomas Stegen wrote: > A paradigm refers to the way computations proceeds, not how code is > structured. Procedural and object-oriented refers to structuring of > code not models of computation. The messaging paradigm computes > by applying code to immutable data (immutable in theory at least). > The imperative paradigm modifies data in an explicitly addressed > updatable store.
The distinction you make between procedural and object-oriented on the one hand and imperative and messaging on the other hand is new to me, but very interesting. Thanks for that. Where do you have this distinction from? (a book, a paper, a link?)
Pascal
-- Given any rule, however ‘fundamental’ or ‘necessary’ for science, there are always circumstances when it is advisable not only to ignore the rule, but to adopt its opposite. - Paul Feyerabend
arien <spammers_s...@getlost.invalid> wrote: > > > I have only learnt object oriented > > > before, so I don't understand how a procedural language works.
> > Odd statement, alas.
> > Regards > > Henrik > Sorry, it might be odd, but it's true. I've only been taught object > oriented, so I seriously don't know what a procedural language looks > like, or how it works.
Like, well... Java.
The reason your statement is odd is that Java is very clearly a procedural language which happens to have some OO features, in roughly the same category as C++ or Objective-C. If you want an "OO language", where objects are truly a defining core paradigm, look at Smalltalk. Or even... wait for it... Common Lisp.
In going from Java to CL, you're moving *further* from the procedural paradigm, and introducing more and deeper object-orientation.
The other issue is that object orientation and procedural style, are, if not entirely orthogonal, certainly not opposites. 'Functional', would be the paradigm you're looking for as a complement to procedural.
Lisp is not purely functional (a purely functional language allows no side-effects), but it has all the important expressive features of a functional langauge and was the first such language. It gives you first class functions and closures, which means there is enough power to program in a purely functional style if you wish to. This is not even *close* to true for java [*]. For the pure opposite to procedural programming, check out something like Haskell, which will feel a lot more like lisp than like java.
Michael
[*] It's probable that java is turing complete without re-assignment, but I doubt it's much fun to get anything useful accomplished in it that way.
arien <spammers_s...@getlost.invalid> wrote: > In article <MPG.18276175a386141b989...@shawnews.vc.shawcable.net>, > br...@invalid.dom says... > > arien wrote: > > > By the way, is Lisp Object oriented? I have only learnt object oriented > > > before, so I don't understand how a procedural language works. > > You shouldn't expect others to do your research for you. Visit > > http://www.lisp.org, then click on "What Is Lisp?", then click on > > "object-oriented / procedural". Learn. > Sometimes I am just looking for a simple answer. Much of what is on > lisp.org goes straight over the top of my head. Remember, I have only > *just* started learning lisp, and I simly don't understand the indepth > analysis that is on lisp.org.
Start trying. By the end of a decent university level introduction to computer science course, you should be able to read and understand at least 80% of the page brian referenced, certainly enough to answer your question.
> In the three lines it took you to say go to lisp.org, you could have > answered my question. In fact you could even have answered it in one > word - "yes" or "no".
Would answering "yes" really have helped much? It certainly wouldn't have cleared up any of your obvious misconceptions.
I think you need to understand something important about this newsgroup. It consists largely of *professional* developers and scientists who use/like lisp. Lots of them have PhDs in CS. One of the folks who posts here was a CS prof of mine 12 years ago. I've seen reference to at least a half dozen other contributors here as professors of CS. There are many contributors here who've written well regarded books on programming or CS, who've written major pieces of important software, or made important intellectual advances. For every relative dilettante like me, there is a famous lisp expert like Kent Pitman. If there were a major standards effort for common lisp, a number of the high-powered folks who would write any new standard are posters here, and a fair amount of discussion about it would take place on this newsgroup.
Don't let the off-topic flights of fancy engaged in by many regulars fool you -- this is a professional forum. The ability to read and ask questions here is like being invited to a faculty lounge full of visiting experts when your university is hosting a major conference.
Consider what you've said here in that light, and you might appreciate the impression you've made. I doubt you would talk to your professors the way you have responded to people here, even if they were very harsh. Yet many, or even most of the posters here deserve a similar level of professional repect.
Further, nobody here has teaching you or any other participant as part of their job. Any teaching here is done because it is fun for the teacher, or because it it pleases them to be helpful or increase the general level of competence in the world.
* Len Charest <no.em...@my.inbox> | M'kay. You do the same, Nagster.
Do you have a cheering bunch of similar idiots to yourself to back you up? The other lunatic from JPL said he received encouraging mail to keep up his self-annihilation. I am very happy that you guys decide to destroy yourself and your credibility so completely. Your goal is to provoke me, you said, and I must admit to some fascination with a person who is so unable to understand the consequences of his own statements as that.
| And I once thought that Norway was a civilized place.
My God, you really /are/ retarded! How could you possibly have come to such a staggeringly moronic conclusion? Holy shit, dude. What did you use to go so wrong? Have you read about this country at all? We have an oil industry that has basically destroyed all other industries, we have a fishing industry that has been reduced to selling unprocessed fish to EU countries so we can buy back the processed fish from them, we have a prime minister who openly /sulks/ on national TV because he is made fun of by one of our most astute political comedians, we have a royalty that has decided that a loose woman who has a child with a criminal and who has been an avid drug user and a pathetic dandy of an "author" make for good royal marriage material, we are going to build a new opera house, but the politicians who want the building are not going to fund operas there, we have socialized medicine and long lines for essential surgery, we have a public school system that is clearly unable to educate people and school buildings that are falling apart, the public transportation in Oslo is losing more money by operating than if they shut down completely, we have the highest interest rate in Europe to keep all the money from stampeding out of the country, which is also killing out industry, we harbor terrorists and violent criminals from muslim countries, we let the Jugoslav mafia take over the street prostitution and narcotics in Oslo, and have more deaths from drug abuse per capita than any capitol in the world. And you thought Norway was a civilized place? Dude, where is your brain? You must clearly be an astonishingly inept person, further evidence that JPL has gone the way of Bell Labs after the big scandals.
But what other things do you associate with countries? Do you have any similar associations based on race, too? How about major religions? Can you work with people from other countries or do they place you in teams where all the members wear flannel shirts and say "y'all" and "nucular"?
Tell me more about yourself and your grave misconceptions of reality! It is so fun to watch clueless people self-destruct while they think they run the show.
-- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
Just move to Bavaria where everything is in order. We have excellent leaders, there is no criminality and everybody is at least well to-do. The Staatsoper in Munich is the best opera house in the world and our schools are the best in the world too. You could teach math and physics as we are short of teachers at the moment. (I am imagining you dealing with the parents on parent's evening, explaining some very basic things to them about their children and I am laughing. That would be simply wonderful!)
* eriknag...@hotmail.com (Erik Naggum) | Are you really such an arrogant fuckwad that you think you are the | only person on the planet named Erik Naggum?
No. I am the only person so name on the planet. Cease and desist.
What is /wrong/ with a person who has to such a thing? *sigh*
-- Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway
Act from reason, and failure makes you rethink and study harder. Act from faith, and failure makes you blame someone and push harder.
> ...When > they see people who praise Common Lisp beyond everything else, who are > extremely defensive of "their baby", and who attack everyone who is not > "enlightened" yet (and who therefore ridicule what they don't > understand), they will almost inevitably think that we're just a bunch > of idiots and will probably back out....
Why "therefore"?
Is it absolutely necessary to ridicule anything you don't understand?
Is it possible that the "attack" is not upon the person, nor upon the lack of enlightenedness, but is directed against either the ridicule, or even the "therefore"?
> The distinction you make between procedural and object-oriented on the > one hand and imperative and messaging on the other hand is new to me, > but very interesting. Thanks for that. Where do you have this > distinction from? (a book, a paper, a link?)
Most of what know I have picked up in small pieces from different places and I can hardly remember them all and I am hardly an expert, but a very nice and brief overview is given here:
"I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning." ~ A. Crowley
"I slept with Faith, and found a corpse in my arms on awaking; I drank and danced all night with Doubt, and found her a virgin in the morning." ~ A. Crowley
* Erik Naggum | Ah! This yielded some valuable understanding. Clearly, those who enter | the world of Common Lisp do not have to "face any facts". Amazing.
* Pascal Costanza | Of course they have to, but this is trivial.
The fact that people do not get it strongly suggests otherwise.
| I haven't said that I see it this way. Please read again: "When _they_ | see people who ...".
But they do not see people who /do/ this! Damnit, are you so unable to see reality because of your emotional attachment to a parallel universe that you cannot even grasp that you are factually wrong about something?
* Pascal Costanza | You still haven't understood what I want to encourage. I don't think that | you even have any clue.
* Erik Naggum | Yes, Pascal, I understand /perfectly/ well what you want to encourage.
* Pascal Costanza | No, you don't. Your posting proves this impressively. Would you please just | stop spreading misinformation about me and/or my motivations?
How utterly predictable a response. Your basic problem is that you do not know how to listen to people who are not just like you, that is, just like /everybody/. You lack something quite profound, but I am not sure what. You clearly lack general empathy and need to make a choice about with whom to share your feelings and the rest you openly favor attacking. You clearly express such a strong dislike of other /people/ that you must have failed to realize your own role in how you perceive them. It is not possible to fail to realize this unless you are functionally braindead.
You clearly believe that your understanding is sufficient and thus refuse to listen to anything more from the outside world. You believe that when you find some evidence to confirm your already clearly prejudicial view of another person, it constitutes proof that they do not understand you. You would clearly not recognize an accurate description of yourself from another point of view, but this tremendously consistent with your basic attitude and your complete and utter failure to /think/.
You tell me that /you/ do not think I grasp what you are after. But look at this: you claim that your view and your needs represent the majority of people. You are right about that. Now, /please think/. If you /are/ the majority and I am in the minority, how could you possibly believe that I have not already and many years ago figured out exactly how you guys work? If you had the brain to do it, this would be a grave insult, but you do not think ahead. You do in fact not think at all, because the things you say can only be uttered by a mind closed shut long ago.
How can I detect that you do not think, you may wonder? It is very, very easy: Do you exhibit an /understanding/ of ideas or positions you do not agree with? Now, the first reaction you come up with to this point is "and vice versa" -- which is a very strong clue that you do not understand before you attack your opponent. To a thinking person, it does not matter that the other guy suffers from the same problem. It does not influence the argument one bit. But to the non-thinking person, this is all there is to it: Hurling accusations back and forth to cause bad feelings. This is how I can tell that you are completely /unthinking/: The whole point is that you are a feeling person who does not believe in thinking. The first, and if your behavior here is indicative, the /only/ thing you do is check how you feel about something. If and only if you feel sufficiently well, can you dare to open your eyes and look at the actual contents.
Now, this is precisely how the majority of people react. There is nothing special about you at all. There is nothing whatsoever that could prevent anyone from understanding how these people work. Everywhere, and I really mean /everywhere/ people are like you, Pascal. Now, in my view, there can be nothing as insulting towards another person as a claim that he has made no distinct and personal impression, but some people have to make up the masses, too. and if they can think of themselves a something because they are non-descript, replaceable members of the masses, so be it. Pascal has given voice to the rebellion of the masses, where /not/ knowing anything means others should listen to them, where being /newbie/ and unwilling to learn is a virtue. The people that the world would benefit the most from attracting is, in the views of Pascal Costanza, those who have nothing to offer anyone. The calls for a more popular Common Lisp is precisely this: that the more nondescript nonspecific entities we can count, the better. But how do we attract the masses? Pascal thinks that I do not understand this because I retch and puke whenever I think of attracting the masses. To this unthinking member of the masses, anyone who considers the masses to be the root cause of human misery, does not understand him, and proves it impressively. The sheer inability of members of the masses to grasp that someone could /not/ value the masses higher than the individual make them believe that others have not /understood/ them, because, clearly, anyone who /understands/ the masses has to agree with their value.
I watch politicians and marketing departments, I watch commercials on TV and hear them on the radio, I see ads in the newspaper and on the Net, and I read the deceptive and manipulative nonsense of large companies like Microsoft and I /know/ how it all works. Propaganda and marketing are not hard to understand. It is not hard to predict what will make people buy some piece of shit. All it takes is the total abdication of respect for the human being as a thinking being. /This/ is the hard part, for even the terminally comatose retain some inkling of the value of their brain. But to succeed in mass marketing, you have to dispell every notion of respect for the human being as anything other than a programmable cash machine. And it can be programmed very easily. The main problem with today's mass marketing is not that not all of it works, it is that /all/ of it works, so in order to be heard in the deafening cacophony of mass market advertising, you /really/ have to go overboard. Again, this would not be possible if you thought people had a working brain. In order to attract the masses, you have to stop thinking. The only way you can keep the masses around is if you do not demand that they think, because the moment someone thinks, that is the moment they cease to be the masses. The masses are stupid by /definition/. The masses is defined by absence. Be /anything/ and you are not a member of the masses. Hell, even /yearn/ for anything and you are not a member of the masses.
The problem is not in understanding Pascal Costanza and his masses, it is in making them realize that they have been understood. Nobody likes to hear that they are stupid, but the masses are the only ones to /fight/ it. Anyone who is /not/ a member of the masses can point to something they have accomplished in their lives and say "I'm not stupid, so what made this other guy think I am?". The members of the masses rebel against the very notion that the masse are stupid with intense feelings of rejection and hatred towards those who dare speak the truth, but by doing so, they have proved the very thing they challenge. The only way to successfully challenge a criticism against your mental capacity is to put it to shame by showing what you got. Stupid people do not grasp this, while every smart person I have ever seen have figured this out long before they talked to me about it. Therefore, the whole point with denying the masses the opportunity and right to be stupid is to drag those individuals out of the masses who find that they can do better than being a member of the masses. Again, the stupid masses do not grasp this, but every individual worth his salt does. Against this process, we then have Pascal Costanza, the premier proponent of hedonistic feel-goodism where only one's own feelings matter and attacking others is perfectly legitimate if it makes you feel better. (This is also how these dysfunctional idiots see other people and every form of "attack".) Instead of encouraging people to take the step out of the masses, Pascal Costanza actively encourages people to remain members of the masses while he, another member of the masses, tries to pretend that he is nothing special, /everybody/ has problems with Lisp syntax and so on and so forth, It is precisely the /everybody/ aspect that makes Pascal Costanza a member and proponent of the masses.
So, Pascal, I have not spread any misinformation about you at all. What on earth (or substitute any other place as appropriate) made you think that I would try to say something I do not actually mean about you or your cause? You are the kind of person who spreads willful misinformation and tries to make people believe in falsehoods. The people you defend and go to great lengths to encourage are the kind of people who revel in making up things that they think would hurt others. Every facet of your behavior here confirms that your goal is to reduce Common Lisp to a mass market language, which means: to chase away every independent thinker, every person who has a different opinion, evere nonconformist, every single person who does not agree with everybody else -- which is to say: every single person who is not "nice" to everybody else. The only way you can have people together for an extended period of time and have them all be nice to eachother is if you lobotomize the lot.
Your task here is to destroy every single shred of individuality and real personality and replace them with your bland niceness and unthinking masses. The
Recently, our chase plane pilot Mike Melville has also flown the EZ-Rocket. His first words after shutting the engines down were "That was a real kick in the pants!" ... Does it make a lot of noise?
Yes. Our sound level meter goes off the scale of 138 dBA at 10 meters. However, during test flights people on the ground have noted that it is quieter than many jet aircraft they have heard.
On Tue, 29 Oct 2002 08:35:47 +1030, arien <spammers_s...@getlost.invalid> wrote:
> It's called frustration after all the abuse I received for just being a > newbie. I did NOT deserve the abuse. I was told I was dumb and various > other name calling and assumptions which are not true.
Erik Naggum wrote: > Do you have a cheering bunch of similar idiots to yourself to back you up?
No, I'm not as fortunate as you.
> Your goal is to provoke me, > you said, and I must admit to some fascination with a person who is so > unable to understand the consequences of his own statements as that.
You don't understand monkey dancing?
> Tell me more about yourself and your grave misconceptions of reality!
While speeding to work today in my Camaro Z-28 with Boston blasting on the 8-track, it occurred to me that what the world needs now is the collected works of Erik Naggum bound into a trade paperback with a shiny cover. The world *needs* your brutal honesty, your insight into the psychology of mind, your unsentimental assessment of the human condition. You are a Nietzsche for the New World Order!
Anywho, you could call it "Diarrhetics, the Modern Science of Usenet Masturbation" and sell it for $29.95 a pop to the great unwashed. I'm sure it'll make you rich. Then you can move away from that hellhole you call Norway.
> It is so fun to watch clueless people self-destruct while they think they > run the show.
Erik Naggum wrote: > Oh, by the looks of it, you are not going to notice any difference. > Not any time soon, anyway. That is the real beauty of it all.
Please tell me, then. That's what the rest of us in c.l.l expect of you.
> Maybe she has, maybe this is all a calculated ploy from someone with > too much time on their hands, but since I never attribute to malice > what can be adequately explained with stupidity, I'm going with > stupidity.
[snip]
The problem with this dictum, I've found, is that it tends to elide the possibility of malicous stupidity (or of culpable stupidity of a sort that entails something of the same order as malice).
(Of course, the "adequately" is supposed to cover some of this, but, in general, I prefer *best* (available) explanations rather than merely adequate ones.)
