Erik Naggum  <e...@naggum.no> wrote:

Kind regards,

Regards,
--
Nils Goesche
"Don't ask for whom the <CTRL-G> tolls."

Cheers

  This is not surprising.  People are not taught to go read the specification
  when they program C because so many things are explicitly implementation-
  dependent that you basically cannot do very much if you write only to the
  specification of C.  There was not even consistency requirements among the
  multiple implementation-dependencies in C-1989, but I seem to recall that
  there are in the integrity amendment and in C-1999.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

* Pascal Costanza
| I totally disagree.  My working style in learning a new language is to
| absorb its rationale first.  I usually invest a lot of time there before
| I begin to program in a new language.  I don't think that I'm not
| intelligent. ;-)

  I think you two are using "rationale" very differently.  Kaz's usage is very
  close to mine as I understand his last sentence, but it occurs to me that
  Pascal uses it to mean something like the conceptual models of the language,
  which is also a "rationale" but in a much broader sense.  It is like those
  two deeply intelligent questions "who are you" and "what do you want" in
  Babylon 5, to which the answer is not your name and your dinner menu choice.

| No, the case is different.  When I am reading a textbook about ANSI Common
| Lisp I expect it to be correct, and each deviation from the standard to be a
| bug.  When I am reading CLtL2 I know that I expect it to be about a slightly
| different language.

  I think your first expectation is faulty.  I have come to believe, after a
  long discussion tonight over Apple's invocation of the DMCA to prevent its
  customers from burning DVDs on external drives, that many people discuss
  things mainly to determine which "side" of an issue people are on, and seek
  to learn who they agree and disagree with, long before any party understands
  the issues involved.  Some people on the Net seem to read what others write
  with the express purpose to believe it rather than think about it.  I write
  mostly about what I think about and not what I believe.  I read what others
  write to think about it, not to believe it.  Those who inject falsehoods into
  the information flow, however, poison the well of thinking and reasoning.
  However, that which is not false is not necessarily true.  Many things can
  be true at the same time depending on context, so it is hard to determine
  that something is The Truth, but we can fairly easily determine that
  something is false.  If we limit the discussions to what has not already
  been determined to be false, I believe the chance of finding more truth
  increases dramatically compared to a forum where people either post
  falsehoods or limit their discussion to what is already determined to be
  true.  The latter occurs when people are mainly concerned with believing
  (in) what others say.

  So, if you expect what people write to be correct, you will tend to believe
  them before you have thought about what they say.  This is bad for your
  critical thinking ability.  You should, however, expect what they say not to
  be known (at the time it was written) to be false and that they wrote it
  because they thought was valuable in some sense or another.  The economy of
  writing dictates that people do not both blabber endlessly and get published.

  However, the situation that something was true but has become false over
  time is so common in technical writing that I have some philosophical
  problems understanding your position.  You are not reading CLtL2 in order to
  believe it to be useful, but to understand some of the historical record.
  For the same reason, it is actually useful to read CLtL1 or the older Lisp
  manuals.  If your desire is to understand and not to believe, you will not
  be derailed by historic information any more than you are derailed by past
  knowledge that you have had to expire.  It should still be valuable to you.

| No, I don't learn that way, I learn languages by looking at their specs.
| Sorry.

  Sorry to correct you, but you have learned this way up until now.  If your
  past successes also determine your future options, you are likely to limit
  yourself needlessly.  My experience has been similar to yours, but then I
  discovered that I had chosen to learn things that came easy to me.  This
  became quietly self-fulfilling.  I decided to learn new things from the most
  technical source available based on the assumption that it would be easy to
  learn and lost interest in things that did not yield to this successful mode
  of learning.  Then I realized that I had happened on this mode of learning
  by accident and that I had probably been exposed to a number of other modes
  of learning that had not yielded results as quickly or as consistently and
  had simply taken the path of least resistance.  I decided to seek out paths
  of significant resistance and actively to search out counter-information to
  what I already believed to be true.  I read things that I had previously
  thought to be false, invested a lot of time in reading political theories
  that I believed to be wrong and evil for the sole purpose of delaying the
  impulse to agree or believe and to hone my critical thinking by learning to
  listen to arguments before I decided on their truth status.  It has helped
  me /tremendously/ in dealing with issues that did not come easy to me, to
  find that I, too, need to work hard to understand certain topics and most
  topics beyond a certain level.  I had dismissed a number of topics because
  what people were talking about as if it were difficult were in fact trivial
  and hence not worth my time.  It turned out that the entry-level to these
  areas of human knowledge was indeed trivial and boring beyond belief, but
  that there was lots of interesting thinking going on among those who had
  plowed through the tons of trivialties that had shaped their mode of
  thinking and made them able to discuss topics based on massive background
  information.  Instead of reading the specification for the English language,
  I read poetry and literature and found that literary criticism is not trivial
  at all (despite the best efforts of my teachers to make it appear worse than
  pedestrian, unrewarding, and dilettantish).  I found, in brief, that the
  kinds of things for which I /could/ read the specification and the highly
  condensed formal presentations were limited and thus limited me instead of
  making it possible for me to learn interesting things.  I came to believe that
  too much success too early in life in certain fundamentally simple approaches
  could be a curse  and not the gift it was touted to be at the time.

  Sometimes, more information is passed to the reader in a tutorial than in
  the reference for the same material.  It therefore behooves the conscientious
  student to read more than one tutorial to learn of more ways to approach the
  same topic as seen by experts in both the field and in pedagogy.  A critical
  student should also study pedagogy in order to learn how to distinguish bad
  teachers and textbooks from good.  To understand pedagogical presentations
  and their desired effect on readers is no small task.  Most of us learn in
  ways that are hard to communicate to others and the expectation that others
  learn in the same way we do, given that we have chosen how to learn through
  a series of accidentally positive feedback, not through deliberate selection
  among the available learning modes.  Since learning and thinking are not
  taught in our schools, good methodology is largely unavailable until people
  enter college or university, a decade later than it should have been taught.

  I think this should be of value to the Feyerabend project.  Comments?

| In this example, the section about #, provides essential information that is
| relevant for understanding #. So you cannot just skip it. At least not the
| first time.

  There is something I do not quite understand about #,.  The recommended way
  to accomplish very similar results today is to use `load-time-value´.  There
  are some cases where #, and `load-time-value´would differ in semantics, but
  I think it is such a verbose way to request this behavior that people are
  unlikely to want to use it I think #,
  should have been made to expand to a `load-time-value´ form.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

  What this means is that there has been a dearth of teaching the necessary
  reading skills.  "Caveat lector" should be at least as important in people's
  lives as the caveat emptor that has entered our common vocabulary and the
  business ethics.

| Is it important if I'm typical? I can only repeat myself: There's always
| more than one path to enlightenment. The more paths you provide the more
| people you attract.

  But have you followed this dictum yourself?  You seem to be a firm believer
  in your past successes in learning programming languages, even though you
  appear to get the message that there is more to it than you have seen so far.
  You realize, I hope, that your article will be another non-reference-material
  resource on Common Lisp that you hope people will want to read when they
  desire to learn Common Lisp.  If you truly believed in the specification-only
  learning mode, it seems to follow that you would not have written this text.
  I take this to mean there is hope for your appreciation of other paths to
  enlightenment that may go through both historic and tutorial documents.

  One of the major attractions that Common Lisp offer me personally is that
  there is just so much in and around it that I would benefit from.  I came to
  the point of SGML expertise where (I thought) I would not be able to develop
  any further, where there would be nothing more for me to learn, and I found
  myself always helping people without the reward of learning anything new.
  This exhausted me and contributed strongly to abandoning 6 years of
  concentrated effort on something I have additionally come to think of as
  fundamentally braindamaged.  I decided to work in an area where the
  probability of dealing with people who were smarter than me was nonzero and
  the Lisp and Scheme worlds offer this in abundance.  To work in areas where
  the sum total of knowledge is acquirable in your youth may seem exciting to
  the youth, but to realize that you have wasted your most absorbent days on
  something that would bore you when you exhausted the supply of ideas is
  nothing but painful to the old.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

  I find this absolutely astonishing.  I hope you will not demand lower prices
  because of your backward culture.  :)

  Norway may be highly advanced compared to other European countries, but both
  VISA and MasterCard are really big over here.  Banks offer debit and credit
  cards that fit different credit ratings and other profiles.  Other companies
  have agreements with credit card companies to offer their most preferred
  customers major credit cards.  My preferred airline actually picks up my
  annual credit card fees and offer free travel insurance when I pay for the
  tickets with the credit card.  I have come to rely so much on my credit card
  that I do not leave home without it.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

http://webstore.ansi.org/ansidocstore/product.asp?sku=ISO%2FIEC+9899%...
http://ftp2.ansi.org/download/free_download.asp?document=ISO%2FIEC+98...

  It goes for USD 26 today.  The corrigendum is free.

| Of course, the quality should be good (I remember reading in this newsgroup
| some time ago that there may be problems in this respect).

  That applies to the Common Lisp standard.  The C standard is produced
  properly.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

Now my point is: most people don't like abstract high-level languages
the same way that most don't like higher mathematics where you need to
think in abstract terms. So I think that will be a barrier to the
popularity of Lisp. The other day I asked a CS student about SCHEME(he
had taken a class in that). His answer: Ohh, it's a strange language
with lots of parentheses. He obviously didn't realize or wasn't
introduced to the powerfull abstractions that are possible with
Lisp/Scheme. And I think most people wouldn't like to think in
abstract terms. The average programmer likes simple concrete languages
like C.

So maybe the best idea would be to create a new language(together with
a specification), based on Lisp of course but with the advantage of
having the hindsight of 40 years of Lisp experience. Paul Graham is
doing this, just go to his site (www.paulgraham.com) to learn about
"Arc".

  #H(SETQ)

generates a link to the appropriate section of the HyperSpec.

Pascal

However, I understand your objections and I am very thankful for your
comments. I will try to be more patient and learn even more, and in two
or three years, I will give you an interim report about how my world
view has changed. (This is only half-joking. ;)

Pascal

Pascal

hs

--

  Rather, the abstractions that C offers are considered more "natural" than
  those offered by the extended Lisp family.

| I think maybe Paul Graham is right when he says: a language created by a
| committee is never a good language (or something similar).

  I think Paul Graham is /fundamentally/ clueless about the construction of
  large systems.  His desire to go back to basics to design Arc is a symptom
  of the intelligent, but socially immature hacker who thinks he knows things
  better than most people and /therefore/ think that other people are wrong,
  making sure there is a community consensus behind decisions and that you
  have to accomodate more than one person to make something succeed.  Some
  people succeed in making communities -- Perl and C++ and Java come to mind
  -- and some people fail miserably because they think too much in "my way or
  no way" terms.

| Paul Graham is doing this, just go to his site (www.paulgraham.com) to learn
| about "Arc".

  He is just another disgruntled Lisper who disrespects everybody who thinks
  different from himself.  The announcement of "Arc" destroyed much of my
  respect for Paul Graham as an authority.

| But then why not reinvent Lisp? See above.

  Because you end up worse than what we already have.

  How come people with the most misguided political ideas believe revolution
  is the answer and people with reasonable political ideas manage to succeed
  in slowly transforming their society to their liking?  Please think about it.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway

  I bought the actual standard and it nicely printed and bound.  (The only
  objection I have against the standard qua publication is that it uses the
  butt-ugly default TeX fonts.)  In order to know whether it was advisable for
  me to recommend that others spend the USD 18 on the PDF file, I bought it
  only to discover that there are things worse than almost computer modern --
  almost computer modern printed scanned back in at 150 dpi by a person with a
  serious grudge against attention to detail.  The bad PDF document looks like
  evidence of a passive-aggressive personality disorder hard at work.  You
  could not make something that ugly unless you were deliberately trying to
  punish people for wanting to buy the standard, especially since ANSI had the
  original postscript files, from which they should have been able to destill
  a PDF.  But then again, ANSI even failed to list the Common Lisp standard
  properly in their catalog.

  Now, the obvious conclusion from the above is that I should no longer advise
  people to purchase the PDF document.  But it is also the wrong conclusion.
  You need the real thing and the ANSI document is the real thing.  USD 18
  will set you back one good meal or a movie and a burger date, but you are
  single, anyway, right?  (But purchase the actual document and you may have
  to forgo real food and eat rice for a month or more.  Obesity has become an
  epidemic in Western cultures and asceticism quite undervalued, but one may
  still find cause to prioritize food over standards.)  So the only reason you
  want this document is that you want to ascertain that what you read elsewhere
  is the true standard.  It may not be a great read -- for that, the postscript
  files are still available or get the TeX sources and compile your own -- but
  there are some differences between the abject representational poverty of
  HTML and the paper version has a very different feel than any of the HTML
  versions available.

  Since I mentioned it, I got quite a handsome number of positive responses,
  so I think I shall go forward with an idea I got as I came across amazingly
  beautifully printed and bound versions of the Bible and the Qur'an (which are
  admittedly aimed at larger markets than standards) and noticed that Webster's
  New World College Dictionary comes in a black leather-bound and gilded
  edition for their 50th anniversary.  As a bibliophile I would so very much
  like to produce the last public draft of the Common Lisp standard in a nicer
  font and in the high-quality binding that I think it deserves.  Since it is
  not going to change any time soon and we should try not to worry about its
  status as ANSI standard, I should hope there is a sufficiently large market
  that I am willing to take on the job of producing this book in a lasting and
  beautiful version.  The problems are the print run, the cost of the binding,
  and the financial risks involved.  I have no idea what the costs might be,
  but will investigate in the coming week.  It will be substantially more than
  the USD 18 for the PDF file, however.  Please indicate your preliminary
  interest to me by mail with some indication of the price level at which that
  interest would wane.

--
Erik Naggum, Oslo, Norway