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Curious about functional programming

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The Glauber

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Jul 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/21/00
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I'm intrigued by the idea of functional programming, but i haven't
found much material on it on the Web (which means i'm probably looking
in the wrong place). There are a number of purely functional
programming languages, then there's Lisp-ish languages and everything
else.

My superficial observation is that Lisp users seem to be more tolerant
of side-effects in their programs than Scheme users.

I think you can do functional programming in imperative languages too,
and some of the things that are considered good coding in object-
oriented programming (short methods, "getter" and "setter" methods to
access members, etc) are a step towards functional programming.

Is F.P. an idea that's still considered important? Is it important for
Lisp programmers in "the real world"?

Curious...

glauber
--
Glauber Ribeiro
thegl...@my-deja.com
"Opinions stated are my own and not representative of Experian"


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

Johan Kullstam

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Jul 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/21/00
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The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com> writes:

> I'm intrigued by the idea of functional programming, but i haven't
> found much material on it on the Web (which means i'm probably looking
> in the wrong place). There are a number of purely functional
> programming languages, then there's Lisp-ish languages and everything
> else.
>
> My superficial observation is that Lisp users seem to be more tolerant
> of side-effects in their programs than Scheme users.

yes. common-lisp emphasizes getting things done as opposed to
strictly maintaining language purity. personally, i think common-lisp
does a pretty good job on both counts.

> I think you can do functional programming in imperative languages too,
> and some of the things that are considered good coding in object-
> oriented programming (short methods, "getter" and "setter" methods to
> access members, etc) are a step towards functional programming.

yes, but the popular imperative languages tend not to have functions
as first class objects, nor do they make passing functions easy. the
lack of one-shot function "constants"^1 (lambda) make it difficult.

i remember particularly painful C++ episode in which i tried to take
member function of two variables, fill in a constant for one of the
arguments and pass it to a function expecting to recieve a function of
one argument. it's trivial in lisp; it's a pain in the ass kludge in
C++. the C++ guys i went to for advice looked at me as if i had two
heads for even wanting such a thing. when i told them lisp can do it,
i suddenly felt i had sprouted a third head.

setter functions have side effects and not pure functions. that
doesn't mean they aren't useful. i find lisp's setf to be
particularly elegant as it frames setting under the notation of
getting. that's good for humans and wonderful for macros. i don't
know if it's "functional" though.

> Is F.P. an idea that's still considered important? Is it important for
> Lisp programmers in "the real world"?

a pure function is easier to deal with since it won't spew side
effects all over creation. it's all about not surprising the
programmer with unintended and complex consequences. obvious side
effects with limited scope are perfectly OK imho.^2

> Curious...
>
> glauber
> --
> Glauber Ribeiro
> thegl...@my-deja.com
> "Opinions stated are my own and not representative of Experian"
>
>
> Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
> Before you buy.

[1] #'(lambda (x) (* x x)) is a function just like 1.0 is a floating
point number.

[2] things like setq on a local variable or printing to a file have
obvious side effects (changing a variable, lengthening a file, resp.).

--
J o h a n K u l l s t a m
[kull...@ne.mediaone.net]
Don't Fear the Penguin!

Barry Margolin

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Jul 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/21/00
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In article <m2g0p3f...@euler.axel.nom>,
Johan Kullstam <kull...@ne.mediaone.net> wrote:

>The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com> writes:
>> Is F.P. an idea that's still considered important? Is it important for
>> Lisp programmers in "the real world"?
>
>a pure function is easier to deal with since it won't spew side
>effects all over creation. it's all about not surprising the
>programmer with unintended and complex consequences. obvious side
>effects with limited scope are perfectly OK imho.^2

One of the main benefits of "pure FP" is in program optimization,
particularly in parallel processing architectures. Programs without side
effects are easy for other programs to reason about and transform. Lazy
evaluation can be done, and computations can be done in parallel, all
without changing the results of the program. So people doing research on
programming language implementation like FP because it avoids the hard
problems.

However, IMHO, most real world programmers have a harder time designing
pure functional programs. I believe our minds tend to think about
step-by-step plans more easily than functional decomposition (our
hunter/gatherer forebears didn't think "Eat the animal that I cooked that I
killed", they thought "kill the animal, then cook it, then eat it", and we
inherited their planning thought processes). So programming practicioners,
as opposed to academics, tend to prefer imperative programming styles.

As Johan pointed out, Common Lisp provides many functional features, so you
can use that style when it fits your needs, but overall program design
tends to be mostly imperative.

--
Barry Margolin, bar...@genuity.net
Genuity, Burlington, MA
*** DON'T SEND TECHNICAL QUESTIONS DIRECTLY TO ME, post them to newsgroups.
Please DON'T copy followups to me -- I'll assume it wasn't posted to the group.

Kent M Pitman

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Jul 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/21/00
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Barry Margolin <bar...@genuity.net> writes:

No conflict with anything Barry said here--jsut wanted to add some thoughts
to underscore some of his remarks for those few who remain both unconvinced
but still open to argument on the matter...

> In article <m2g0p3f...@euler.axel.nom>,
> Johan Kullstam <kull...@ne.mediaone.net> wrote:
> >The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com> writes:
> >> Is F.P. an idea that's still considered important? Is it important for
> >> Lisp programmers in "the real world"?
>

> One of the main benefits of "pure FP" is in program optimization, [...]


>
> However, IMHO, most real world programmers have a harder time designing
> pure functional programs. I believe our minds tend to think about
> step-by-step plans more easily than functional decomposition

Personally, I would say it's because things in the world DO have state and
because people develop brain hardware that directly mirrors those things
about which they reason most often. If most things in the world were
state-free, I think people would reason well about state-free things.

Certainly when discussing optimization, as you suggest, which is really about
the abstract meta-process of reasoning about a process WITHOUT reasoning
about its domain data and reasoning only about abstract identities and
transformations of known characteristic (since it's conventionally done by
programs that don't understand the domain task), there are properties of
state-free things that makes "mindless" (I'll call it) reasoning easier.
But "mindful" things--that is, things that are really about a domain and how
it works as reasoned by a trained expert--are often about systems with state
and trying to "model" them without isomorphism but instead by making a
trustable proof that transforming it to a state-free decomposition is hard
because you ahve to do not only the state-free result but also the
transformation. It's easier just to use the brain's natural hardware for
doing statistical prediction, structural modeling, simulation, and other
techniques that are directly available in wetware.

> (our
> hunter/gatherer forebears didn't think "Eat the animal that I cooked that I
> killed", they thought "kill the animal, then cook it, then eat it", and we
> inherited their planning thought processes). So programming practicioners,
> as opposed to academics, tend to prefer imperative programming styles.

Yes, I agree with this analysis completely. I've made similar comments about
the value of recursion in teaching children. Does anyone know someone who has
taught a kid to climb stairs by saying "climb the first stair, then climb
the stairs"? I think we all say "here are a bunch of stairs. learn how to
climb one. now do it to all of them."

> As Johan pointed out, Common Lisp provides many functional features, so you
> can use that style when it fits your needs, but overall program design
> tends to be mostly imperative.

Precisely. Some of the world is functional, and CL models that with proper
isomorphism to functions. I hate working in languages where first class
functions are not available for this. However, most of the world has state
and CL models that as well. It's exactly the ability to integrate
these stylistically clashing abstractions which makes CL so able to model
a world which is likewise full full of uncoordinated abstractions, artifacts,
etc. It's hardly surprising either, since CL's roots are in early AI work
trying to mirror thought on the very hardest of representational problems.
CL has spent less time worrying about the elegance of a "hello world" program
and more on worrying about the "how world" or "why world"...

Joe Marshall

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Jul 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/21/00
to
Barry Margolin <bar...@genuity.net> writes:

> I believe our minds tend to think about step-by-step plans more

> easily than functional decomposition (our hunter/gatherer forebears


> didn't think "Eat the animal that I cooked that I killed", they
> thought "kill the animal, then cook it, then eat it", and we
> inherited their planning thought processes).

I disagree. I think that functional decomposition is both quite easy
to grasp and that people use it more than they are aware. We think
`that wall that is made of bricks and mortar' rather than `that wall
that is
1. Place brick on ground.
2. put mortar on it
3. Place brick next to it.
4. etc....'

I think that the `step-by-step' approach to programming may have as
much to do with the way we are taught about programming (and following
directions) as with inhereted thought processes.

Fernando D. Mato Mira

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Jul 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/21/00
to
The Glauber wrote:

> My superficial observation is that Lisp users seem to be more tolerant
> of side-effects in their programs than Scheme users.

But Common Lisp is more functional:

http://series.sourceforge.net/

--
Fernando D. Mato Mira Phone : +41 (78) 778 FDMM
E-mail : matomira AT acm DOT org

David Hanley

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Jul 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/21/00
to

As a short answer, i often use functional ideas without doing
pure functional programming--even in languages such
as java. This often helps me reason about complex code, as
I don't have to worry about shared objects getting mutated
by some way. Yes, this will run slower for some applications,
but that's where judicious mutation and extra care on
a specific path gets you 90% of the performance you could
achieve with a hairy version of the code which makes no
copies, but is much harder to understand.

dave


Duane Rettig

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Jul 21, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/21/00
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nos...@nospam.com ( e 4 5 5 @ y a h o o . c o m ) writes:

> On 21 Jul 2000 14:45:12 -0400, Joe Marshall <jmar...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
>
> >I disagree. I think that functional decomposition is both quite easy
> >to grasp and that people use it more than they are aware. We think
> >`that wall that is made of bricks and mortar' rather than `that wall
> >that is
> > 1. Place brick on ground.
> > 2. put mortar on it
> > 3. Place brick next to it.
> > 4. etc....'
>

> Seems more like object-oriented. A brick is an abstract object which seems
> almost concrete. A concrete block is equally abstract but really concrete.
> Both are quite hard, but a brick is actually easy to grasp, and can even be
> thrown as an exception, but not safely. How easy is it to grasp functional
> decomposition?

I always grasp bricks easily and safely, but only when using gloves.
But some bricks are made out of clay.

Why are we talking about bricks and concrete in a lisp newsgroup?

:-) :-)

--
Duane Rettig Franz Inc. http://www.franz.com/ (www)
1995 University Ave Suite 275 Berkeley, CA 94704
Phone: (510) 548-3600; FAX: (510) 548-8253 du...@Franz.COM (internet)

e 4 5 5 @ y a h o o . c o m

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Jul 22, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/22/00
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Xah

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Jul 22, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/22/00
to
Barry Margolin, bar...@genuity.net humbugly wrote:
> One of the main benefits of "pure FP" is in program optimization,
> particularly in parallel processing architectures. Programs without side
> effects are easy for other programs to reason about and transform. Lazy
> evaluation can be done, and computations can be done in parallel, all
> without changing the results of the program. So people doing research on
> programming language implementation like FP because it avoids the hard
> problems.

Likewise: one of the main benefits of "imperative programing" is in easy
compiler implementation. And blab blab blab. So people who do real world
programing prefer the imperatives of begging style because it avoids the
labor of thinking clearly.

> However, IMHO, most real world programmers have a harder time designing
> pure functional programs.

However, IMHO, real world Luddites have a hard time understanding automation
& progress also.

> I believe our minds tend to think about
> step-by-step plans more easily than functional decomposition (our
> hunter/gatherer forebears didn't think "Eat the animal that I cooked that I
> killed", they thought "kill the animal, then cook it, then eat it", and we
> inherited their planning thought processes).

Vacuous opinion touched up with dumb presentation jacked up with a pent-up
wrangled anal-ogy in the fashion of wishful thinkers.

> So programming practicioners,
> as opposed to academics, tend to prefer imperative programming styles.

Therefore Luddites & rubes, as opposed to the educated, tend to prefer
staying put.

> As Johan pointed out, Common Lisp provides many functional features, so you
> can use that style when it fits your needs, but overall program design
> tends to be mostly imperative.

in the same vein: as i pointed out, Common Lisp provide some functional
features, so you can use that style when you are capable of clear thinking,
but overall program design tends to be mostly dysfunctional.

--

At the end era of any revolution, there's a bag of effete conservatives who
drag the society. Lisp was a revolution precisely because it's functional.
Now we have the likes of Barry Margolin singing the songs of the
imperatives.

Pure and non-strict (tech term) functional languages will be THE languages
of the future, as a matter of time. How soon it will happen depends on the
brightness of our information age. Obviously, the likes of Margolin is not
helping.

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


Erik Naggum

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Jul 22, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/22/00
to
* The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com>

| My superficial observation is that Lisp users seem to be more
| tolerant of side-effects in their programs than Scheme users.

Side-effects in programming is a side-effect of programming with
stateful objects. In its purest form, and certain Schemers want
nothing less, Scheme eschewes statefulness and hence objects that
have state information. This is one of the reasons it is often
impossible to talk to Schemers and Scheme is useless for more than
embedded languages that do all the side-effects behind the scenes.

| I think you can do functional programming in imperative languages too,
| and some of the things that are considered good coding in object-
| oriented programming (short methods, "getter" and "setter" methods to
| access members, etc) are a step towards functional programming.

I consider object-oriented programming antithetical to functional
programming. What do you do with an object that changes state or,
more broadly, maintains some information about itself that may be
modified by "methods" on it? In functional programming, you would
return a new object. In object-oriented programming, other users of
the same object would see the change. Object-oriented programming
relies on object identity. Functional programming relies on objects
not being referenced by anyone else.

| Is F.P. an idea that's still considered important? Is it important
| for Lisp programmers in "the real world"?

As with all theoretical approaches to the real world, you always get
something really important out of every theory that has been built
from observations of the real world, but when the theory starts to
depend more on the egos of the creators than on reality, however one
defines and relates to it, it quickly loses its appeal to any others
than its believers/investors. I view functional programming as an
attempt to solve certain hard problems -- not those of application,
infrastructure, modeling, human requirements, etc, but in the design
of languages -- a consequence of which is that certain programming
paradigms emerge and prove themselves worthy of examination and the
occasional use, but 100% pure functional style is simply useless: If
you have no side-effects, you have no effects on the real world,
which has the same identity before and after your side-effect-free
program. Taken to its extreme, side-effect-free programming would
mean you had to create a new universe with every computation.

Now that we've established that there has to be _some_ side-effects,
the question is no longer whether they are good or bad, but _which_
are good or bad. The functional programming languages I have used
and studied have not let me make that decision myself, but rather
have tried to force me into accepting somebody else's choices. I
don't think this is a particularly useful approach to programming
paradigms, and I don't want to work against the languages I use.

#:Erik
--
If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.

Xah

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Jul 22, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/22/00
to
Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> wrote:
> No conflict with anything Barry said here--jsut wanted to add some thoughts
> to underscore some of his remarks for those few who remain both unconvinced
> but still open to argument on the matter...

No conflict with anything Kent said here -- i just wanted to add some
thoughts to underscore some of his remarks for those few who are clouded by
the lure of the imperatives but are still capable of critical thinking.

Kent begs:


> Personally, I would say it's because things in the world DO have state and
> because people develop brain hardware that directly mirrors those things
> about which they reason most often.

Impersonally, i would say Kent have no idea what he is talking about.
First off, it's meaningless mumble jumble. On a meta or intuitive level,
it's also plagued by non sequiturs.

>If most things in the world were state-free

what the fuck does this really mean?

> I think people would reason well about state-free things.

how this follows? and what the fuck is "_reason well_ about state-free
things"?

When not being technical, mumble jumble appears to be Kent's forte.

> Certainly when discussing optimization, as you suggest, which is really about
> the abstract meta-process of reasoning about a process WITHOUT reasoning
> about its domain data and reasoning only about abstract identities and
> transformations of known characteristic (since it's conventionally done by
> programs that don't understand the domain task), there are properties of
> state-free things that makes "mindless" (I'll call it) reasoning easier.
> But "mindful" things--that is, things that are really about a domain and how
> it works as reasoned by a trained expert--are often about systems with state
> and trying to "model" them without isomorphism but instead by making a
> trustable proof that transforming it to a state-free decomposition is hard
> because you ahve to do not only the state-free result but also the
> transformation. It's easier just to use the brain's natural hardware for
> doing statistical prediction, structural modeling, simulation, and other
> techniques that are directly available in wetware.

Wetware my ass.

For those "stateful" things as you say, then it should be modeled by
automata, monads (excuse me for my ignorance for this one), neuro-networks,
genetic programing, fuzzy-logic, pure objects and so on that has a rigid
mathematical foundation. Most of which can be embodied in functional
programing.

That's the best reply i can gather for Kent's vague verbalization.

Barry Margolin <bar...@genuity.net> writes:
>> (our
>> hunter/gatherer forebears didn't think "Eat the animal that I cooked that I
>> killed", they thought "kill the animal, then cook it, then eat it", and we

>> inherited their planning thought processes). So programming practicioners,


>> as opposed to academics, tend to prefer imperative programming styles.

Kent Pitman apologizes:


> Yes, I agree with this analysis completely. I've made similar comments about
> the value of recursion in teaching children. Does anyone know someone who has
> taught a kid to climb stairs by saying "climb the first stair, then climb
> the stairs"? I think we all say "here are a bunch of stairs. learn how to
> climb one. now do it to all of them."

Huh? Excuse me for my lack of imagination, but could you be a bit precise?

Are you now, paralleling analogies with mappings from the functional
paradigm to the methodology domain for the injection of your opinion??? By
ways of empathy, i think you know what i mean too.

Barry Margolin <bar...@genuity.net> sings:


>> As Johan pointed out, Common Lisp provides many functional features, so you
>> can use that style when it fits your needs, but overall program design
>> tends to be mostly imperative.

Kent Pitman echoes:


> Precisely. Some of the world is functional, and CL models that with proper
> isomorphism to functions.

What the FUCK does


"CL models that with proper isomorphism to functions"

^^^^^^ ^^^^^^^^^^^
mean? Here Kent Pitman is fucking fuck all fucked up about using jargons to
impinge those lesser educated.

> I hate working in languages where first class
> functions are not available for this. However, most of the world has state
> and CL models that as well. It's exactly the ability to integrate
> these stylistically clashing abstractions which makes CL so able to model
> a world which is likewise full full of uncoordinated abstractions, artifacts,
> etc. It's hardly surprising either, since CL's roots are in early AI work
> trying to mirror thought on the very hardest of representational problems.
> CL has spent less time worrying about the elegance of a "hello world" program
> and more on worrying about the "how world" or "why world"...

I get tired of correcting sloppy iffy writings like these that's not even
belles-lettres nor sophistry. Kent, maybe your technical career wrapped up,
maybe you should focus on fiction writing full time.

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


Christopher Browne

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Jul 22, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/22/00
to
Centuries ago, Nostradamus foresaw a time when Erik Naggum would say:

>* The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com>
>| My superficial observation is that Lisp users seem to be more
>| tolerant of side-effects in their programs than Scheme users.
>
> Side-effects in programming is a side-effect of programming with
> stateful objects. In its purest form, and certain Schemers want
> nothing less, Scheme eschewes statefulness and hence objects that
> have state information. This is one of the reasons it is often
> impossible to talk to Schemers and Scheme is useless for more than
> embedded languages that do all the side-effects behind the scenes.

I thought that most of the "purist" functional programming people had
headed off to work with Haskell and ML. After all, making Scheme truely
"stateless" would mandate removing set! from the language. But I suppose
you keep up with those "certain Schemers" more than I do.

>| I think you can do functional programming in imperative languages too,
>| and some of the things that are considered good coding in object-
>| oriented programming (short methods, "getter" and "setter" methods to
>| access members, etc) are a step towards functional programming.
>
> I consider object-oriented programming antithetical to functional
> programming. What do you do with an object that changes state or,
> more broadly, maintains some information about itself that may be
> modified by "methods" on it? In functional programming, you would
> return a new object. In object-oriented programming, other users of
> the same object would see the change. Object-oriented programming
> relies on object identity. Functional programming relies on objects
> not being referenced by anyone else.

Agreed; I suspect that most of those that suggest that OO is in any way
related to FP Just Didn't Get It when they did their two week module on
functional programming.

That being said, the world isn't all about having Just One Programming
Paradigm.

- Perl represents the "scripting languages with all the paradigms
thrown in."

- C++ is _NOT_ an "object oriented language," but rather a "language that
supports objected oriented and other useful programming paradigms."
(Which is approximately the way Stroustrup describes C++.)

- Common Lisp supports quite the bunch of paradigms.

- The FP language that seems to have gotten the most widely deployed for
"useful stuff" is OCAML, a version of ML augmented with object oriented
capabilities. They've actually created an Emacs clone in OCAML.

>| Is F.P. an idea that's still considered important? Is it important
>| for Lisp programmers in "the real world"?
>
> As with all theoretical approaches to the real world, you always get
> something really important out of every theory that has been built
> from observations of the real world, but when the theory starts to
> depend more on the egos of the creators than on reality, however one
> defines and relates to it, it quickly loses its appeal to any others
> than its believers/investors. I view functional programming as an
> attempt to solve certain hard problems -- not those of application,
> infrastructure, modeling, human requirements, etc, but in the design
> of languages -- a consequence of which is that certain programming
> paradigms emerge and prove themselves worthy of examination and the
> occasional use, but 100% pure functional style is simply useless: If
> you have no side-effects, you have no effects on the real world,
> which has the same identity before and after your side-effect-free
> program. Taken to its extreme, side-effect-free programming would
> mean you had to create a new universe with every computation.

You have 30 seconds: Define the universe. Give at least 3 examples...
:-)
--
cbbr...@ntlug.org - <http://www.ntlug.org/~cbbrowne/>
"The day Microsoft makes something that doesn't suck is probably the
day they start making vacuum cleaners" - Ernst Jan Plugge

Joe Marshall

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Jul 22, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/22/00
to
nos...@nospam.com ( e 4 5 5 @ y a h o o . c o m ) writes:

The rate at which bricks or concrete decompose is a function of their
environment. Brick which are statically bound in mortar tend to have
longer lifetimes than those which are dynamically bound (with
strapping? Don't forget to unwind it!). Certainly the garbage
collectors have an easier time transporting individual bricks. But a
wall tends to be a barrier for garbage collectors, so they usually
just sweep up around it.

Both bricks and concrete blocks provide a uniform interface and hide
the details of their implementation. With the appropriate use of
protection forms, they can be safely thrown or caught, and even a
non-exceptional person can handle either.

This leads us to a possible link between the lambda calculus (note the
etymology of calculus! More than co-incidence?) and freemasonry...

Pierre R. Mai

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Jul 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/23/00
to
Xah <x...@xahlee.org> writes:

> For those "stateful" things as you say, then it should be modeled by
> automata, monads (excuse me for my ignorance for this one), neuro-networks,
> genetic programing, fuzzy-logic, pure objects and so on that has a rigid
> mathematical foundation. Most of which can be embodied in functional
> programing.

Imperative programming languages have just as rigid a mathematical
_foundation_. It just happens that reasoning about imperative programs
is harder.

Other than that I can only wonder why you post in c.l.l, if you
consider pure lazy functional languages to be the programming
languages of the future, then surely all Lisps and those abominable
retards that continue to use them will be neither entertaining nor
interesting... But why stop when it's so much fun...

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]

Rob Warnock

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Jul 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/23/00
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Joe Marshall <jmar...@alum.mit.edu> wrote:
+---------------

| This leads us to a possible link between the lambda calculus (note the
| etymology of calculus! More than co-incidence?) and freemasonry...
+---------------

**ROTFLMAO!!**


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, 41L-955 rp...@sgi.com
Applied Networking http://reality.sgi.com/rpw3/
Silicon Graphics, Inc. Phone: 650-933-1673
1600 Amphitheatre Pkwy. PP-ASEL-IA
Mountain View, CA 94043

Xah

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Jul 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/23/00
to
i <x...@xahlee.org> wrote:
>> For those "stateful" things as you say, then it should be modeled by
>> automata, monads (excuse me for my ignorance for this one), neuro-networks,
>> genetic programing, fuzzy-logic, pure objects and so on that has a rigid
>> mathematical foundation. Most of which can be embodied in functional
>> programing.

pm...@acm.org (Pierre R. Mai) Jul 2000 01:19:58 +0200 wrote:
> Imperative programming languages have just as rigid a mathematical
> _foundation_. It just happens that reasoning about imperative programs
> is harder.

Yeah? and? is this a background info or was it a refutation? If latter, how
does it work?

was our snazzy & comfy context about functional vs imperative programing?
I wrote my paragraphS in check of Kent's poetic syllogization. What is your
point?

> Other than that I can only wonder why you post in c.l.l, if you
> consider pure lazy functional languages to be the programming
> languages of the future,

> then surely all Lisps and those abominable
> retards that continue to use them will be neither entertaining nor
> interesting...

please guys. For serious arguments or opinion giving: one at a time, and
connect the logic. Make your "if then" work. ... (... define your
disagreement, give support, think clearly and distinctly, and don't muddy it
with _ infused_ and _meaningless_ taunts (it'll muddy both cogency of main
dish AND sourness of the desert) )

I post on c.l.l. for mostly the same reason people posts in newsgroups,
except that i'm not here to pickup Common Lisp technicalities. But to the
point: i cannot tolerate charismatic untruths, especially glaringly dropped
by dignitaries. Such untruths beg me for a trashing.

The previous two posts by Barry Margolin & Kent M. Pitman are really good
paradigm. Good as paragon of stupid writings. Full fledged in all aspects.
Are you about to contribute to this genre?

>... But why stop when it's so much fun...

indeed my buddy,

in good deed,

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html

Lieven Marchand

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Jul 23, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/23/00
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cbbr...@knuth.brownes.org (Christopher Browne) writes:

> - The FP language that seems to have gotten the most widely deployed for
> "useful stuff" is OCAML, a version of ML augmented with object oriented
> capabilities. They've actually created an Emacs clone in OCAML.

OCaml also added real variables ("references") and gave up referential
transparency to do it and guarantees order of execution without stuff
like monads. I think the most reasonable way to look at OCaml is just
like CL as a language with a functional subset, but not as a
functional language.

--
Lieven Marchand <m...@bewoner.dma.be>
Lambda calculus - Call us a mad club

Kent M Pitman

unread,
Jul 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/24/00
to
Xah, I wonder if you'd indulge me in the answer to a couple of questions.
I'm not here trying to convince you of something; I'm curious how you model
the world, computation, and the relationship between them:

- What do you think is going on in someone's head when they
"think about" something? That is, do you think it's an excerise
in "functional process" (e.g., side-effect-free decomposition or
some such) or "imperative process" (manipulation of the stateful
stuff you seem to abhor so) or how would you characterize it?

- Notwithstanding your answer, do you give any credence to the notion of
mental isomorphism? That is, do you suppose there is value in having
the "shape" of mental conceptions match the "shape" of reality (e.g.,
to minimize the computational cost of marshalling and unmarshalling
brain data and/or reality data, depending on which way you're going)
or is that simply an irrelevancy? Likewise, do you see any value in
reasoning in a way that is consistent with the mechanism? For example,
you could model a coke machine using "statistics" or "functional
expressions", but it seems to me there is more value to modeling it as
a state machine since it is, in fact, such a thing. If you choose to
model something in a way that it in fact doesn't work (as pre-Kepler
folk used to model the rotation of the planets in their spirograph-like
curly-orbit way), don't you risk overcomplicate the simple? And so
doesn't it come down to how people think? Not how you wish them to think
but how they in fact think? (Can you cite experiments to show that you
have a clear and uncontroverted theory of how they think such that you
are sure you are not advocating dissonance between our mental models
and our devices for aiding in computation?) Sometimes, obviously, the
technique for the computation may be well-understood and accepted; but
where it is not, debuggability comes (it seems to me) best when people
have some way of destructuring the problem into intelligible components;
isomorphism between the real world and the computation isn't the only
way to do it, but it doesn't seem to me that one should discount it as
a ridiculous way, either, in the case where programmers want to do it.

Martin Cracauer

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Jul 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/24/00
to
The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com> writes:

>Is F.P. an idea that's still considered important? Is it important for
>Lisp programmers in "the real world"?

Adding to what other said, a large part of the F.P. community uses
their language research to make use of strong type systems, targetting
compile-time saveness without the work depression that comes with them
in most traditional OO languages. Obviously, that is even more remote
from what the usual Lisp programmer does than the aspect of being
side-effect free.

Martin
--
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Martin Cracauer <crac...@bik-gmbh.de> http://www.bik-gmbh.de/~cracauer/
FreeBSD - where you want to go. Today. http://www.freebsd.org/

Frode Vatvedt Fjeld

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Jul 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/24/00
to
The Glauber <thegl...@my-deja.com> writes:

> Is F.P. an idea that's still considered important? Is it important
> for Lisp programmers in "the real world"?

I think it's a very important concept that should always be considered
by anyone doing any kind of programming.

Maybe CL should have included the ability to declare a function as
"functional" (side-effect-free, that is).

--
Frode Vatvedt Fjeld

Hannah Schroeter

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Jul 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/24/00
to
Hello!

In article <3978C6DE...@iname.com>,
Fernando D. Mato Mira <mato...@iname.com> wrote:
>The Glauber wrote:

>> My superficial observation is that Lisp users seem to be more tolerant
>> of side-effects in their programs than Scheme users.

>But Common Lisp is more functional:

>http://series.sourceforge.net/

This reminds me very much of Haskell's lazy lists in combination with the
deforestation optimization(s).

Regards, Hannah.

The Glauber

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Jul 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/24/00
to
Children,

please play nicely or get out of the playpen...


glauber

The Glauber

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Jul 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/24/00
to
In article <3978CEFD...@ncgr.org>,


What do you mean by using functional ideas?

I, for example, try to make methods or functions self-contained, try to
avoid global variables, try to encapsulate state in classes. Is this
what you're writing about?

glauber


--
Glauber Ribeiro
thegl...@my-deja.com http://www.myvehiclehistoryreport.com


"Opinions stated are my own and not representative of Experian"

The Glauber

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Jul 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/24/00
to
[...]

Thanks, this was a great post; i'm keeping it for future reference.


> #:Erik
> --
> If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.

OK

Dorai Sitaram

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Jul 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/24/00
to
>> I'm intrigued by the idea of functional programming, but i haven't
>> found much material on it on the Web (which means i'm probably looking
>> in the wrong place). There are a number of purely functional
>> programming languages, then there's Lisp-ish languages and everything
>> else.
>>
>> My superficial observation is that Lisp users seem to be more tolerant
>> of side-effects in their programs than Scheme users.
>
>yes. common-lisp emphasizes getting things done as opposed to
>strictly maintaining language purity. personally, i think common-lisp
>does a pretty good job on both counts.

To first talk about the languages as things in
themselves: Scheme and CL are identical in their
approach to side-effects (modulo only spelling). They
both allow changing the bindings of variables, and
they both allow mutating the contents of compound
data. (Some languages like ML allow side-effects of
the second type only, so one has to mimic assignable
variables by defining a pro-forma compound datum
called the reference. References require special
syntax for mere access, which Scheme and CL
variables don't.) You'd be shortchanging yourself if
you used side-effects as a litmus to choose one of
Scheme or CL over the other.

To next talk about usage: I disagree with the
speculation that Scheme usage is more leery of
side-effects, even if the language allows them. Both
Scheme and CL have a non-imperative core, and users in
both languages make forays out of this _as the
situation demands_. Of course no one is going to use
side-effects (or _anything_) gratuitously, not even in
the C world, where assignment is used because it is
the only way to solve a problem (another way of
looking at this is that C's non-imperative core is not
powerful enough). In Scheme and Common Lisp, it isn't
that side-effects are curtailed, but that alternatives
exist in the form of really powerful procedural
constructs, and naturally they also find use. The
full power of side-effects is nevertheless still
there.

No influential Scheme group is side-effect-shy, but
even so, the Scheme community I followed (Rice,
Indiana) is extremely active in the imperative aspect
of Scheme, fending off as it did the prevailing myth
at the time that you cannot have mathematically
reasonable languages that also had imperative
features. It has done extensive work charting out the
imperative landscape of Scheme, mapping it into two
categories, i.e., State and Control. Some of the most
persuasive elucidation that a purely functional
approach (however higher-order) is weaker than its
combination with imperative features comes from this
community. Even the most idle surfing of the
Scheme offerings on the Rice web site will put to rest
any concerns you may have that side-effects receive
but cursory treatment in the Scheme world.

If you find Scheme useful and you like it, explore
it. Same goes for CL. Avoid getting trapped in pat
binarisms. I wish you success and fun in your
explorations!

--d

Shiv

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Jul 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/24/00
to

It requires a certain mindset to be a good CL programmer (as opposed
to a good C programmer). Similarly, to ge a good "purely functional
non-strict" language (eg. Clean) programmer it requires a different
mindset. For many people the lack of side-effects is intolerable
(rightly so, as evidenced by the reactions in this thread). Usually
one is forced into passing the state around, and this can become
intolerable if designed inappropriately. The monadic-style is to hide
the state, say in an abstract datatype (or just by discipline), and
provide operators that will sequence actions and pass the state around
under the covers. {Aside: for a beautiful use of monadic-style in Caml
see the sources for fftw in www.fftw.org}. The monadic style is
popular in ML (and its variants), Haskell, etc.. The Clean
(www.cs.kun.nl/~clean) approach is a little bit more palatable. It has
the notion of uniqueness types whereby you can declare that some
object will not be shared by anything else when a function is
invoked. Since side-effects are only a problem when sharing is
present, this effectively overcomes it, and you get destructive
updates in a functional manner. So you can get arrays to behave like
arrays. However, this is does not make CL+CLOS! But, good Clean (or
Haskell) programmers have done pretty well. For example Clean has its
entire IDE written in Clean! A stateful task done well.

So before shooting all the children of Lisp (after all that is what
ML, Haskell, Clean, etc. are) it might be worth your effort to take a
closer look. If you want to take a look at only one, may I suggest
Clean? As somebody else already mentioned, these languages really
emphasize strong typing with type inferencing as one of their strong
points besides functional style and/or laziness. They also have some
neat features like list and array comprehensions. Of course, many of
these features could possibly be added to CL via macros and
stuff. Have fun!!


--shiv--


Xah

unread,
Jul 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/24/00
to
Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> 24 Jul 2000 03:53:43 GMT wrote:
> - What do you think is going on in someone's head when they
> "think about" something? That is, do you think it's an excerise
> in "functional process" (e.g., side-effect-free decomposition or
> some such) or "imperative process" (manipulation of the stateful
> stuff you seem to abhor so) or how would you characterize it?

this is a silly question. Do you think deity exist? Do you think they are
sexy?

These type of questions belong to metaphysics, classical philosophy, and
classical psychology. They are passé in our info age, except that Freudian
theories are still used by shrinks to comfort people and shrinking their
wallets.

What's _thinking_ anyway? How do you know that my existence isn't just your
fancy? (after all, it is in your head.) For these questions, better dig
neuroscience and information science for answers.

Furthermore, "functional" and "imperative" describe computation
methodologies that we invented. Why do you assume that these notions are
applicable (or maps) to how our brain processes? Are you supposing that
human thinking has been completely understood or codified? You are forcing a
simile. (or "isomorphism" as you say)

(btw, _isomorphism_ is a mathematical term bearing a rigorous definition in
an axiomatic context. A lookup in dictionaries indicated that it is used in
technical contexts only. (math, biology, chemistry.) Your usage of '_proper_
isomorphism' to endeavor a sense of mathematical mapping between two totally
ill-defined and disparate things seems to me stultifying.)

Most of you have thought of the innocent question "how big is the universe",
and so have our ancestors. In hindsight, it seems foolish that our ancestors
pondered such a question without having taken a course in calculus and
learned the ins and outs of bounded and finiteness concepts. In fact, it's
quite ridiculous if modern notions of dimensionality are not present in the
questioner's mind. But actually it's truly ludicrous if we are ignorant of
shapes of space (topology) & non-Euclidean geometries. Frankly, it is a
fucking stupid question in additional light of space-time continuum of
Relativity. The point here is: what you think as sensible questions are not
always good questions.

I would suggest that anyone who are interested in philosophy in general to
follow Bertrand Russell's logical positivism school of thought, and ask not
big-time metaphysical questions or lore but study logic & linguistics &
mathematics: put your foot on solid ground.

having read so many language wars and literatures, i find it trite. The best
language, is the one with the most good unyielding mathematical properties.
The more interesting question is, the mathematical study of different
ideology of such property sets, and possible ISOMORPHISM between them.

In newsgroups, few are educated enough to be aware of such a level of
thought. They argue sugar syntaxes, they argue C++ vs Java, they argue my GC
vs your GC, they argue high-level vs low level, they argue trivial
psychology, they argue sizes, they argue petty arguments blithely and often
blindly too.

> - Notwithstanding your answer, do you give any credence to the notion of
> mental isomorphism? That is, do you suppose there is value in having
> the "shape" of mental conceptions match the "shape" of reality (e.g.,
> to minimize the computational cost of marshalling and unmarshalling
> brain data and/or reality data, depending on which way you're going)
> or is that simply an irrelevancy?

I deem it irrelevant because such an observation is not a scientific
observation; it has little value in aiding science.

> Likewise, do you see any value in
> reasoning in a way that is consistent with the mechanism?

> For example,
> you could model a coke machine using "statistics" or "functional
> expressions", but it seems to me there is more value to modeling it as
> a state machine since it is, in fact, such a thing.

(ok, so drinking machines are sate machines. Therefore the so called "human
thinking" jams into an excluded middle of functional/imperative?)

> If you choose to
> model something in a way that it in fact doesn't work (as pre-Kepler
> folk used to model the rotation of the planets in their spirograph-like
> curly-orbit way), don't you risk overcomplicate the simple?

Here we are talking about planetary motion, which is a matter of eye-balling
paths very well-defined and easily verified under science. You were talking
about modeling of human thought -- a not well-defined thingy -- and
insisting it "maps" to some ill-defined computational model. (Ockham's razor
would cut you to pieces.)

> And so
> doesn't it come down to how people think? Not how you wish them to think
> but how they in fact think? (Can you cite experiments to show that you
> have a clear and uncontroverted theory of how they think such that you
> are sure you are not advocating dissonance between our mental models
> and our devices for aiding in computation?)

How people think?

No, i don't care how people think, but how they should think according to
knowledge. I understand the iffiness of purpose of life, i understand that
theory needs corrections, but it is science & theories that we should base
our argument or decisions on, not metaphysics, culture, fad, or what you or
me think "how people thinks".

You know well how Theories of Relativity changed thinking? Do you know how
the existence of irrational numbers changed thinking? Do you know how
non-Euclidean geometry changed thinking? Do you know how Godel's theorem
changed thinking? Do you know how Penrose Tiles changed thinking? (and so on
and on and on.)

It's not "how people think" that matters, but "what do we know about how
people think" and "what's the best way to think according to our
understanding?". What is the (scientific) value of saying "human thinks more
like imperative programing than functional decomposition"? I'm totally
flummoxed on how such mapping maps, and fear such observation can only
impede progress. As technology pushes us willy-nilly towards a pure
information age, untruths and ignorance will become the primary woe among
all vices and calamities. Cultivate one untruth, and you'd cause a damage
more devastating than mass murder.

> Sometimes, obviously, the
> technique for the computation may be well-understood and accepted; but
> where it is not, debuggability comes (it seems to me) best when people
> have some way of destructuring the problem into intelligible components;
> isomorphism between the real world and the computation isn't the only
> way to do it, but it doesn't seem to me that one should discount it as
> a ridiculous way, either, in the case where programmers want to do it.

I understand your humanitarian approach to things. Of course, mathematics
has intrinsic limitations and is of little power in the context of all
crannies of human daily affairs. I cannot use formalism to decide whether i
should kiss a girl, nor maximize my income by solving an equation. However,
science is the ONLY way of real progress. (almost "by definition".) You are
not doing computer _science_ if you stray too far from scientific
approaches. (for what's worth: what i'm doing here is the science AND art of
critical criticizing.)

What is your issue anyway? It is fine if you like Common Lisp better than
Scheme, but not fine to litter untruths such as "human nature this or that".
It is not really imperative programing that i attack in this thread, but
your skunking "humanitarian" droppings.

PS "progress" is defined as betterment of human state in general that i wish
neophyte thinkers won't moot a nitpicking.

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


Erik Naggum

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Jul 24, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/24/00
to
* Frode Vatvedt Fjeld <fro...@acm.org>

| Maybe CL should have included the ability to declare a function as
| "functional" (side-effect-free, that is).

Most Lisp compilers include such a mechanism, but the guarantee is
even harder to maintain and guarantee than typing, and it should not
affect correctness, so nothing is lost by considering this as part
of the great optimization problem.

Robert Monfera

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Jul 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/25/00
to
Christopher Browne wrote:

> I suspect that most of those that suggest that OO is in any
> way related to FP Just Didn't Get It when they did their two
> week module on functional programming.

Polymorphism and inheritance are more important aspects of OO than
object identity (encapsulation being further down). These two concepts
blend perfectly with FP for those completing their two week module on
functional programming. With CLOS, it is highly possible to write
functions that return objects, which get garbage collected after a
one-time use.

Of course, there are people for whom OO is not OO without their pet
feature (e.g., those who say CLOS is not OO because it lacks
encapsulation).

Maybe you wanted to say that object identity does not mix with FP, or
that you consider object identity the sole defining feature of OO,
polymorphism being a mere accident. If it's the latter, maybe it's just
the side effect of your preference of imperative programming over both
FP and polymorphism.

Robert

Robert Monfera

unread,
Jul 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/25/00
to
Xah wrote:

> These type of questions belong to metaphysics, classical philosophy,
> and classical psychology. They are passé in our info age

Ever heard of cognitive science and cognitive psychology in our info
age? Had you studied it a little, you would have understood that the
brain does not necessarily solve logically isomorph problems the same
way. Your naive fixa idea gets old fast.

Robert

Kent M Pitman

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Jul 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/25/00
to
Xah <x...@xahlee.org> writes:

> Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> 24 Jul 2000 03:53:43 GMT wrote:
> > - What do you think is going on in someone's head when they
> > "think about" something? That is, do you think it's an excerise
> > in "functional process" (e.g., side-effect-free decomposition or
> > some such) or "imperative process" (manipulation of the stateful
> > stuff you seem to abhor so) or how would you characterize it?
>
> this is a silly question.

If I were implementing CORBA and talking about the efficiency of marshalling
and unmarshalling data between two processors that shared no address space,
it would make a big difference to know whether they used the same
representational systems because it would affect the computational overhead
significantly--would I have to transform each data item or could I pass
stuff essentially "straight through". I think the issue is no less
relevant to mental-to-computer links. And just because you can't reliably
measure how computations is represented doesn't mean it's not relevant.
Far from a silly question, I'd allege, it seems to me a central question.
Just my opinion, though. Somehow I anticipate that your mileage will vary.

Xah

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Jul 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/25/00
to
Kent & readers,

it is unfortunate that i usually find your (newsgroup) writings to be
antithesis of the logical. (same goes for Peter Gabriel's Pattern of
Software trash) I wonder if it's merely a manifestation of stylistic clash,
or some fundamental world-view incongruity in us, or simply your writings
don't shine.

Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> 25 Jul 2000 07:14:01 GMT wrote:
> If I were implementing CORBA and talking about the efficiency of marshalling
> and unmarshalling data between two processors that shared no address space,
> it would make a big difference to know whether they used the same
> representational systems because it would affect the computational overhead
> significantly--would I have to transform each data item or could I pass
> stuff essentially "straight through".

Fine example of a computing task that i could imagine.

> I think the issue is no less
> relevant to mental-to-computer links.

Where is your support for this opinion? It doesn't really connect to the
previous example or address my criticism.

> And just because you can't reliably
> measure how computations is represented doesn't mean it's not relevant.

Yeah, but just because you can cite a "just because" doesn't mean it's
relevant. I want to see buttresses of your fancy edifice.

> Far from a silly question, I'd allege, it seems to me a central question.

A central pitfall, perhaps. Mumble jumble i insist.

> Just my opinion, though. Somehow I anticipate that your mileage will vary.

peace, brother!!

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://www.xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


Tim Bradshaw

unread,
Jul 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/25/00
to
* Duane Rettig wrote:

> Why are we talking about bricks and concrete in a lisp newsgroup?

After long experiment it was found preferable to talking about why
Lisp is slower than C++...

--tim

Erik Naggum

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Jul 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/25/00
to
* Xah <x...@xahlee.org>

| it is unfortunate that i usually find your (newsgroup) writings to
| be antithesis of the logical. (same goes for Peter Gabriel's Pattern
| of Software trash) I wonder if it's merely a manifestation of
| stylistic clash, or some fundamental world-view incongruity in us,
| or simply your writings don't shine.

Or it could simply be a consequence of the fact that you're the only
sane person in the whole entire universe.

Reini Urban

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Jul 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/25/00
to
Duane Rettig wrote:
>Why are we talking about bricks and concrete in a lisp newsgroup?

indeed. it's summer and some really should be talking about icecream and
its various flavors. time is not ready for architecture yet.
--
Zur Einschätzung der aktuellen Situation in Ö
http://www.tuwien.ac.at/diskurs/

Reini Urban

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Jul 25, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/25/00
to
Erik Naggum wrote:
>* Xah <x...@xahlee.org>
>| it is unfortunate that i usually find your (newsgroup) writings to
>| be antithesis of the logical. (same goes for Peter Gabriel's Pattern
>| of Software trash) I wonder if it's merely a manifestation of
>| stylistic clash, or some fundamental world-view incongruity in us,
>| or simply your writings don't shine.
>
> Or it could simply be a consequence of the fact that you're the only
> sane person in the whole entire universe.

now this *IS* logical to me.
(though I still don't understand ~three postmodern words per
xah-sentence)

Rainer Joswig

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
to
In article <lc8zur8...@balrog.ece.ucsb.edu>, Shiv
<sh...@balrog.ece.ucsb.edu> wrote:

> Clean? As somebody else already mentioned, these languages really
> emphasize strong typing with type inferencing as one of their strong
> points besides functional style and/or laziness. They also have some
> neat features like list and array comprehensions. Of course, many of
> these features could possibly be added to CL via macros and
> stuff. Have fun!!

As you might imagine, most of these "features" are available
for CL or for subsets of CL. Type inferencing, list
comprehensions, etc have been added several times to CL.

Remember, Common Lisp is a language laboratory.

--
Rainer Joswig, BU Partner,
ISION Internet AG, Steinhöft 9, 20459 Hamburg, Germany
Tel: +49 40 3070 2950, Fax: +49 40 3070 2999
Email: mailto:rainer...@ision.net WWW: http://www.ision.net/

Rainer Joswig

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
to

> It requires a certain mindset to be a good CL programmer (as opposed
> to a good C programmer).

No, you don't need a certain "mindset". Common Lisp supports
one hundred different mindsets.

Giving up mental blockades helps, though.

Wolfhard Buß

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
to
Rainer Joswig <rainer...@ision.net> writes:

> As you might imagine, most of these "features" are available
> for CL or for subsets of CL. Type inferencing, list
> comprehensions, etc have been added several times to CL.

Any references?

-wb


William Deakin

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
to
Reini Urban wrote:
> (though I still don't understand ~three postmodern words per

What is a postmodern word?

;)will

Rainer Joswig

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
to
In article <m3puo1z...@minka.katzen.ol>, wb...@gmx.net (Wolfhard
Buß) wrote:

Type inferencing/checking:
- CMU CL
- SEQUEL
- ACL2
- http://www.dcs.qmw.ac.uk/SEL-HPC/Articles/GeneratedHtml/functional.imptype.html
- The Nimble Type Inferencer for Common Lisp-84
http://citeseer.nj.nec.com/cachedpage/87589/1

For list comprehension things, the CMU Lisp archive
should lead to success or look for old comp.lang.lisp
postings.

Examples:

(defun qsort (ax)
(and ax
(let ((a (car ax))
(x (cdr ax)))
(append (qsort [y (y <- x) (< y a)])
(list a)
(qsort [y (y <- x) (>= y a)])))))

(miranda perms (x)
() => '(())
(_ . _) => [(cons a p)
(a <- x)
(p <- (perms (remove a x :count 1)))])

Reini Urban

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
to

I cannot tell you exactly now what it is, because I don't understand it,
as I said, I can only show you what I mean. First I try it with some
examples picked from random sentences:

xah sentence #1:


"it is unfortunate that i usually find your (newsgroup) writings to be
antithesis of the logical."

xah sentence #2:


"(same goes for Peter Gabriel's Pattern of Software trash) I wonder if
it's merely a manifestation of stylistic clash, or some fundamental
world-view incongruity in us, or simply your writings don't shine."

xah sentence #3:


"this is a silly question. Do you think deity exist? Do you think they
are sexy?"

pm words in #1: "antithesis of the logical"
pm words in #2: "Pattern of Software trash", "world-view incongruity"
pm words in #3: deity, exist, sexy

proofs of concept:
http://www.elsewhere.org/cgi-bin/postmodern/
To some extent also:
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~zelenski/rsg/grammars/

ideology:
(Unfortunately I have my own postmodernism ramblings only in german,
so)
A positivistic approach to postmodernism in computer languages:
http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html

rationale:
I see words taken from new fields and put into an old and closed
context. This would not be harmful per se. The problem is that I don't
understand the reason to use such words in this context. Is just the
word that makes no sense or is the whole sentence?
My guess -and that is why I said "postmodern"- that the author wants
to hide the fact that he doesn't understand any meaning of our words or
sentences, so he tooks "random" but interesting or may-fit words,
applies them to our trash of sentences (in his view) to criticize our
methods to communicate. This is a interesting deconstructive method but
unfortunately only interesting to folks who don't understand the
comp.lang.lisp level of communication, and worse for me, completely non
understandable from his point of view because I don't know the original
context where he took these words from. The criticized words and
sentences make perfect sense for me, and the irritations are
non-constructive.

Xah

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
to

Reini Urban wrote:
> (though I still don't understand ~three postmodern words per
> xah-sentence)

William Deakin <w.de...@pindar.com> 26 Jul 2000 07:53:27 GMT wrote:
> What is a postmodern word?

C'mon people, there are dictionaries on the web. Look up and savor every
word. What's your rush?

my American Heritage dictionary (1995) says:
postmodern or post-modern adj. 1. Of or relating to art, architecture, or
literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by
reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying
modernist styles or practices to extremes: łthe post-modern mode of tapering
the tops of buildings˛ Jane Holtz Kay

Not until i looked up this word now, i find sense in Larry Wall's outcry:
"Perl is a postmodern language".

Larry Wall is at the minimum an _artful_ criminal. One could disregard his
damages to the computing world, and enjoy his writings.

Kent Pitman, you still haven't answered my question about what you think of
Perl. (could you indulge ME and answer that?) Was Perl, in your opinion, a
language based on fine principles?

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://www.xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html
"Disclaiming claim: I'm insane."


William Deakin

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
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Xah wrote:
> William Deakin <w.de...@pindar.com> 26 Jul 2000 07:53:27 GMT wrote:
> > What is a postmodern word?
>
> C'mon people, there are dictionaries on the web. Look up and savor every
> word.
Thanks for the advice. What I wanted to know, however, is what a
postmodern word was (as opposed to a modernist, neo-gothic or romantist
word, say).

> Not until i looked up this word now, i find sense in Larry Wall's outcry:
> "Perl is a postmodern language".
>
> Larry Wall is at the minimum an _artful_ criminal. One could disregard his
> damages to the computing world, and enjoy his writings.

Yup.

:)will

William Deakin

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
to

Reini Urban wrote:


>
> William Deakin wrote:
> >Reini Urban wrote:
> >> (though I still don't understand ~three postmodern words per
> >

> >What is a postmodern word?

[...elided interesting stuff about postmodernism...]


> rationale:
> I see words taken from new fields and put into an old and closed
> context. This would not be harmful per se. The problem is that I don't
> understand the reason to use such words in this context.

Art, or could it be an AI language gigger bug?

>Is just the word that makes no sense or is the whole sentence?

(Wishing he was not going to open up a whole Witgensitian can of worms
:) My take on this is that meaning of words in a sentence depends on the
the other words in the sentence and the context in which the sentence is
used. In this case the word can never `make sense' except in the context
of the sentence. Following on from this, to talk about a word making
sense or not is senseless -- that is it neither makes sense or not. But
hey ho, back to sendmail configuration.

> My guess -and that is why I said "postmodern"- that the author wants
> to hide the fact that he doesn't understand any meaning of our words or
> sentences, so he tooks "random" but interesting or may-fit words,
> applies them to our trash of sentences (in his view) to criticize our
> methods to communicate.

Or is generating the text automatically.

> This is a interesting deconstructive method but unfortunately only
> interesting to folks who don't understand the comp.lang.lisp level of
> communication,

Unless c.l.l is being used in a different way. That is, some kind of
conceptual art experiment (this is where you have try and divine some
kind of purpose or aesthetic meaning behind the text rather than
divining any kind of sense) or some kind of elaborate programming text
generation prank (like henley)[1]; And not using c.l.l. as a place to
talk about problems and issues with lisp.

> and worse for me, completely non-understandable from his

> point of view because I don't know the original context where he took
> these words from.

Yup. Unless they are words statistically selected from a dictionary.

Anyway, thanks for your the explaination of postmodernism,

:)will

[1] But written using functional programming :)

Cor Gest jr

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
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I'm getting really confused now.

Poor me, in all innocent-ignorance, I always thougt that the
only state of any Function(ality) in/or any other whatever-state or
function for that matter has to be a *working state*.

As in most cases, if not all, it is *that* state that pays the mortgage.

Maybe it's time to get a Phd. in Programmer-lingo-phylosophy or just
go on wasting my time on earning the can of spam for the daily-bread.


cor

--
/*#include<rumor.h> Everything is relative.........even that */
/* If GNU/LINUX has no solution, you'v got the wrong problem */
/* Never install Slackware.........You might learn to use IT */
/* pa3...@amsat.org ICQ:1612519 http://clsnet.dynip.nl */

William Deakin

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
to
Cor Gest jr wrote:
> As in most cases, if not all, it is *that* state that pays the mortgage.
But what do you do on the weekends?

:)will

Xah

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
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Reini Urban (rur...@sbox.tu-graz.ac.at) 26 Jul 2000 11:11:38 GMT wrote:
> [postmodern words]...

> rationale:
> I see words taken from new fields and put into an old and closed
> context. This would not be harmful per se. The problem is that I don't
> understand the reason to use such words in this context. Is just the

> word that makes no sense or is the whole sentence?

> My guess -and that is why I said "postmodern"- that the author wants


> to hide the fact that he doesn't understand any meaning of our words or
> sentences, so he tooks "random" but interesting or may-fit words,
> applies them to our trash of sentences (in his view) to criticize our
> methods to communicate.

I hope this is honest. Though i doubt it is written without spices. Exactly
what you mean by: "that the author wants to hide the fact that he doesn't
understand any meaning of our words or sentences"? Which sentence or words
or idea do you suppose i didn't understand in Kent's post? Or, perhaps you
are referring to Kent's generic thought model or approach that i didn't
like?

> This is a interesting deconstructive method but
> unfortunately only interesting to folks who don't understand the
> comp.lang.lisp level of communication

Do you really suppose that i'm such a dumb ass? Pray-explain in detail. Make
a fool of me, or yourself. I'm eager to learn -- that you are a square.

> , and worse for me, completely non


> understandable from his point of view because I don't know the original

> context where he took these words from. The criticized words and
> sentences make perfect sense for me, and the irritations are
> non-constructive.

Perhaps i failed in communication to Pitman-alikes. If you just ask, i'd be
happy to explain any sentence or intentions or origins or allegories or
allusions or recondite wisdom you couldn't grasp. If you ask nicely, i'd be
happy to re-write my post (you pick) in a completely flat, no highbrow
words, down-to-earth, no figures of speech, dry, 100% content 0% dressing,
symbolic-logic manner.

The modern world is full pitiful foolscap wearers in uniform.

PS while trying to find the name for the square cap worn by Ph.D.s, i found
this hilarious essay:
http://www.princeton.edu/~ekowalsk/phd.html

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://www.xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


Suchandra Thapa

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
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Shiv <sh...@balrog.ece.ucsb.edu> wrote:
>So before shooting all the children of Lisp (after all that is what
>ML, Haskell, Clean, etc. are) it might be worth your effort to take a
>closer look. If you want to take a look at only one, may I suggest
>Clean? As somebody else already mentioned, these languages really
>emphasize strong typing with type inferencing as one of their strong
>points besides functional style and/or laziness. They also have some
>neat features like list and array comprehensions. Of course, many of
>these features could possibly be added to CL via macros and
>stuff. Have fun!!


I'm not sure if Clean if the best language to get into. The biggest
problem with clean is that the source code to the compiler isn't available
so if the binaries provided don't work for you, you're out of luck. Plus
there is only one implementation of Clean available. Because of this
I think ML (for example Ocaml) or Haskell are probably better choices.


--
------------------------------------------------------------------

Suchandra S. Thapa
s-t...@uchicago.edu

------------------------------------------------------------------

Xah

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
to
Reini Urban Rube,

On a second reading of your post, I cannot bear the extent of your moronism.

> [postmodern words]


> xah sentence #1:
> "it is unfortunate that i usually find your (newsgroup) writings to be
> antithesis of the logical."
>
> xah sentence #2:
> "(same goes for Peter Gabriel's Pattern of Software trash) I wonder if
> it's merely a manifestation of stylistic clash, or some fundamental
> world-view incongruity in us, or simply your writings don't shine."
>
> xah sentence #3:

> "this is a silly question. Do you think deity exist? Do you think they
> are sexy?"
>

> pm words in #1: "antithesis of the logical"
> pm words in #2: "Pattern of Software trash", "world-view incongruity"
> pm words in #3: deity, exist, sexy

By "antithesis of the logical", it means that Kent's writing style is very
literary. It's flow is very organic. That is, its meaning, expression, and
reasoning have the air of being very inexact, not deductive, curvy. His
posts in this thread are perfect examples: the logic does not connect (i.e.
"If most things in the world were state-free, I think people would reason
well about state-free things."), analogies are used from different
level/aspect ("taught a kid to climb stairs ..."), technical words are used
unfittingly in non-technical contexts. ("proper isomorphism")

> xah sentence #2:
> "(same goes for Peter Gabriel's Pattern of Software trash) I wonder if
> it's merely a manifestation of stylistic clash, or some fundamental
> world-view incongruity in us, or simply your writings don't shine."

It means, i felt the same way about Peter Gabriel's book _Patterns of
Software_, and that i think it is totally garbage. Now, because the world is
not an axiomatic universe, there must be some leeway given to things that's
not strictly scientific or logical. (in simpler words: we should not be
narrow minded.) Even though i felt that Kent's writings are very hard to
digest and not very artistic, i concede that maybe that's just because we
have different tastes that our style of writing is opposite ("stylistic
clash"), or that we grew-up differently such that our thoughts doesn't click
("world-view incongruity"). In that paragraph, i also showed conceit at the
end.

> xah sentence #3:


> "this is a silly question. Do you think deity exist? Do you think they
> are sexy?"

I used these questions to illustrate the silliness of Kent's question about
whether people think in imperative or functional modes. It is followed by
elaborate explanations and examples. "Does God Exist" is a central question
in classical Western philosophy of 18th century, debated by every dominant
philosophers (and church leaders). Such question are gradually dismissed by
scientific thinking in general. Many philosophers and in particular Bertrand
Russell has showed the meaninglessness of such a question. The "Do you think
they are sexy" is added as dressing, as any literary work cannot do without.

--

Dear Urban Rube, when you used the word "postmodern", i doubt you really
understood that word. To me, "postmodern" to you simply means literatures
you don't understand.

> A positivistic approach to postmodernism in computer languages:
> http://www.wall.org/~larry/pm.html

Positivistic??? What the fuck do you know about positivism? You fucking dolt
please: (1) Look up in a dictionary. m-w.com (2) Read up in an encyclopedia.
britannica.com. (3) Run fast with your head foremost toward a wall.

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://www.xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


Tim Bradshaw

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
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* Xah wrote:
> my American Heritage dictionary (1995) says:
> postmodern or post-modern adj. 1. Of or relating to art, architecture, or
> literature that reacts against earlier modernist principles, as by
> reintroducing traditional or classical elements of style or by carrying
> modernist styles or practices to extremes: ³the post-modern mode of tapering

> the tops of buildings² Jane Holtz Kay

Now we know the real answer to Duane's question from a while ago: we
were talking about bricks and mortar to avoid talking about
postmodernism.

--tim

Frank A. Adrian

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
to
"Xah" <x...@xahlee.org> wrote in message news:B5A460C1.D67F%x...@xahlee.org...

> It means, i felt the same way about Peter Gabriel's book _Patterns of
> Software_, and that i think it is totally garbage.

Odd. Peter Gabriel has not (as far as I know) written any books. He has
made several recordings (upwards of two dozen, according to my Library of
Congress search), both with Genesis (in it's early days) and as a solo act.
Many of them are quite listenable, many not. Choose carefully.

As for "Patterns of Software", I believe the name you are looking for is
"Richard" Gabriel. Now, given that you are too stupid to get the author's
name correct (having misattributed it incorrectly not once, but twice), why
should we believe - or care about - anything you have to say? To quote an
earlier article of yours:

"Do you really suppose that i'm such a dumb ass? Pray-explain in detail.
Make

a fool of me..."

So, see above.

faa

Xah

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Jul 26, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/26/00
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"Frank A. Adrian" <fad...@uswest.net> 26 Jul 2000 20:47:30 -0700 wrote:
> Odd. Peter Gabriel has not (as far as I know) written any books. He has
> made several recordings (upwards of two dozen, according to my Library of
> Congress search), both with Genesis (in it's early days) and as a solo act.
> Many of them are quite listenable, many not. Choose carefully.
>
> As for "Patterns of Software", I believe the name you are looking for is
> "Richard" Gabriel.

Peter -> Dick -> Richard, as you can see, it's all dicks & peters. I apology
for mixing little peckers. I feel sorry for the Gabriels.


Once i met a troll god. I asked him, "what the best way to troll?".

-- "pick spellings"

"but what if there's none?"

-- "Pick typos"

"yeah, but there is NONE."

-- "Pick syntax"

"ah, language..."

-- "Pick grammar"

"i seee, then con..."

-- "Pick names"

"but what about content?"

-- "No, it's nitpicking all the way".


> Now, given that you are too stupid to get the author's
> name correct (having misattributed it incorrectly not once, but twice), why
> should we believe - or care about - anything you have to say?

Don't come here and beg me for a lesson. Do what you will. I'll take $200
per hour, minimum of 5 hours. Send private email for an arrangement.

> To quote an
> earlier article of yours:
>
> "Do you really suppose that i'm such a dumb ass? Pray-explain in detail.
> Make a fool of me..."

You missed the important ending: "... or yourself. I'm eager to learn --


that you are a square."

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://www.xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


Espen Vestre

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Jul 27, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/27/00
to
Xah <x...@xahlee.org> writes:

> I would suggest that anyone who are interested in philosophy in general to
> follow Bertrand Russell's logical positivism school of thought, and ask not
> big-time metaphysical questions or lore but study logic & linguistics &
> mathematics: put your foot on solid ground.

Having worked, from a mathematical background, in the borderland of
lingustics, mathematics and logic, I must say you are exaggregating
the 'solidness' of those subjects. Even the most theoretical
linguistists are often engaged in 'theory-wars' which can be just as
silly as the 'programming language wars' you condemn. And even the
most rigid mathematics is only 'solid' as a game in its own right,
where you e.g. can choose to play with or without the rule 'Axiom of
Choice'...

And some, and not only those entering the field from psychology, are
working with so-called 'mental models'. This field (which I know
mainly through the book 'Mental Models' by Johnson-Laird) is quite
obsessed with trying to build models of how people 'really think'
(btw quite stateful models, at least in the case of Johnson-Laird).

--
(espen)

David Hanley

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Jul 27, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/27/00
to

The Glauber wrote:

> In article <3978CEFD...@ncgr.org>,
> David Hanley <d...@ncgr.org> wrote:
> >
> > As a short answer, i often use functional ideas without doing
> > pure functional programming--even in languages such
> > as java. This often helps me reason about complex code, as
> > I don't have to worry about shared objects getting mutated
> > by some way. Yes, this will run slower for some applications,
> > but that's where judicious mutation and extra care on
> > a specific path gets you 90% of the performance you could
> > achieve with a hairy version of the code which makes no
> > copies, but is much harder to understand.
>
> What do you mean by using functional ideas?
>
> I, for example, try to make methods or functions self-contained, try to
> avoid global variables, try to encapsulate state in classes. Is this
> what you're writing about?

Yes, basically. Having functions return new data instead of
modifying parameters Having methods be standalone instead of
working on complex object state, creating new objects instead
of modifying old ones, etc. This helps *me* reason about code
more easily and avoid complex bugs.


dave


Rob St. Amant

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Jul 27, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/27/00
to
Espen Vestre <espen@*do-not-spam-me*.vestre.net> writes:
> And some, and not only those entering the field from psychology, are
> working with so-called 'mental models'. This field (which I know
> mainly through the book 'Mental Models' by Johnson-Laird) is quite
> obsessed with trying to build models of how people 'really think'
> (btw quite stateful models, at least in the case of Johnson-Laird).

Researchers in human-computer interaction are still doing work on
mental models, but the really interesting work on model-building these
days is with systems like Soar and ACT-R. Newell's Unified Models of
Cognition and Anderson's Atomic Components of Thought are good
book-length introductions.

--
Rob St. Amant
Computer Science Department
North Carolina State University
http://www.csc.ncsu.edu/faculty/stamant/

Reini Urban

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Jul 27, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/27/00
to
Xah wrote:
>Reini Urban (rur...@sbox.tu-graz.ac.at) 26 Jul 2000 11:11:38 GMT wrote:
>> [postmodern words]...
>> rationale:
>> I see words taken from new fields and put into an old and closed
>> context. This would not be harmful per se. The problem is that I don't
>> understand the reason to use such words in this context. Is just the
>> word that makes no sense or is the whole sentence?
>
>> My guess -and that is why I said "postmodern"- that the author wants
>> to hide the fact that he doesn't understand any meaning of our words or
>> sentences, so he tooks "random" but interesting or may-fit words,
>> applies them to our trash of sentences (in his view) to criticize our
>> methods to communicate.
>
>I hope this is honest. Though i doubt it is written without spices. Exactly
>what you mean by: "that the author wants to hide the fact that he doesn't
>understand any meaning of our words or sentences"? Which sentence or words
>or idea do you suppose i didn't understand in Kent's post? Or, perhaps you
>are referring to Kent's generic thought model or approach that i didn't
>like?

you didn't like it, but most important you didn't understand any single
sentence, which is kind of weird to me because it is quite easy to
understand if you read some lisp literature. maybe if you will
understand you can better critize it.

>Perhaps i failed in communication to Pitman-alikes. If you just ask, i'd be
>happy to explain any sentence or intentions or origins or allegories or
>allusions or recondite wisdom you couldn't grasp. If you ask nicely, i'd be
>happy to re-write my post (you pick) in a completely flat, no highbrow
>words, down-to-earth, no figures of speech, dry, 100% content 0% dressing,
>symbolic-logic manner.

why not all the time?
it is better to improve the communication skills to be able to be
understood by others. especially in a social context.

>By "antithesis of the logical", it means that Kent's writing style is very
>literary. It's flow is very organic. That is, its meaning, expression, and
>reasoning have the air of being very inexact, not deductive, curvy.

my opinion on this is 180° (to use a Xah word here),
and i think of others as well, otherwise he wouldn't have been choosen
for the standardization editors job, which required exactly the opposite
attributes. pure nonsense you're are talking.

>His posts in this thread are perfect examples: the logic does not connect (i.e.
>"If most things in the world were state-free, I think people would reason
>well about state-free things."),

please have a look into SICP or books for pure functional languages.
then you will understand what we are talking about. for certain groups
"state" is the most important aspect, for other groups the worst,
again others love to have multiple aspects of states ("there's more than
one way to do it" => "there's more than one way to keep it").

reasoning unbound by state restrictions is a proper AI goal
("pure lambda calculus"), but reasoning with state helps also. (hence
"flavors" and "CLOS").

you can only joke when others understand the joke. british raise their
eyebrows when they didn't get the joke, you accuse.
--
C++ ARM: "C programmers think memory management is too important to be
left to the computer. Lisp programmers think memory management is too
important to be left to the user."

Reini Urban

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Jul 27, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/27/00
to
William Deakin wrote:
>Reini Urban wrote:
>> rationale:
>> I see words taken from new fields and put into an old and closed
>> context. This would not be harmful per se. The problem is that I don't
>> understand the reason to use such words in this context.

>Art, or could it be an AI language gigger bug?

indeed it's some kind of art.
besides the emotional overflow it's very interesting to me, because he
uses a lot of word-association tricks which works on a lower level.
in fact it is a very positive quality to me, if I would have understood
the context and if it would have been less emotional. (but polemic is
always emotional to some extent so it's not that important.)

>>Is just the word that makes no sense or is the whole sentence?

>(Wishing he was not going to open up a whole Witgensitian can of worms
>:) My take on this is that meaning of words in a sentence depends on the
>the other words in the sentence and the context in which the sentence is
>used. In this case the word can never `make sense' except in the context
>of the sentence. Following on from this, to talk about a word making
>sense or not is senseless -- that is it neither makes sense or not. But
>hey ho, back to sendmail configuration.

indeed the problem is the context, and his context might be deeper than
just a sentence, it might be a far away branch in cyc.

but a minor contra:
words per se do make sense. cyc's bricks are words, not sentences.
context may only change the meaning. associations as well.
BTW: associations by other means of verbal communication is the worst
problem in understanding. cyc's worst problem, the historical and
cultural background.

>Anyway, thanks for your the explaination of postmodernism,

beware that is only a *very small* aspect (0.1%) of postmodernism I care
about. in fact I work in a studio with 20 hardcore architectural
postmodernists and i'm the only hardcore modernist, so there would be
plenty of things to say. but only in the architectural, literature and
movie context and not in programming languages.
I don't like meta-talking about perl as postmodernistic language, but I
love postmodern literature and movies, and dislike most of the
architectural postmodernism, my primary field of interest. I do honor
some of its critical aspects, but the positive ones not at all.

maybe postmodernism in a lisp or AI context could be
multiple interpretations of state. ("a quantum-lisp", amb)

More possible postmodernistic features of a language:
Macros, Nondeterministic Computing, "Metalinguistic Abstraction"
(chapter 4 from SICP), Programs that write programs,
and the relativistic and loose approach to time and concurrency.
--
Nur der kleine Geist hält Ordnung, das Genie beherrscht das Chaos.

Sashank Varma

unread,
Jul 27, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/27/00
to
In article <3980ab02.106576729@news>, rur...@sbox.tu-graz.ac.at wrote:

>I don't like meta-talking about perl as postmodernistic language, but I
>love postmodern literature and movies

i feel the same. there's a recent collection, a norton anthology
of "postmodern fiction," that's simply amazing. i was turned on
to it because it contains selections by some of my favorite
authors, including william gibson ("neuromancer") and neal
stephenson ("snow crash"). i didn't know that i had a
postmodern aesthetic...

>maybe postmodernism in a lisp or AI context could be
>multiple interpretations of state. ("a quantum-lisp", amb)

i've seen a few books in the local university library with titles
like "a postomdern critique of ai." the arguments seemed pretty
old-hat, actually, a combination of dryefus's phenomenological
points (formal ai fails to take the fluidity of the body, the
substrate of cognition, into account) and the anthropological
critique (formal ai is person-centered and neglects the ways in
which culture shapes our minds). i can hunt up specific
references if you're interested.

>More possible postmodernistic features of a language:
>Macros, Nondeterministic Computing, "Metalinguistic Abstraction"
>(chapter 4 from SICP), Programs that write programs,

i assume you mean this is as a joke. this is good ol' fashion
mathematics/logic/computation theory. postmodernists, in my
experience, are scientific and mathematical morons, and have
no appreciation of the aesthetic virtues of these (OUR)
enterprises.

it is incorrect to say these are postmodern elements (in my
opinion). rather, explain them to your postmodern friends;
educate them as to what science and math and engineering and
such are really about. broaden their views beyond postmodernism.

you'll never get it through their thick (but soft) skulls,
though.

sashank

(who just finished reading a book by a postmodern writer
comparing the positions of the the anthropological linguist
Whorf and the russian critic Bakhtin. many useful points,
many more slanderous, snide, and generally offensive
pejoratives about science. made me feel like starting a
"fight club.")

Xah

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Jul 27, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/27/00
to
Reini Urban Rube listen:

When quality lampoon are read by rubes, it arose instinctive ire in them.
Although they do not apprehend the significance, but can fully sense it's
attacking nature. In newsgroups, such rubes would reply with a vengeance,
showing that their majesty, could see nothing but insults.

Xah wrote:
>> Or, perhaps you
>> are referring to Kent's generic thought model or approach that i didn't
>> like?

Rube (27 Jul 2000 21:29:10 GMT) wrote:
> you didn't like it, but most important you didn't understand any single
> sentence, which is kind of weird to me because it is quite easy to
> understand if you read some lisp literature. maybe if you will
> understand you can better critize it.

This paragraph consists of dramatic accusations without backup. Instead, you
should point out which lisp literature you have in mind that i haven't read.
Point out the general ideas that i'm missing in your mind. Point out and
name the quantity of quality computer language literatures really do talk
about "think models". Make certain that any intelligent reader after reading
your paragraph will say: "ah, maybe Xah is just a fancy writer but know
little about the science and art of programing languages".

Xah wrote:
>> ...If you ask nicely, i'd be


>> happy to re-write my post (you pick) in a completely flat, no highbrow
>> words, down-to-earth, no figures of speech, dry, 100% content 0% dressing,
>> symbolic-logic manner.

Rube wrote:
> why not all the time?
> it is better to improve the communication skills to be able to be
> understood by others. especially in a social context.

Your lack of erudition is not to be the standard for society.
Obviously, you are not at the level that my writings are intended for.

Xah wrote:
>> By "antithesis of the logical", it means that Kent's writing style is very
>> literary. It's flow is very organic. That is, its meaning, expression, and
>> reasoning have the air of being very inexact, not deductive, curvy.

Rube wrote:
> my opinion on this is 180° (to use a Xah word here),
> and i think of others as well, otherwise he wouldn't have been choosen
> for the standardization editors job, which required exactly the opposite
> attributes. pure nonsense you're are talking.

Countless high positions are held by dummies throughout history. The point
here, is that the positions Kent has held cannot be used to quench my attack
of his posts in this thread.

Contrariwise, there are geniuses like Xah who have not held any high
positions in history. Unless critique are off the chart, you should not use
credentials to quell it.

Xah wrote:
>> His posts in this thread are perfect examples: the logic does not connect
>> (i.e.
>> "If most things in the world were state-free, I think people would reason
>> well about state-free things."),

Rube wrote:
> please have a look into SICP or books for pure functional languages.
> then you will understand what we are talking about.

Are you certain that i have not read much books related to functional
languages? (Btw, WHAT the fuck is SICP? Shouldn't you spell things out when
dealing with someone who haven't read much lisp literature?)

I'm beginning to think, that you are such a big mouthing, credential wearing
dolt who are not thorough in endeavors but just got pissed off and jumped on
by not able to understand my writings. I'm taking pains here to make sure
you understand what i'm saying in this post.

Rube wrote:
> for certain groups
> "state" is the most important aspect, for other groups the worst,
> again others love to have multiple aspects of states ("there's more than
> one way to do it" => "there's more than one way to keep it").
>
> reasoning unbound by state restrictions is a proper AI goal
> ("pure lambda calculus"), but reasoning with state helps also. (hence
> "flavors" and "CLOS").

I assume you don't fucking understand my posts in this thread. Allow me to
make it plain. There are two major points i criticized:

(1) Kent's writing style in this thread. I pointed out that his style is
either of low quality or distasteful to me. (i have yet to be educated from
anyone here about how his style is a "valid" style. I'm here to learn too.
Quid Pro Quo.)

(2) Kent's penchant to write (newsgroup posts) about amorphous pursuits in
computer science. In particular, I criticized Kent's opinion that human
thinks in imperative mode more than functional. I suggest that such are lame
research topics, and people who are concerned with computer languages should
instead work on mathematical problems. (say, those research level
"exercises" in Knuth's books.)

The only reply that has some merit so far, is Espen Vestre's about how the
sciences i'm enamored with isn't itself without fuzziness.

> you can only joke when others understand the joke. british raise their
> eyebrows when they didn't get the joke, you accuse.

What a joke. The only one who's joking is you. (yes, really.)

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://www.xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


Xah

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Jul 27, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/27/00
to
Xah wrote:
>> I would suggest that anyone who are interested in philosophy in general to
>> follow Bertrand Russell's logical positivism school of thought, and ask not
>> big-time metaphysical questions or lore but study logic & linguistics &
>> mathematics: put your foot on solid ground.

Espen Vestre (27 Jul 2000 10:24:15 +0200) wrote


> Having worked, from a mathematical background, in the borderland of
> lingustics, mathematics and logic, I must say you are exaggregating
> the 'solidness' of those subjects. Even the most theoretical
> linguistists are often engaged in 'theory-wars' which can be just as
> silly as the 'programming language wars' you condemn. And even the
> most rigid mathematics is only 'solid' as a game in its own right,
> where you e.g. can choose to play with or without the rule 'Axiom of
> Choice'...

(Finally somebody contributes something of value.)

I agree with your sentiments on the whole. (to lurkers: "condemning silly
programing language wars" was not my point.)

> And some, and not only those entering the field from psychology, are
> working with so-called 'mental models'. This field (which I know
> mainly through the book 'Mental Models' by Johnson-Laird) is quite
> obsessed with trying to build models of how people 'really think'
> (btw quite stateful models, at least in the case of Johnson-Laird).

(finally i'm getting something in return.)

A quick search found Johnson Laird's home page:
http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~phil/

i haven't read the whole page, but there it is this glaring error:
>Notice, however, that if the first assertion is false
> then there is a king in the hand, but not an ace.

This is not true. Usually statements (or theorems (tech term)) in logic (or
daily life) are not to be taken as excluded-middle. e.g. "imperative
language sucks" is not equivalent to "non imperative language doesn't suck".

Note that:
> Philip N. Johnson-Laird
>
> Stuart Professor of Psychology

Let me supply a bit background info:
In the minds of logicians and mathematicians, professors of psychology are
to be ridiculed upon.

Thanks Espen Vestre for contributing your experiences and opinions of value.


PS:
i'm not here to jostle among contemporary bigwigs. I'm here, to educate and
guide contemporary bigwigs. Bigwigs please take note, and little people get
fucking out of my way.

In the history of science, lots of donkey fashions are dead. Mind models ~=
donkey fashion.

When i see an Archimedes, a Gauss, an Euler, an Einstein, a Russell, a
Godel, ... diffidence i display, inferiority i admit.

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://www.xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


Espen Vestre

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Jul 28, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/28/00
to
Xah <x...@xahlee.org> writes:

> > Stuart Professor of Psychology
>
> Let me supply a bit background info:
> In the minds of logicians and mathematicians, professors of psychology are
> to be ridiculed upon.

Well, it was a professor of mathematics that recommended this book to me...

--
(espen)

William Deakin

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Jul 28, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/28/00
to
Reini Urban wrote:
> but a minor contra:
> words per se do make sense. cyc's bricks are words, not sentences.
> context may only change the meaning. associations as well.
Meaning without sense or sense without meaning. Hmmm, an interesting
thought. :)

> BTW: associations by other means of verbal communication is the worst
> problem in understanding. cyc's worst problem, the historical and
> cultural background.

Yup. There's a Wittgenstein story here somewhere.

>* will wrote:
>>Anyway, thanks for your the explaination of postmodernism,
> beware that is only a *very small* aspect (0.1%) of postmodernism I care
> about.

Cheers. Warning noted.

:)w

Sashank Varma

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Jul 28, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/28/00
to
In article <n7yog3i...@panix3.panix.com>, r...@panix.com wrote:
>I doubt that a good PoMo would care to
>learn ``rationalist nonsense'' such as science, math and engineering.

i agree. that's why i objected to:

In article <3980ab02.106576729@news>, rur...@sbox.tu-graz.ac.at wrote:
>More possible postmodernistic features of a language:
>Macros, Nondeterministic Computing, "Metalinguistic Abstraction"
>(chapter 4 from SICP), Programs that write programs,

pomos can't consistently pick and choose the "neat" aspects of the
rationalist enterprise while simultaneously dismissing it all as
"nonsense". which suggests a flaw in their orthodoxy/dogma.

sashank

N. Going Zax

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Jul 28, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/28/00
to
On Fri, 28 Jul 2000 09:38:07 -0500, sas...@vuse.vanderbilt.edu
(Sashank Varma) wrote:
[snip]

>>
>>pomos can't consistently pick and choose the "neat" aspects of the
>>rationalist enterprise while simultaneously dismissing it all as
>>"nonsense". which suggests a flaw in their orthodoxy/dogma.
>>
>>sashank

This is why the entire "PostModern movement" seems to me to be much
more about Style than Substance.


--

Regards,
N. Going Zax, Raconteur

"...Not a inch to the West,
Not a inch to the East..."


Immanuel Litzroth

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Jul 28, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/28/00
to

>i haven't read the whole page, but there it is this glaring error:
>>Notice, however, that if the first assertion is false
>> then there is a king in the hand, but not an ace.
>
>This is not true. Usually statements (or theorems (tech term)) in logic
>(or daily life) are not to be taken as excluded-middle. e.g. "imperative
>language sucks" is not equivalent to "non imperative language doesn't
>suck".
>
Actually it is true.
You can only say A->B is false if you have A and (not B). Since we are
dealing with a particular hand making a false statement requires you
prove that by showing the hand does indeed have a king but not an ace.
Immanuel

Xah

unread,
Jul 29, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/29/00
to
[http://www.cogsci.princeton.edu/~phil/] says:
>>> Notice, however, that if the first assertion is false
>>> then there is a king in the hand, but not an ace.

Xah wrote:
>>This is not true. Usually statements (or theorems (tech term)) in logic
>>(or daily life) are not to be taken as excluded-middle. e.g. "imperative
>>language sucks" is not equivalent to "non imperative language doesn't
>>suck".

Immanuel...@hotmail.com (Immanuel Litzroth) wrote:
> Actually it is true.
> You can only say A->B is false if you have A and (not B). Since we are
> dealing with a particular hand making a false statement requires you
> prove that by showing the hand does indeed have a king but not an ace.

Right you are that Mistake i made. Trap it is; psychologists they being.

However, your reasoning is _incorrect_. If rubes are stricken, obliged i'm
to enlighten.

PS my use of "excluded-middle" was mistaken & misleading. Same reason how
Immanuel fell.

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://www.xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


Tim Bradshaw

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Jul 29, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/29/00
to
* Xah wrote:
> No, i don't care how people think, but how they should think according to
> knowledge. I understand the iffiness of purpose of life, i understand that
> theory needs corrections, but it is science & theories that we should base
> our argument or decisions on, not metaphysics, culture, fad, or what you or
> me think "how people thinks".

I think that the great lesson that that the history of Lisp can teach
is that most people do not make their decisions in any kind of
rational way. Lisp (and related languages) have *obviously* been a
rationally better choice in many places, at many times. ITS was
probably a rationally better system than Unix at the time, a lisp
machine was almost certainly a rationally better system than a Unix
workstation at the time.

But Lisp has not won. So *something* is going on here that is not
rational, but is to do with `metaphysics, culture, fad, or what you or
me think "how people thinks"'. And we need to understand what this
something is if either we want Lisp to win, or (in my case) we want
merely to ensure that a niche in which we can make a decent living
continues to exist.

There's an honourable tradition within the Lisp community of people
trying to understand and explain what this non-rational stuff is --
Dick Gabriel's famous paper probably being the best known example.
Since most Lisp people are extremely rationalist it's often fairly
hard for them, so they sometimes struggle to do it, or in many cases
just refuse to admit there is a problem. But if you want to hack Lisp
you need at least to make sure that someone is going to be willing to
pay you to do this in the reasonably long term: becoming a competent
Lisp programmer involves investing a reasonable percentage of your
life (as does becoming competent in anything else), so you want to be
sure you aren't wasting that, as you can't get it back when it's gone.
And it turns out that rational arguments (`lisp is just better,
because ...!') don't help you much: you need to understand enough
about people to tell them the right story.

Kent has been through more Lisp history than almost any other regular
poster to this group: if anyone understands that rationality gets you
nowhere it's him. Perhaps you should listen to him: he has
interesting things to say. Perhaps he isn't right, but at least he
understands there is a problem here to which rational argument is not
the answer.

--tim

Reini Urban

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Jul 29, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/29/00
to
Sashank Varma wrote:
>In article <3980ab02.106576729@news>, rur...@sbox.tu-graz.ac.at wrote:
>>More possible postmodernistic features of a language:
>>Macros, Nondeterministic Computing, "Metalinguistic Abstraction"
>>(chapter 4 from SICP), Programs that write programs,
>
>i assume you mean this is as a joke. this is good ol' fashion
>mathematics/logic/computation theory. postmodernists, in my
>experience, are scientific and mathematical morons, and have
>no appreciation of the aesthetic virtues of these (OUR)
>enterprises.
>
>it is incorrect to say these are postmodern elements (in my
>opinion). rather, explain them to your postmodern friends;
>educate them as to what science and math and engineering and
>such are really about. broaden their views beyond postmodernism.

Well, I agree with all of you here.

But my postmodern friends are also right to some extent.
This can be only true if I subsume postmodernism as critical branch of
modernism. (which I do).
In this regard I dare to say that say amb, call/cc or hairy lambda usage
is postmodernistic, though we know that is pure rationalism, only not
understood by pomo's and some others.
Typical AI tricks -or in my field an oblique koolhaas pillar- might go
as valid critic from pomos, if positive or negative.


The point is not that they don't understand it, some even do, the point
is that they don't want to accept it for philosophical and more mostly
theological or ethical reasons. The pomo moron's (or so-called "sokol
attractors") are only those who don't want to admit it.
<polemic>
It's mostly an unconscious or unwritten fear of over-rationalism which
leads to desasters and hinders sex, fun and pulp-fiction.
</polemic>

Another argument:
Pomos say rationalism is inhuman. A strong pomo motivation is humanism.
Software cannot be human, only AI to some extent. So AI features might
be more postmodern than procedural ones.

Larry Wall's pomo statement has a similar motivation.
There must be many ways to reach the goal. The more the better.
Individualism as statement. This way you can overcome the typical "how
.. best?" perl questions.
There's no best way. There's no ultimate goal, the process makes a
program, not the in/output or the algorithm. (which is also a typical
architectural argument, esp. in city planning.)

And they are right. The point is that this is always used against
rationalism or modernism, but rationalism never claims to solve that
absolute.
A typical communication problem based on strong emotions.
--
Reini

Xah

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Jul 29, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/29/00
to
Dear Tim Bradshaw & readers,

Thank you Tim for answering to the heart of my thread.

Tim Bradshaw <t...@cley.com> (29 Jul 2000 12:36:39 +0100) wrote:
>
> I think that the great lesson that that the history of Lisp can teach
> is that most people do not make their decisions in any kind of
> rational way. Lisp (and related languages) have *obviously* been a
> rationally better choice in many places, at many times. ITS was
> probably a rationally better system than Unix at the time, a lisp
> machine was almost certainly a rationally better system than a Unix
> workstation at the time.
>
> But Lisp has not won. So *something* is going on here that is not
> rational, but is to do with `metaphysics, culture, fad, or what you or
> me think "how people thinks"'. And we need to understand what this
> something is if either we want Lisp to win, or (in my case) we want
> merely to ensure that a niche in which we can make a decent living
> continues to exist.
>

>...

I know precisely your position, and it is exactly that i'm trying to topple.

If people are sane, if the world keeps moving forward, if we intellectuals
keep fulfilling our duty of education, then good things will spread, and
happiness will rain on earth.

As i said, the quality of _a technology_ has nothing to do with people. Keep
the education going, and soon good languages like lisp WILL be well employed
without artificial selling. However, if you guys begin to falter, begin to
cater to rubes, begin to muddy education with mind-theories, begin to drag
language with human qualities, begin to fight your popularity vanity with
all sort of tactics, then quality languages will never rightfully benefit
mankind.

As i said, education is the key. Teach lamba calculus. Teach symbolic logic.
Teach math. And, teach everything else in general. When the common crowd all
speaks lamba calculus in grade school, it's hard to imagine that they'll
touch the eternally moronic unix C->C++->Java sh->csh->awk->perl fucking
fuck all fucked up FUCK shit.

You think it is unlikely that kindergartener will acquire advanced math? If
so, that's because you lack vision. If you look through history, you'll see
that education level grows, educated people grow, and society and attitude
change. Today's education level in developed countries are hardly
foreseeable in the past. Keep in mind that knowledge and technology tends to
grow in an "exponential" rate too. All these are not taking account of
miraculous forthcoming technologies that sprang from DNA research &
nanotechnologies & AI etc. Who knows what cloning tech will do to society?
What will happen with genetic food and genetic engineered people? What will
happen with the arrival of thinking machines? What will happen when i can
poke a hole in your head and plug in a neuro-digital interface? If you think
all these are fiction, then you need to pay close attention to news. You
could not tell what's coming. We'll see radical changes in our lifetime.

If i may put on the hat of an observer, i believe that on the whole our
century is steadily progressing. In very large part this is due to the
internet: a grassroots massive supply and uncontrolled flow of information,
the hotbed of knowledge. With regards to computing, the fact that
exponential hardware speed growth has significant ramifications. In
particular, this means an unstoppable boom of high level languages like
lisp, and impinging death of lowly languages like C. Jump for joy or not,
high level languages is not only here to stay, but will swipe low level
languages to the niches in the coming decade. In your next blink of an eye,
you might recall that C once was ubiquitous. (fucking asinine Dick Gabriel
forebode that C will be the last language!)

--

There are too many reasons that good technologies are not necessarily
popular. Such a question in itself is fairly stupid. The study of outcome of
things in a social environment is called economics. Economics can be likened
to fluid dynamics: there are many forces involved, with extreme complexity.
To think that you can predict how a leaf ends up in an eddy is preposterous.

Most people find the question intriguing. If you force them to explain,
they'd murmur that they think good technology should win because it's good.
Implicitly, this means that they think that the product quality is the only
factor in social outcome. In their collective unthoughtfulness, the factors
of economics are reduced to one. In this light, the level of absurdity can
be easily seen.

(the next question to ask is why such overwhelming lore, and the answer to
that is not simple, but every common sense should subject to scientific
investigation, at leisure.)

Be sane, be kind, be rational, and be persistent, and good things will take
it's course. Stray from truth or science, then you're paving obstacles.

Was it H. G. Wells who said "Human history becomes more and more
a race between education and catastrophe."?

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://www.xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


Duane Rettig

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Jul 29, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/29/00
to
Tim Bradshaw <t...@cley.com> writes:

> But Lisp has not won. So *something* is going on here that is not
> rational, but is to do with `metaphysics, culture, fad, or what you or
> me think "how people thinks"'. And we need to understand what this
> something is if either we want Lisp to win, or (in my case) we want
> merely to ensure that a niche in which we can make a decent living
> continues to exist.

But to say "Lisp has not won" is misleading; it invokes in most
people's minds either the dichotomy "win or lose", in which case
the statement is saying that Lisp has lost, or at least the trichotomy
"win, lose, or draw", which is somewhat less harsh, but a draw is also
not such a great performance, either.

There is a third possibility: "The game's not over yet". There are
several conclusions that you could draw from this possibility, as
well, "Lisp has not won, yet, but will eventually", or "The game will
never end".

My own favorite spin on this is that every language which "wins" eventually
also loses, since winning is always a fad thing anyway. Lisp has already
won (early '80s) and lost (early 90s), but is on the comeback trail, and
has learned a lot about how to play the game without needing to win.

Finally, Lisp will perservere, as it has always done through both the
winning and losing phases.

--
Duane Rettig Franz Inc. http://www.franz.com/ (www)
1995 University Ave Suite 275 Berkeley, CA 94704
Phone: (510) 548-3600; FAX: (510) 548-8253 du...@Franz.COM (internet)

Duane Rettig

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Jul 29, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/29/00
to
Tim Bradshaw <t...@cley.com> writes:

> I think that the great lesson that that the history of Lisp can teach
> is that most people do not make their decisions in any kind of
> rational way. Lisp (and related languages) have *obviously* been a
> rationally better choice in many places, at many times. ITS was
> probably a rationally better system than Unix at the time, a lisp
> machine was almost certainly a rationally better system than a Unix
> workstation at the time.

Rationality, like many other attributes, can be thought of on a local
or a global level. People usually think rationally, but in order to
understand what that rationale is, you must place yourself into their
frame of reference and locality (including the locality of time). As
we converse in c.l.l. our frame of reference is much more global, and
in some cases time has passed, so we see much more than we or others
did at specific points and specific situations before. So these
locally rational decisions made seem irrational to us. For those people
who are currently making irrational decisions, we must expand their frame
of reference before they will synthesize a new rationale. This is
sometimes hard to do, because as humans we don't tend to think our own
frame-of-reference is limited and can thus be expanded, especially when
another human tells us he knows what that expansion is.

Robert Monfera

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Jul 29, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/29/00
to
Xah wrote:

> Let me supply a bit background info:
> In the minds of logicians and mathematicians, professors of
> psychology are to be ridiculed upon.

Look, Ma - mathematicians and professors of psychology are not disjoint
groups!

Go with your cloddish bits of background "info" somewhere else.

Robert

Xah

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Jul 29, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/29/00
to
Robert Monfera <mon...@fisec.com> (29 Jul 2000 18:36:13 GMT) wrote:
> Look, Ma - mathematicians and professors of psychology are not disjoint
> groups!


Rob Mafia, you lack humor AND sense. Spare us of your logic of disjoint
groups.

> Go with your cloddish bits of background "info" somewhere else.

Stick your tongue to lisp innards. Spare me of your blare.

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://www.xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


thi

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Jul 30, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/30/00
to
Xah <x...@xahlee.org> writes:

> As i said, education is the key. Teach lamba calculus. Teach symbolic logic.
> Teach math. And, teach everything else in general. When the common crowd all
> speaks lamba calculus in grade school, it's hard to imagine that they'll
> touch the eternally moronic unix C->C++->Java sh->csh->awk->perl fucking
> fuck all fucked up FUCK shit.

teaching people foo is insufficient. one must teach people to teach foo.
hence, divorcing from your immediate student requirement of understanding
the irrationality of people, is unwise.

thi


Fernando D. Mato Mira

unread,
Jul 30, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/30/00
to
Tim Bradshaw wrote:

> So *something* is going on here that is not
> rational, but is to do with `metaphysics, culture, fad, or what you or
> me think "how people thinks"'. And we need to understand what this
> something is

Too many stupid people out there?

http://www.systemlogic.net/agurusworld/

--
Fernando D. Mato Mira Phone : +41 (78) 778 FDMM
E-mail : matomira AT acm DOT org

Espen Vestre

unread,
Jul 31, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/31/00
to
Xah <x...@xahlee.org> writes:

> If i may put on the hat of an observer, i believe that on the whole our
> century is steadily progressing. In very large part this is due to the
> internet: a grassroots massive supply and uncontrolled flow of information,
> the hotbed of knowledge.

There's something, though, which really disturbs me: It seems to me
that in many of the richest countries of the world, the quality of the
school system is decaying. At least in Norway, where I live (and which
currently is supposed to have the highest internet user frequency of
the world), there may be an enormous growth in _users_ of high-tech,
but the number of those who understand some of the basics of the
technology seems to be be decreasing. Math intro courses to the
universities show depressing results, and students turn away from
classical university studies of both language and technology :-(

--
(espen)

Tim Bradshaw

unread,
Jul 31, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/31/00
to
* Duane Rettig wrote:
> But to say "Lisp has not won" is misleading; it invokes in most
> people's minds either the dichotomy "win or lose", in which case
> the statement is saying that Lisp has lost, or at least the trichotomy
> "win, lose, or draw", which is somewhat less harsh, but a draw is also
> not such a great performance, either.

Yes, I didn't really mean this like that, and I certainly don't think
lisp has `lost'! What I meant can probably be said better as `lisp
has not gained the market share which it deserves', but even this is
not really right.

Partly I think there is a clash here between the pure-academic
viewpoint (which is how I would characterise Xah's, perhaps wrongly)
and the more social / economic viewpoint which I and others have.

From the pure academic viewpoint market share is just irrelevant. I
mean, what does it matter if General Relativity has `market share'?
Either it's a good theory or it's not. What does it even mean for it
to *have* market share? Perhaps it means that a reasonable proportion
of physicists work in it? For GR this proportion has been pretty low
for most (all?) of the time since the theory was developed. Is that
relevant? No.

So the pure academic really needs to argue that Lisp is `just better',
perhaps because lambda calculus is `just better'. There are problems
you'd need to overcome with this argument, but I think they're
problems that have already been addressed in other fields -- clearly
the differential geometry (manifold / tensor) approach to GR is `just
better' than the explicit component one (even though, perhaps
analogously with Lisp, it requires more mathematical maturity to use).

But Lisp is a programming language, or family of languages -- it's
really worthless without reasonable current implementations, at least
I don't think it's interesting if Lisp survives merely as a
theoretical construct. And reasonable current implementations require
work by many people, which requires money and time. So I think you
absolutely have to take these social & economic issues into account.

--tim

(I don't think this article means I disagree with you, I'm just trying
to clarify my own thinking).


Tim Bradshaw

unread,
Jul 31, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/31/00
to
* Duane Rettig wrote:

> Rationality, like many other attributes, can be thought of on a local
> or a global level. People usually think rationally, but in order to
> understand what that rationale is, you must place yourself into their
> frame of reference and locality (including the locality of time).

I disagree with `usually'. Of course, if you take away enough
considerations -- often this means if you put a horizon on things of
about a week into the future -- then you can make almost anything look
rational. But I find it hard to think of someone who only looks a
week ahead as being rational in most cases.

--tim

Erik Naggum

unread,
Jul 31, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/31/00
to
* Tim Bradshaw <t...@cley.com>

| From the pure academic viewpoint market share is just irrelevant.

Not at all. The academic market consists of minds. Whether an idea
has sufficient "mind share" is substantial to its survival.

#:Erik
--
If this is not what you expected, please alter your expectations.

Espen Vestre

unread,
Jul 31, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/31/00
to
Paul Foley <myc...@actrix.gen.nz> writes:

> > There's something, though, which really disturbs me: It seems to me
> > that in many of the richest countries of the world, the quality of the
> > school system is decaying. At least in Norway, where I live (and which
>

> Every generation bemoan's the decay of (the educational system, the
> language, politics, family values, and whatever else was done better
> in their day). I'm sure it's not completely without justification,
> but we do seem to survive and grow.

You caught me there ;-) Actually, I was a bit general in stating that
the 'quality of the school system is decaying', I was basically worried
about the position of mathematics, which has never been very strong
in the norwegian school system, and which, according to friends who
teach introductory university courses, has never been weaker than now
(and this can be directly measured by simply counting the number of hours
spent learning math during 13 years at school, I think).
--
(espen)

Tim Bradshaw

unread,
Jul 31, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/31/00
to
* Erik Naggum wrote:

> Not at all. The academic market consists of minds. Whether an idea
> has sufficient "mind share" is substantial to its survival.

But not to its merit. In fact, my *definition* of `pure academic'
would be that market share / mind share does not matter but `merit' is
all.`Pure academic' might be the wrong term for it, but that's what
I'm trying to get at.

(There's also some platonic issue here -- does GR exist if no one
understands it any more? Since my whole point is that these
viewpoints are not at all relevant for Lisp or other programming
languages, where mind share is *absolutely* significant, I don't want
to worry about it...)

--tim

The Glauber

unread,
Jul 31, 2000, 3:00:00 AM7/31/00
to
In article <3981adbf....@newsreader.jvnc.net>,

n...@ngzax.com (N. Going Zax) wrote:
> On Fri, 28 Jul 2000 09:38:07 -0500, sas...@vuse.vanderbilt.edu
> (Sashank Varma) wrote:
> [snip]
> >>
> >>pomos can't consistently pick and choose the "neat" aspects of the
> >>rationalist enterprise while simultaneously dismissing it all as
> >>"nonsense". which suggests a flaw in their orthodoxy/dogma.
> >>
> >>sashank
>
> This is why the entire "PostModern movement" seems to me to be much
> more about Style than Substance.


You mean, the importance of having the right kind of black beret?

:-)


--
Glauber Ribeiro
thegl...@my-deja.com http://www.myvehiclehistoryreport.com
"Opinions stated are my own and not representative of Experian"


Sent via Deja.com http://www.deja.com/
Before you buy.

Paul Foley

unread,
Aug 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/1/00
to
On 31 Jul 2000 10:07:35 +0200, Espen Vestre wrote:

> There's something, though, which really disturbs me: It seems to me
> that in many of the richest countries of the world, the quality of the
> school system is decaying. At least in Norway, where I live (and which

Every generation bemoan's the decay of (the educational system, the
language, politics, family values, and whatever else was done better
in their day). I'm sure it's not completely without justification,
but we do seem to survive and grow.

It seems to be the current fashion to try to replace real teachers
with Internet access, though...this worries me somewhat.

> currently is supposed to have the highest internet user frequency of
> the world), there may be an enormous growth in _users_ of high-tech,

Perhaps there's a connection.

--
And ælc þara þe gehierð þas min word, and þa ne wyrcþ, se bið gelic þæm
dysigan menn...

(setq reply-to
(concatenate 'string "Paul Foley " "<mycroft" '(#\@) "actrix.gen.nz>"))

Robert Monfera

unread,
Aug 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/1/00
to
> Rob Mafia, you lack humor AND sense. Spare us of your logic
^^
One of you is more than enough.

> Xah

bless you :@)

Xah

unread,
Aug 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/1/00
to
Xah <x...@xahlee.org> wrote:
>> As i said, education is the key. Teach lamba calculus. Teach symbolic logic.
>> Teach math. And, teach everything else in general. When the common crowd all
>> speaks lamba calculus in grade school, it's hard to imagine that they'll
>> touch the eternally moronic unix C->C++->Java sh->csh->awk->perl fucking
>> fuck all fucked up FUCK shit.


thi <t...@netcom.com> (30 Jul 2000 07:39:09 -0700) wrote:
> teaching people foo is insufficient. one must teach people to teach foo.
> hence, divorcing from your immediate student requirement of understanding
> the irrationality of people, is unwise.

Replace the 'foo' in your first sentence with 'quality education', then you
might correctly interpret what i wrote before you, which may prevent you
from coming up with such wisecrack.

--

A while ago i was watching the Americanized version of the Japanese cartoon
"Pokemon, (the first movie)" on DVD, and watched the annotated version by
the director and another guy (producer, i think).

The commentators commented that the character Meowth (a cat) in the original
(Japanese) version takes on the persona of a philosopher, but in the
Americanized version it was edited to became a wisecracker for American
taste.

This got my brain engaged: "just what's the difference between philosopher
and a wisecracker?".

Their difference can be contrasted thus:
A philosopher is a wise man who have something to say, and is able to say it
eloquently. A wisecracker is a wise man short of a philosopher, who is only
able of making wisecracks at issues. The grave discourses of philosophers
can only be appreciated by the elite, but the shallow jests of wisecrackers
are easily appreciated by all who can sense questions but not consider
answers.

As an example, Xah is a philosopher, Thi is a wisecracker.

Pokemon here: http://www.animationartist.com/pokemon/

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


thi

unread,
Aug 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/1/00
to
Xah <x...@xahlee.org> writes:

> This got my brain engaged: "just what's the difference between philosopher
> and a wisecracker?".
>
> Their difference can be contrasted thus:
> A philosopher is a wise man who have something to say, and is able to say it
> eloquently. A wisecracker is a wise man short of a philosopher, who is only
> able of making wisecracks at issues. The grave discourses of philosophers
> can only be appreciated by the elite, but the shallow jests of wisecrackers
> are easily appreciated by all who can sense questions but not consider
> answers.
>
> As an example, Xah is a philosopher, Thi is a wisecracker.

in addition to shallow, it also quick. but no need to be original; here is a
fortune cookie for you: "time is an illusion, lunchtime doubly so."

thi

Harley Davis

unread,
Aug 1, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/1/00
to
"Tim Bradshaw" <t...@cley.com> wrote in message
news:ey3u2d6...@cley.com...

Consider the old maxim of "If you buy [Microsoft, IBM, current gorilla], you
won't get fired." Is it irrational to follow this maxim? Rationality can
really only be measured as the application of logic (or other
pseudo-rational techniques such as induction) to achieve a particular set of
objectives (or at least to maximize some, perhaps hazily defined, objective
function).

If *your* objective is to maximize Lisp's market share, you need to consider
rhetoric (= applied psychology) in your approach to the problem - and
calling people irrational for not choosing Lisp is not likely to make you
many friends outside of existing Lispers...

-- Harley

Tim Bradshaw

unread,
Aug 2, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/2/00
to
* Harley Davis wrote:
> Consider the old maxim of "If you buy [Microsoft, IBM, current gorilla], you
> won't get fired." Is it irrational to follow this maxim?

I don't think so. But, say, obsessing about using only free software
because it minimises up-front cost even if it cripples you with
maintenance costs later isn't rational. Likewise obsessing about
using only commercial products even when free ones are very well
supported.

> If *your* objective is to maximize Lisp's market share, you need to consider
> rhetoric (= applied psychology) in your approach to the problem

That was my point.

> - and
> calling people irrational for not choosing Lisp is not likely to make you
> many friends outside of existing Lispers...

But *my* objective is not solely to maximize Lisp's market share, I
also have one of being able to say what I think (:-).

--tim


Link Davis

unread,
Aug 2, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/2/00
to
>
> Is F.P. an idea that's still considered important? Is it important for
> Lisp programmers in "the real world"?

Yes. I depend on (or long for) it every day. I transform or append
projects I either inherit from previous non-FP writers, or from
myself... (which is often worst of all). Paul Graham, author of
"ANSI Common Lisp", enlightens us that "The cost of a mistake
is the time it takes to fix it." If you're young and/or engenious
you may not believe me, but it is amazing how much the mind
can forget about a program after a few months...MRIs...years...

Pardon the four ellipses, but that's the main point of my reply. Time.
I can't tell you about parallel processing, AI, or anything
else that speaks in terms $40 words. It simply takes
longer to read and understand a web of side-effects than
to review primary functions and those they depend on.

If you use FP for no other reason than longevity (of your code,
and perhaps your own life), then that is "real world" enough for me.


Robert Monfera

unread,
Aug 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/3/00
to
Harley Davis wrote:

> Consider the old maxim of "If you buy [Microsoft, IBM, current gorilla], you
> won't get fired."

I think it was "Nobody has ever been fired for buying IBM." - and I have
not heard it in relation to any company other than IBM. I would not be
surprised to hear that someone _was_ fired for buying Microsoft.

Robert

Erik Naggum

unread,
Aug 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/3/00
to
* Link Davis <link...@mindspring.com>

| It simply takes longer to read and understand a web of side-effects
| than to review primary functions and those they depend on.

Let's restate this as: It simply takes longer to read badly written
code than to read well-written code. From this obvious position, it
behooves the proponent of any paradigm to compare well-written code
in his favorite and his least favorite paradigms. I don't think I
have seen this yet from those who favor functional programming --
they always compare themselves to really bad side-effect programming
and win, hands down, just like any other programming style would.

Another obvious position is this: It simply takes longer to do what
you're not trained for or not good or don't like at than it takes to
do what you are trained for and good at and like. Those who compare
their own skills at their favorite and their least favorite ends of
the spectrum tend to forget this, too.

Kent M Pitman

unread,
Aug 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/3/00
to
Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.net> writes:

> * Link Davis <link...@mindspring.com>
> | It simply takes longer to read and understand a web of side-effects
> | than to review primary functions and those they depend on.
>
> Let's restate this as: It simply takes longer to read badly written
> code than to read well-written code.

I'd say it differently, of course, even though Xah doesn't like it.
It simply takes longer to read things that are expressed in a way that
is not how your brain is thinking about them. Any time you have to
marshall and unmarshall concepts to different representations, you lose.
This means that for some set of things, functional notation is to be
preferred and for some other things functional notation is not to be
preferred. Deepends a lot on the nature of the thing being modeled,
and how your brain wetware is already modeling it.

JMO. ... but didn't want anyone to think I'd given up on my position
just because Xah has decided my writing style is "invalid". ;-)

The fact that one can't measure for sure how your brain is modeling these
things doesn't mean it's not having an effect. It probably does mean there
is an interesting set of psychology experiments that could be constructed
to learn some things about brain representation.

But the notion that the "speed of understanding" by a human processor
is invariant under changes in brain representation, which seems to be
Xah's position, would be the most surprising kind of outcome of such
experiments and would have fascinating ramifications on the science of
data interchange among communicating distributed processors.

The Glauber

unread,
Aug 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/3/00
to
In article <31742868...@naggum.net>,

Erik Naggum <er...@naggum.net> wrote:
> * Link Davis <link...@mindspring.com>
> | It simply takes longer to read and understand a web of side-effects
> | than to review primary functions and those they depend on.
>
> Let's restate this as: It simply takes longer to read badly written
> code than to read well-written code. From this obvious position, it
> behooves the proponent of any paradigm to compare well-written code
> in his favorite and his least favorite paradigms. I don't think I
> have seen this yet from those who favor functional programming --
> they always compare themselves to really bad side-effect programming
> and win, hands down, just like any other programming style would.
[...]

In the cruel place known as "the real world", this usually translates
to "it's easier to understand code that i wrote than the code (written
by others) that i have to maintain.".

There's gotta be something better than this!

Lieven Marchand

unread,
Aug 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/3/00
to
Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> writes:

> The fact that one can't measure for sure how your brain is modeling these
> things doesn't mean it's not having an effect. It probably does mean there
> is an interesting set of psychology experiments that could be constructed
> to learn some things about brain representation.
>
> But the notion that the "speed of understanding" by a human processor
> is invariant under changes in brain representation, which seems to be
> Xah's position, would be the most surprising kind of outcome of such
> experiments and would have fascinating ramifications on the science of
> data interchange among communicating distributed processors.

I think De Groot's experiments with chess positions already proves
Xah's position invalid. Really good go players also seem to see a very
different board than I do. Even low ranking amateurs can replay from
memory the games they play against one another, because they are
remembered in terms of concepts, but they can't do this if they play
against a complete beginner since his moves generally don't make
sense.

--
Lieven Marchand <m...@bewoner.dma.be>
Lambda calculus - Call us a mad club

Kent M Pitman

unread,
Aug 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/3/00
to
Lieven Marchand <m...@bewoner.dma.be> writes:

> I think De Groot's experiments with chess positions already proves
> Xah's position invalid. Really good go players also seem to see a very
> different board than I do. Even low ranking amateurs can replay from
> memory the games they play against one another, because they are
> remembered in terms of concepts, but they can't do this if they play
> against a complete beginner since his moves generally don't make
> sense.

One of my favorite experiments with the importance of understanding
brain representation have to do with recognizing rotated objects. The
subject is shown an object of complex shape and another which purports
to be the same object rotated and is asked whether it's the same
object. You might think they'd construct an abstract wiring diagram
or correspondence tree, but they mostly don't says the experimental
data. Rather, they rotate the object in their head, taking time
proportional to the amount of rotation. The really fun part is that
somewhere down toward 180 degrees rotation--where the picture is
nearly upside down--they sometimes rotate the wrong way so you get a
split in the experimental data where some people rotate it the "right"
way and some people backwards.

Another is an experiment that shows that people do very badly at the
following game: you show people cards with numbers on one side and
letters on another. Then you lay down one card with an odd number up,
one with an even, one with a vowel, and one with a consonant. Then
you ask, "how many cards must I turn over in order to validate the
claim that on the back of every odd number is a vowel?" People are
awful at this, and worse if you ask them which card. But there are
isomorphic experiments you can do with more familiar objects like
letters that are either addressed or not and either stamped or not, or
some such thing like that, where people get it right a lot more. The
hypothesis, supported by the experimental data, is that people have
better wetware for dealing with "familiar" circumstances than obscure
ones and that they just don't reason well about abstracts. What's
curious is that college educated people always rail against this
claim, claiming they can deal fine with abstracts. But I find myself
wondering if that's not because they think that an "abstract" is a
specific concrete situation and they in fact do have good wetware
(because of constantly confronting them in this or that class) for
dealing with them. But these are not abstract abstracts--they are
concrete abstracts. Heh... And "most" people don't have them because
most people just don't think meta most of the time.

I'm reciting the above two from memory after many years of not having
looked up the specific reference, so pardon any mental transcription
errors. But my point is that while Psychology is full of all kinds of
poorly designed experiments and broad overgeneralizations and mumbo
jumbo, there are also among the soup some people doing some good
science that teaches us interesting and often suprising things about
how people think. I can't help but believe that this information is key to
making good choices about how to design languages and computational systems
for use by people.

Sure, sometimes the computational effect of doing something in an
alien way and just absorbing the reprensentational shift as "part of
the price" is fine. And sometimes you trust a system so well that not
being able to debug the intermediate result is ok. But you can only
decide that if you know the cost of the computation, the reliability
of the algorithm/heuristic (and hence the likelihood you'll have to
debug the system in alien transform space), and the cost of the
representational shift at each end...

Xah

unread,
Aug 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/3/00
to
Dear friendly audiences,

Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> (3 Aug 2000 13:29:53 GMT) wrote:
> But the notion that the "speed of understanding" by a human processor
> is invariant under changes in brain representation, which seems to be
> Xah's position, would be the most surprising kind of outcome of such
> experiments and would have fascinating ramifications on the science of
> data interchange among communicating distributed processors.

"...seems to be Xah's position,..." ??

Kent, I'm so fucking disappointed. For all my lengthy posts in this thread,
you don't get to my points but cling to your thoughts about how human beings
this or that and hacking on something i never proposed.

Lieven Marchand <m...@bewoner.dma.be> (03 Aug 2000 18:27:36 +0200) wrote:
> I think De Groot's experiments with chess positions already proves

> Xah's position invalid. [... go players this and that]

I think if De Groot's experiments proved "my position" invalid, it must have
also proved that bookworms like you are invalid.

Quality thoughts and writings take energy. I'm getting very tired here
dealing with bigwigs who dodge & quibble & equivocate and ramify but
couldn't follow an argument. I wish somebody plaster this thread to the
moon, so that people can see the extreme stupidity of persons involved and
be ridiculed upon. No, i wish we can fast forward to the next 100 years, so
that we can actually see a statue of Xah pissing on these ph.D tag wearers
of 21st century.

Gee... i feel sooo... Sane! Doctor Naggum, let's go get a drink!

Xah
x...@xahlee.org
http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/more.html


Duane Rettig

unread,
Aug 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/3/00
to
Xah <x...@xahlee.org> writes:

> Dear friendly audiences,
>
> Kent M Pitman <pit...@world.std.com> (3 Aug 2000 13:29:53 GMT) wrote:
> > But the notion that the "speed of understanding" by a human processor
> > is invariant under changes in brain representation, which seems to be
> > Xah's position, would be the most surprising kind of outcome of such
> > experiments and would have fascinating ramifications on the science of
> > data interchange among communicating distributed processors.
>
> "...seems to be Xah's position,..." ??
>
> Kent, I'm so fucking disappointed. For all my lengthy posts in this thread,
> you don't get to my points but cling to your thoughts about how human beings
> this or that and hacking on something i never proposed.

"...all my lengthy posts..."

Perhaps this is precisely the problem. In the past, your posts have
been verbose and grand, using words and phrases that seldom come up in
most English-speaking conversations or writings.

When I first started seeing yur articles on comp.lang.lisp, I thought
you considered yourself a poet/philosopher, specifically one to whom
it might actually be an insult for others to understand fully or to
catch all of the potential double-meanings of the phrases. But as of
your last couple of articles, which have become more terse and direct
as your frustration with us has climbed, and especially the paragraph I
quoted above, which states your point so directly and with no chance
of misunderstanding, I now believe that you really want us to
understand you. If this is truly the case, then you would obtain
much of that desired understanding by realizing this: There is a middle
ground - just because you have a firm command of a language doesn't mean
you must use it all, especially if your purpose is to communicate.

--
Duane Rettig Franz Inc. http://www.franz.com/ (www)
1995 University Ave Suite 275 Berkeley, CA 94704
Phone: (510) 548-3600; FAX: (510) 548-8253 du...@Franz.COM (internet)

Frank A. Adrian

unread,
Aug 3, 2000, 3:00:00 AM8/3/00
to
"Xah" <x...@xahlee.org> wrote in message news:B5AF631B.DFD9%x...@xahlee.org...

>I'm getting very tired here
> dealing with bigwigs who dodge & quibble & equivocate and ramify but
> couldn't follow an argument.

So don't do it if it's such a burden. Are you some sort of masochist or
just insane?

>I wish somebody plaster this thread to the
> moon, so that people can see the extreme stupidity of persons involved and
> be ridiculed upon.

As it is, this is probably as close as you can get to "plastering this
thread to the moon" these days, unless you want to go to the expense of
press releases and PR firms. Feel free if you wish, though for one "getting
tired here" it might just prove to be more of a burden.

>No, i wish we can fast forward to the next 100 years, so
> that we can actually see a statue of Xah pissing on these ph.D tag wearers
> of 21st century.

My! That would be an interesting outcome. Good luck on your goal.
Although peeing on people seems to be a slightly odd ambition. And probably
not one to be immortalized in statuary, unless as part of a fountain.

faa

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