Err I know I am not a part of this conversation. In fact I only breezed over the original post. Your reply to it, does not address the substance. In fact, I wonder if english is your first language.
> "even guy steele, the author of lisp standard came to realize the > crappiness of the language, so he had to create a new one - scheme"
> I don't know about you, but the above sentence sort of, maybe, kinda > suggests chronological order. Next time, you can remove the ambiguity > by defining what "the language" is.
I would assume "The language" refers to Lisp.
> "after AI acedemics refused to switch to scheme"
> Remind me again, who was forcing them to?
Does refusal require force?
> P.P.S. - Looking back at my reply, over half of it seems to be a junior > high-school level English lesson. If that isn't a good indication of a > troll, I don't know what is.
The majority of programmers can't read and write. His rant was one giant mess, but if you are concerned over form and not content, you have a worse problem.
"Vladimir S." <seda...@cpsc.ucalgary.ca> wrote in message
> "on a more serious note, you need to get your facts straight: i never > said that cltl1 was written before it was realized lisp was crap"
> "even guy steele, the author of lisp standard came to realize the > crappiness of the language, so he had to create a new one - scheme"
> I don't know about you, but the above sentence sort of, maybe, kinda > suggests chronological order. Next time, you can remove the ambiguity > by defining what "the language" is.
> "after AI acedemics refused to switch to scheme"
> Remind me again, who was forcing them to?
> "to the guy who suggested paragraph breaks - i will accept that as > constructive criticism. to the puke-stained twits who want capitalized > sentences - you may never understand it, but period '.' is generally > enough to denote full stop."
> With an attitude like that, it is no wonder you have trouble with > reading comprehension.
> "my original intent was to let out my feelings about dimwits who run > around advocating things they don't understand, regardless of their > cause."
> The irony is killing me.
> "if lisp is in fact none of those things, how do you think these > "rumors" got started?"
> See above.
> "peter norvig is into python now"
> Peter Norvig does what his managers tell him to do.
> "paul graham says lisp is "awkward" in On Lisp. he also mentions > feeling like on vacation in a dentist chair, when he was working on a > lisp project (see the article about hackers and painters) - not > exactly an expression of joy."
> Forgive my straightforwardness, but I wonder, have you ever worked as > a lawyer? Your propensity to take quotes out of context* and > misinterpret them is downright brilliant.
> "guy steele - well, we just discussed him."
> Yes, you certainly did.
> "lisp macros are nothing but c macros, only slower, with brackets > outside"
> So after reading all 300+ pages of Graham's book, the only word that > got through to you was "awkward"?
> "if you want to use lisp - fine, just don't shove it down the throats > of people who know better."
> Oh man, if only my manager would have listened when I told him that > about <insert hated language here>!
> * P.S. - Yeah, yeah, maybe I don't provide context with yours, but > troll-baiting letters can only be so long, you know?
> P.P.S. - Looking back at my reply, over half of it seems to be a junior > high-school level English lesson. If that isn't a good indication of a > troll, I don't know what is.
Sudsy> Christian Lynbech <christian.lynb...@ted.ericsson.se> wrote in Sudsy> message <news:ofof251qlx.fsf@situla.ted.dk.eu.ericsson.se>... >> >>>>> "Ian" == Ian Wild <i...@cfmu.eurocontrol.be> writes: >> Ian> You might also want to collect a few capital letters to use in Ian> your report. >> I think the report will be in all uppercase letters, he has used >> up all the lowercase ones. >> >> Long live the teletype experince. >> >> >> ------------------------+-------------------------------------------------- --- >> Christian Lynbech | christian #\@ defun #\. dk >> ------------------------+-------------------------------------------------- --- >> Hit the philistines three times over the head with the Elisp >> reference manual. - peto...@hal.com (Michael A. Petonic)
Sudsy> Since everyone else seems to be bashing the original poster, Sudsy> I'm going to come down on his side. I too have worked with Sudsy> people who seem eager to jump on the latest bandwagon without Sudsy> due diligence. It results in a significant waste of resources Sudsy> as someone has to spend the research time only to end up Sudsy> disproving the lofty claims. So spare me the talk of the Sudsy> "latest and greatest" thing and let me get back to generating Sudsy> industrial-strength solutions using tools and frameworks which Sudsy> will stick around for a few years at least. The stories I Sudsy> could relate...
Isn't the fact someone spends the time to investigate the claims the due diligance your saying is lacking? If it wasn't for someone pushing to try out the new things, would we ever progress at all? Many of the now industrial strength solutions were once new untested and often considered to be making lofty claims.
While I understand the original posters position to some extent, I think its a pity that he had already made up his mind about what his inestigation and report were going to say before he actually did any investigation. I first looked at lisp in the mid 80's - for a number of reasons, it did not suit what I was doing at the time. I'm now working on different problems and the language has progressed considerably in that time - where once I would not have considered lisp for a project, I now find its a contender.
In this industry its important to continually re-evaluate and investigate - its a domain which is far from static and one in which we gain greater understanding and knowledge at an astounding rate. What was true 5 years ago is not necessarily true now. For me, this rapid change and development is what makes it such an interesting area to work in.
Tim -- Tim Cross The e-mail address on this message is FALSE (obviously!). My real e-mail is to a company in Australia called rapttech and my login is tcross - if you really need to send mail, you should be able to work it out!
sca...@yahoo.com (scav50) wrote in message <news:e0a34273.0305132049.51a2dad9@posting.google.com>... > (the fact is that i'm the only one who has > actual real-world lisp experience) so now, instead of doing actual > work in java and c++, because of this local moron, i have to waste my > time on this.
what's the problem? you could have just CCed them with this post and you'd be done. they would either believe you or get someone else to do it who has not already made up their mind.
did you think hosting a flamewar would be a more effcient use of your time than doing Java and C++? come to think of it...
> so to all you slashdot-wielding and usenet-spamming lisp > evangelists i have to say this: before preaching something, learn the > fucking subject.
don't be silly. the more lisp they learn, the more they evengelize it.
> before you say that lisp is easy, try actually > learning it!
interactive, dynamically-typed, tons of built-in functions to let you have great fun right out of the box, the best OO model extant, free commercial trial packaes with nice IDEs... what's the hard part?
> look at lispers with 10-20 year experience who argue > about what a three-line snippet supposed and not supposed to do...
cut the FUD, you clown. how can they argue? they just plop the code into a nicely compliant CL and see what it does. when implementations disagree, there is a nice little ANSI spec they can turn to for a referee. if it's implementation dependent, it is not "supposed to do" anything.
any interesting language has obscure corners. the cool thing is that Lisp not only has a spec, but the spec identifies the obscure corners and tells you what is implementation dependent. if you are hardcore enough to get into these corners, the spec will guide you. and thx to KMP it is also a hyperspec.
> write a hygienic > "defmacro" replacement
you write one. I don't want one, and I do not know anyone who does. this is a straw man you intend to savage mercilessly for the life of this thread, in a desperate attempt to avoid talking about what it is like to use Lisp to get real work done. You remember that work you wanted to get done, don't you?
...and their program semantics includes *count* increasing by the number of times the macro argument appears in the macro-expansion? I think the real problem here is that management is asking /you/ for advice.
> even guy steele, the > author of lisp standard came to realize the crappiness of the > language, so he had to create a new one -
you mean Java? Please provide a citation on Steele, Lisp, and crappiness. Or stfu.
> paul graham, the celebrated author of lisp books, couldn't help > but call lisp "awkward" in On Lisp. is this convincing enough?
No, you lying sonuvabitch. But this (heavily snipped (you know how that works)) version of Chapter One (copied from http://www.paulgraham.com/onlisptext.html) is (convincing). Read just the > bits for the soundbites:
"The Extensible Language ========================== ... Fortunately, word has begun to spread that AI is not what Lisp is all about.
>> Recent advances in hardware and software have made Lisp
commercially viable
One of the most distinctive qualities of Lisp is the way it can be tailored to suit the program being written in it...
1.1 Design by Evolution Because Lisp gives you the freedom to define your own operators, you can mold it into just the language you need...
>> And if you're not sure yet what kind of program you're writing, >> it's a safe bet to write it in Lisp.
Whatever kind of program yours turns out to be, Lisp will, during the writing of it, have evolved into a language for writing that kind of program.
If you're not sure yet what kind of program you're writing? To some ears that sentence has an odd ring to it. It is in jarring contrast with a certain model of doing things wherein you (1) carefully plan what you're going to do, and then (2) do it. ... The plan-and-implement method may have been a good way of building dams or launching invasions, but experience has not shown it to be as good a way of writing programs. ...
It may be difficult to say why the old method fails, but that it does fail, anyone can see. When is software delivered on time? ... We can approach programming in a different way, if we have the right tools. ... The flexibility of Lisp has spawned a whole new style of programming. In Lisp, you can do much of your planning as you write the program.
Why wait for hindsight? As Montaigne found, nothing clarifies your ideas like trying to write them down. ... The ability to plan programs as you write them has two momentous consequences: programs take less time to write, because when you plan and write at the same time, you have a real program to focus your attention; and they turn out better, because the final design is always a product of evolution. ....
Lisp's versatility makes this kind of programming a practical alternative.
>> Indeed, the greatest danger of Lisp is that it may spoil you. >> Once you've used Lisp for a while, you may become so sensitive to the fit >> between language and application that you won't be able to go back to >> another language without always feeling that it doesn't give you quite >> the flexibility you need.
1.2 Programming Bottom-Up ... Bottom-up design is possible to a certain degree in languages other than Lisp. Whenever you see library functions, bottom-up design is happening. However, Lisp gives you much broader powers in this department, and augmenting the language plays a proportionately larger role in Lisp style—so much so that
>> Lisp is not just a different language, but a whole different way of >> programming....
1.3 EXTENSIBLE SOFTWARE ...The experience of Lisp programming suggests a more cheerful way to phrase this law: as the size of the group decreases, the productivity of individual programmers goes up. A small group wins, relatively speaking, simply because it's smaller. ...
The Lisp style of programming is one that has grown in importance as software has grown in complexity. ....
Lisp is an especially good language for writing extensible programs because it is itself an extensible program. If you write your Lisp programs so as to pass this extensibility on to the user, you effectively get an extension language for free.
And the difference between extending a Lisp program in Lisp, and doing the same thing in a traditional language, is like the difference between meeting someone in person and conversing by letters. ... When this degree of access is combined with an interactive environment, you have extensibility at its best. ...What happens when you're unsure of something? If the original program is written in Lisp, you can probe it interactively... This kind of feedback allows you to program with a high degree of confidence—to write more ambitious extensions, and to write them faster. An interactive environment always makes programming easier...
1.4 Extending Lisp ...But the main reason macros are hard to understand is that they're foreign. No other language has anything like Lisp macros. Thus learning about macros may entail unlearning preconceptions inadvertently picked up from other languages. Foremost among these is the notion of a program as something afflicted by rigor mortis. ...If it takes some time to get used to macros, it is well worth the effort.
1.5 Why Lisp (or When) These newpossibilities do not stem from a single magic ingredient. In this respect, Lisp is like an arch. Which of the wedge-shaped stones (voussoirs) is the one that holds up the arch? The question itself is mistaken; they all do. Like an arch, Lisp is a collection of interlocking features. We can list some of these features—dynamic storage allocation and garbage collection, runtime typing, functions as objects, a built-in parser which generates lists, a compiler which accepts programs expressed as lists, an interactive environment, and so on—but the power of Lisp cannot be traced to any single one of them. It is the combination which makes Lisp programming what it is.
Over the past twenty years, the way people program has changed. Many of these changes—interactive environments, dynamic linking, even object-oriented programming—have been piecemeal attempts to give other languages some of the flexibility of Lisp. The metaphor of the arch suggests how well they have succeeded.
It is widely known that Lisp and Fortran are the two oldest languages still in use. What is perhaps more significant is that they represent opposite poles in the philosophy of language design. Fortran was invented as a step up from assembly language. Lisp was invented as a language for expressing algorithms. Such different intentions yielded vastly different languages.
>> Fortran makes life easy for the compiler writer; Lisp makes life easy >> for the programmer.
... As the gods determined from afar the outcomes of battles among the ancient Greeks, the outcome of this battle is being determined by hardware. Every year, things look better for Lisp. The arguments against Lisp are now starting to sound very much like the arguments that assembly language programmers gave against high-level languages in the early 1970s.
Paolo Amoroso <amor...@mclink.it> writes: > On 14 May 2003 16:17:49 -0700, sca...@yahoo.com (scav50) wrote: > > + paul graham says lisp is "awkward" in On Lisp. he also mentions
> Graham's book "On Lisp" has almost 400 pages. You are quoting a single > word out of it. I realize it's to much to ask you for more context.
It was also one of the most influencial books in making me learn Lisp, so I'd probably lean more towards believing that this one word wasn't very important whn compared with the rest of them 400 pages :)
The village idiot wrote: > paul graham, the celebrated author of lisp books, couldn't help > but call lisp "awkward" in On Lisp. is this convincing enough?
There are three places (I searched the PDF file) where the word "awkward" or "awkwardness" appears.
In each case he is complaining that the use of
(funcall <function-name> ...)
instead of just
(<function-name> ...)
is awkward.
That's his complaint --- he prefers lisp1 to lisp2.
The other day I was translating some scheme code into lisp. I found myself sympathizing with this point of view, thinking that it was a bit tedious to find all the places where a function was being passed in a variable and making sure I put the funcall in front of it. On the other hand, the same code had a bunch of utilities that the author had obviously stolen directly from Common Lisp (i.e. reduce, find, every, sublis), so I didn't have to translate that code, though he had had to write it!
We've had the lisp1 vs. lisp2 argument many times here in this newsgroup. It's obviously a legitimate position, but not something that speaks to lisp as a language as a whole. Someone who would write two (2) major books on a language and walk off with $49 million from selling a product built using that language --- which language he specifically claimed gave him a major competitive advantage --- is certainly being misrepresented by the above comment.
-- Fred Gilham gil...@csl.sri.com ...We must ask, is there any means available to prevent mankind from being hurt by people's bad judgment and malice? Is it not a non sequitur to assume that one could avoid the disastrous consequences of these human weaknesses by substituting the government's discretion for that of the individual citizens? Are governments endowed with intellectual and moral perfection? Are the rulers not human too, not themselves subject to human frailties and deficiencies? --- Ludwig von Mises
> > Who is that one person that has always been on every programming team > > you have ever been on? Who is that person who never joined a team > > later than you did, and never left the team sooner than you? Answer > > that question, and you have the identity of the moron.
> i can see how you could have induced this rule from your own > experience. however, you failed to realize that it may not apply to > others. why don't you go expand a macro or backtrace something? make > yourself appear useful.
I sense that you indeed answered the above questions for yourself, and are now fuming over the inescapable answer.
Okay, you have convinced me that Lisp sucks because it doesn't have an automatically-hygienic defmacro. I'm more than capable of appointing a new programming language to be my ``main'' one; I have done so a few times in my programming life.
I expect that you will now direct me to a programming language which retains all of the advantages of Lisp *and* which provides a hygienic defmacro.
I see that we are crossposting to Java and C++ newsgroups; but you can't possibly be saying that these moronic miscreations are that language!
If you can't point me to this alternative language, then you are just an irrational idiot who is jumping up and down on one spot, fuming over something that he cannot fix. Do you also honk at red lights to make them turn green faster, or shake your fist at the weather? Do you curse gravity when you stumble and fall?
If the Lisp community cared about having a standard construct for automatic macro hygiene, we would have it by now. But somehow, nearly forty years of Lisp programming has merrily gone on without it---and it was not without progress elsewhere in the language. Features like lexical closures, conditions and, oh, an object system were added. People cared about having these things, so they were worked in. Once upon a time, writing a macro meant getting the entire macro call form as an argument, and having to analyze its syntax explicitly, with no destructuring. Destructuring without additional hygiene has shown to be a sufficiently good tool for Lisp programmers.
"Robert Hand" <flash91NOS...@qwest.net> writes: > Err I know I am not a part of this conversation.
Nobody invited me either.
> In fact I only breezed over the original post.
Maybe you should go back and read it. As a matter of fact, it probably helps to read the post I'm responding to as well.
> Your reply to it, does not address the substance.
I didn't know there was any.
> In fact, I wonder if english is your first language.
Congratulations! You get a star! Did you figure that one out by looking at my strange foreigner name?
> > "even guy steele, the author of lisp standard came to realize the > > crappiness of the language, so he had to create a new one - scheme"
> > I don't know about you, but the above sentence sort of, maybe, kinda > > suggests chronological order. Next time, you can remove the ambiguity > > by defining what "the language" is.
> I would assume "The language" refers to Lisp.
Well, "the language" in the context of that sentence refers to the "lisp standard" which Guy Steele is "the author of" (historical accuracy note - Guy Steele didn't make up the standard single handedly; he was a major contributor and wrote the definitive books on the standard's early form). Guy Steele "invented" Scheme (again, he didn't do this alone) almost a decade before work on Common Lisp got underway.
> > "after AI acedemics refused to switch to scheme"
> > Remind me again, who was forcing them to?
> Does refusal require force?
Well, it does require an active inquiry from a third party.
> The majority of programmers can't read and write.
Judging by the amount of crap on Usenet, it seems that the majority of people have the same problem as well.
> His rant was one giant mess, but if you are concerned over form and > not content, you have a worse problem.
I may have problems, but taking Usenet trolls seriously isn't one of them. Let's go over the three main points of the alleged "content" step by step:
- The original poster claims his coworkers are morons.
Fair enough, I really don't care what he thinks of them.
Other have already stated what I myself think of hygenic macros better than I can, but let me state it anyway: I don't care. "Unsafe" macros are like any sufficiently powerful tool in that they can be used improperly to do harm. I know enough about my tools not to abuse them. In his other thread (the original poster managed to break this one into two or three ones already) it has been pointed out that hygenic macros aren't really all that tough to implement anyway. Since you haven't bothered to read this thread before responding, let me state it again: nobody seems to care. Besides which, macros should be used infrequently enough that this shouldn't even be a problem (but I suppose "experienced morons" like the original poster shoot themselves in the foot with that one as well).
P.S. - Postscripts are intended to be read. When I said I was troll-baiting, I was quite serious. With a response like this:
"p.s. hey vladimir, go hatch some more little lenins if you can't add anything of value to the discussion."
I certainly appear to have been successful, to my great satisfaction. :)
P.P.S. - There is no need to include a copy of my original message at the bottom of your reply, seeing as you quoted almost all of it beforehand.
P.P.P.S - I think all of the original poster's flames have been thoroughly debunked and deconstructed, and personally I don't find him as amusing anymore. Let's all stop feeding the trolls now, people.
<w...@nospam.nowhere> wrote: >Dealing with people can be very difficult. Dealing with bosses can be >very difficult. Scav50 snapped in public when he should just keep his >personal problems to himself. Even worse he has snapped anonymously, >a faceless name from behind some Yahoo account.
You have no clue as to what the 'net can do to one, do you?
"Oh bother", said Pooh, as the CIA decrypted his hard drive.
-----= Posted via Newsfeeds.Com, Uncensored Usenet News =----- http://www.newsfeeds.com - The #1 Newsgroup Service in the World! -----== Over 80,000 Newsgroups - 16 Different Servers! =-----
> The federal government has an Artificial Intelligence program that of > the primary purpose to discern fact from fiction, with a demonstrated > ability to read and process information. > Also, the operators are using electronic surveillance for input with > various feedback techniques for extracting any information required to > resolve discrepancies from their calculated belief of fact ( or truth). > The AI may someday develop into a very helpful tool for human kind > with it's ability to reduce operator input errors and use safety rules. > It currently has basic knowledge in a various areas of study including > engineering, science, medicine and law.
> Communicate in the abstract. Keep fuzzy. > Maybe this is an infinite universe. > Hot is minimum cold. Cold is minimum hot. > You can't prove anything. > You can't see anything. > You can't prove this moment here is of any loss caused by errors ( of the past) > ( because you do not have the ability to change the past in order to prove any > dissimilarity ) > Life is Happiness.
