to RG - Lisp lunacy and Perl psychosis

[Xah Lee]

2010-03-17

Also, flamebait language-comparison xposts involving Lisp are one
of Xah Lee's trademarks. You might want to look into not imitating
him/her/it.

being a professional programer today, typically you know more than
just one language. Practical questions, discussions, involving more
than one language is natural, and in fact happens more and more often
in online forums over the past 15 years i've seen. Partly due to, of
course, the tremendous birth of languages in the past decade.

In the 1980s or 1990s, you don't typically use more than one lang in a
project. Today, probably majority of projects requires you to use more
than one well known general purpose language. In those times,
discussion of more than one language is usually academic comparison.
Today, honest post as “i know this in X but how you do in Y†is a
common need.

The reason they become flame wars is mostly not about the message
content. More about tech geeker's sensitivity, with the carried over
old school netiquette that any person mentioning lang x in group y
must be of no good intentions.

If you look at online forums today, in fact most comp lang forums have
no problem in mentioning or discussion different languages in context.
The problem occur more frequently in free-for-all type of forums where
the know-it-all tech geekers reside (the in-group argot is “hackerâ€),
each thinking they are justice kings and queens, take opportunities to
ridicule, flame, any post that mention other lang or any thing that
doesn't seem to be protective of their lang. This is comp.lang.*
newsgroups, with good as well as mostly bad aspects. Of course, the
free-for-all nature is precisely the reason most tech geekers stay in
newsgroups. A good percentage of them, if not majority, are old
timers.

Most newsgroup tech geekers consider cross-posting wrong. I consider
such taboo in this convention being a major contribution to the
redundant creation of new languages, flaws, and foster the hostile
faction nature of programing language groups we see.

It is sad to say, comp.lang.lisp today is 90% machine generated spam.
You see that each time this is brought up in the past 3 years, the
regulars are too busy boasting about how they've set up some tech geek
system so that spam don't reach their eyes, and sternly sputter about
web browser using idiots, with, profuse suggestions from their
infinite knowledge about what newsgroup reading software people should
be using.

To the comp.lang.python people, i think perhaps it is fruitful now to
think about de-coupling the newsgroup from the mailing list... am not
very involved in the comp.lang.python or python community in recent
years, but my thought is that, i got the feeling that most practical
posts happen in the mailing list and the newsgroup ones tend to be
more free flow of thoughts... so perhaps de-couple them is good,
because python is main stream now and mailing list is sustainable
large, is good for more practical, concrete questions and answers, and
philosophical free thoughts still have a place to go, in newsgroups.

further readings:

• Proliferation of Computing Languages
xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/new_langs.html

• Tech Geekers vs Spammers
xahlee.org/UnixResource_dir/writ/tech_geekers_vs_spammers.html

• Cross-posting & Language Factions
xahlee.org/Netiquette_dir/cross-post.html

Xah
∑ http://xahlee.org/

☄

 

[Peter J. Holzer]

why would the presence of a REPL theoretically make debugging
something easier? Whose theory? Ive debugged small Perl and Scheme
programs.

I don't know about the theory, but in practice a REPL makes debugging
easier because you can interactively test your code. This is especially
powerful if it is combined with a debugger. The Perl debugger is a
primitive REPL (well, only a REL, you have to P yourself), so you may
already have used some of its features (like invoking functions or
evaluating arbitrarily complex expressions) and take them for granted,
but if you've ever used a debugger which didn't have the ability or had
to work without any debugger you'll appreciate it (of course you can
always write test programs which do the same thing, but that takes more
time).

hp

 

[Kyle T. Jones]

Trying to understand a language (machine or human) that you do
not know is futile. You must either give up, or actually learn
the language.

That argument is self defeating. You simply cannot "actually learn the
language" without "trying to understand (the) language".

HTH. HAND.

Cheers.