Re: Seeking computer-programming job (Sunnyvale, CA)

[Arne Vajhøj]

Obviously, there is. It may not be implemented, or fully specified,
but it's whatever Lisp language you are talking about in this thread.

Being a competent engineer and all, you wouldn't be caught dead spewing
nonsense about a language you know nothing about, such as Common Lisp,
right?

There is at least one wrong premise in that argument ...



Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Have some self respect and do your research before you make a fool of
yourself again.

Optimist !

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

These tiresome personal attacks do not constitute rational arguments
in favor of either Lisp or Java, "Lew" and Paul.

That was not a personal attack.

Do you read what you reply to?

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

These tiresome personal attacks do not constitute rational arguments
in favor of either Lisp or Java, "Lew" and gugamilare.

Furthermore, I said I had spent quite a while demonstrat*ing*
otherwise. Misquoting me does not prove me an idiot; rather, it proves
you a liar.

Nope. You wrote:

#I have just spent quite a while demonstrated otherwise.

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/c5faf5f283f19ac6?hl=da

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

That much is true, but the larger context is a debate about which is
better, Lisp or Java. The problematical consequences of macros are
part of a refutation of an assertion fronted earlier to the effect
that Lisp was superior. The probable truth is that neither is strictly
superior to the other.

What - a taste of common sense??

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Paul is infamous for this intentional misapprehension of emacs, among other
things.

Paul Foley has written little, if anything, in this thread about
emacs. No other Pauls are in evidence. This remark seems to be
confused.[/QUOTE]

Read the thread more careful and you would see that he is referring
to Paul Derbyshire.

Last but not least, emacs is a terminal-mode editor. I should know --
I've used it, extensively during the 90s on one particular remote
system and occasionally before and since.

Nope.

It is an editor that supports both text and GUI mode.

There is this great thing called Wikipedia where you can
learn about think that you do not know about. Lisp is
likely to be too big a topic to learn about via Wikipedia,
but Emacs is OK:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs

The fact that you did not have access to X display or were
not aware that Emacs supported X does not prove anything
(except maybe lack of HW or lack of skills).

And emacs is a curses-based unix editor from the seventies. A tiny bit
of Web research will reveal that the first version was written between
January 1, 1970 and December 31, 1979 (inclusive) and that it is now
primarily used on unix systems; its source code #includes something
whose name contains "curses" just to round things out.

If *YOU* do the web research (link given above) then you would
see that Emacs contains a lot more than it did when it was
implemented on top of TECO.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

These tiresome personal attacks do not constitute rational arguments
in favor of either Lisp or Java, "Lew" and Adlai.

That was not a personal attack, but noting a fact.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

And you'd have to make me. Why on earth would I *want* to blow up my web
browser by clicking on a .pdf link?

Time for a better browser and/or PDF plugin.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

They were described in the gcc docs as nonportable. This was probably
before C99 though.

Both # and ## are required by C89.

The C world moves slowly. C99 was in the making for ages and still isn't
100% supported. The full C++ spec likewise. There are a lot of compilers
that deal very poorly with even simple use of templates, many producing
duplicate symbol errors if you use a template with the same args in more
than one compilation unit, which is valid C++ but which a lot of linkers
still don't like.

True.

But I have not seen a compiler where # and ## were not working for
a couple of decades.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

More thinking about the code, yes. More thinking about how to prod the
editor into doing xyzzy, not so much.

If someone can not learn to use an editor, then the code would
not be much worth anyway.

Arne

 

[Arne Vajhøj]

Not since version 5.

Also in version 5 and 6.

null is not a valid value for int or double - it requires
Integer or Double.

Arne

 

[Paul Foley]

I do not need to. In the case of macros, it sufficed for me to look
into one particular similarity: that a macro invocation is replaced
with some code, inside which placeholders are replaced with copies of
the call's arguments, and then the result of the substitution is
compiled.

This is false.

My concerns regarding macro use derive entirely from this one fact,
which you have not denied is true of Lisp macros.

And I told you Lisp macros are functions. They can expand into
anything computable, not just "some code, inside which placeholders
are replaced with copies of the call's arguments"

 

[Kaz Kylheku]

I came to this debate curious about Lisp, rather than
inherently hostile to it, but found myself somewhat alarmed by things
that I realized would inevitably cause serious problems in any
realistic large-scale software-development effort.

I don't think anyone in their right mind would let a twit like
you into a building where such a project is taking place.

My criticism in
this area was offered with the hope that it might lead to
improvements

Your criticism after sniffing Lisp for five minutes is about as valuable as a
wet paper tissue.

 

[Paul Foley]

I don't see that this is a useful distinction, between "the method is
in the package" and "the method's name is in the package". It amounts
to the same thing.

Really? So if I run a prize-draw where everyone writes their name on
a piece of paper and we put the papers in a box and draw the winner at
random...that's exactly the same as putting all the /people/ in the
box?

 

[Tamas K Papp]

Even if you never use CL for real-world work, what you learn from it can
make you a much better programmer.

I have heard it said often, but I am still wondering about this.
Maybe CL has made me a better programmer in other languages, but
mostly I just miss the features of CL and hate programming in the
other language. After CL, it is like swimming in tar.

The other day I was doing something in R, for teaching. It took
about an hour, but it was enough for missing the following:

- symbols (R uses strings, ugly)

- convenience macros like with-open-file already in the standard

- simple macros in libraries, eg iterate

- SBCL's compiler, which checks my code pretty thoroughly and warns me
about typos and think-os

- the speed of compiled code.

And R is a pretty decent language. If I were programming in Fortran,
I would be going crazy after Lisp. And in the list above, I didn't
even include CLOS, fancier DSLs, etc.

Tamas

 

[Stefan Ram]

If I were programming in Fortran,
I would be going crazy after Lisp.

LISP started out as a subroutine package
for list processing /in FORTRAN/.

 

[Kenneth Tilton]

LISP started out as a subroutine package
for list processing /in FORTRAN/.

I tried to get McCarthy to apologize for the name Lisp during the Q&A
after an ILC talk. He said he wanted to call it FLPL. Or something like
that. Hey, it's haiku time again in c.l.l!

McCarthy
---------
Some BDFL:
Did not dictate the syntax
Or even the name.

kt

 

[Lars Enderin]

You're right though about the productivity of this debate. It's like
evolutionists vs. creationists: one side has logic and evidence on
its side, the other unshakable faith, and neither will budge. We'll
never give up our logic and evidence and apparently you'll never give
up your faith. And since there are no important public policy issues
at stake, your continuing to argue is pointless.

It's ironic, really, that when you write something which seems to make
sense, you have got it exactly backwards: You are obviously the one
arguing from faith and faulty reasoning. [& further personal attacks]

Who are you, and what is the point of this unprovoked drive-by flaming?

The point is to expose you as a fraud.
And unless you really are a schizo, you know me through your other
aliases: Twisted, Jerry Gerrone, etc, etc.
It must be hard work to keep pretending to be so many different persons.

 

[Lars Enderin]

These tiresome personal attacks do not constitute rational arguments
in favor of either Lisp or Java, Larry.

And I think Seamus and I are both online posting right now as a matter
of fact. One more thing you got wrong. This is what happens to those
that allow their emotions to overrule their reason.

It's easy to run Thunderbird and Firefox in different windows more or
less simultaneously, so that doesn't invalidate the highly plausible
hypothesis that you and Seamus are one and the same person.

 

[Spiros Bousbouras]

[ Crossposting to sci.math and setting follow-ups for sci.math ]

Ponder it too much and suffer Georg Cantor's fate you will.

I doubt it.

They basically rebuilt the entire foundation.

No, it only affected Frege's effort for a foundation. Others
took into account Russell's paradox when writing their attempts
at a foundation but they didn't have to rebuild anything. And of
course foundations is only a small part of mathematics so your
claim about "half of mathematics" is completely false, it's not
even half of foundations.

That ripples into everything.

It didn't affect already established mathematics and there was
a lot of that.

A lot of other theorems had to be checked for assuming or
relying on something called the "axiom of choice", for instance. Some of
them could still be proven without it. Not others.

First, axiom of choice has nothing to do with self-
referentiality. Second, the first theorem to make use of the
axiom of choice was Zermelo's well-ordering principle, so no
existing theorems had to be checked for reliance on the axiom of
choice.