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

[Spiros Bousbouras]

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

I see no call for this rudeness. Behave yourself or you'll wind up mired
in my kill filter like a fly caught in a pitcher plant.


Lies.

And it did not take me long to find a citation to support what I wrote.

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52393.html

"It's worth realizing that the rigorous mathematical definitions of
things like "the real numbers between 0 and 1" weren't well-developed
until roughly 1900, and so it was very hard to also talk about things
like "this infinite set is bigger than that one" until about that same
time. (As a side note, it may be for the best that they're hard to
identify; Georg Cantor, who's responsible for much of the formal set
theory that underlies these questions, went mad late in life and died in
an asylum, as have some other people who have looked at them!)"

Your quote in no way supports your claim that pondering
self-referentiality drove Cantor mad.

[...]

 

[Seamus MacRae]

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

I see no call for this rudeness. Behave yourself or you'll wind up mired
in my kill filter like a fly caught in a pitcher plant.

Lies.

And it did not take me long to find a citation to support what I wrote.

http://mathforum.org/library/drmath/view/52393.html

"It's worth realizing that the rigorous mathematical definitions of
things like "the real numbers between 0 and 1" weren't well-developed
until roughly 1900, and so it was very hard to also talk about things
like "this infinite set is bigger than that one" until about that same
time. (As a side note, it may be for the best that they're hard to
identify; Georg Cantor, who's responsible for much of the formal set
theory that underlies these questions, went mad late in life and died in
an asylum, as have some other people who have looked at them!)"

Your quote in no way supports your claim that pondering
self-referentiality drove Cantor mad.

I made no such claim. I said "Unbounded self-referentiality *reputedly*
drove Georg Cantor mad" (emphasis added). I have now substantiated the
claim that it *reputedly* drove him mad. Whether that reputation was
deserved or not is an entirely separate matter.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

I doubt it.

Beware. Fear, anger, aggression -- the Dark Side are they, and you have
shown signs of two of the three frequently over the last few days.

No

They basically rebuilt the foundation.

And of course foundations is only a small part of mathematics

When a foundation is changed, everything constructed above it is
potentially affected, and at least needs some checking.

[calls me a liar]

I weary of your frequent ad hominem arguments. Please confine your
statements to ones about the actual subject matter under debate and
leave your personal opinion of your opponent out of it.

It didn't

It always does.

First, axiom of choice has nothing to do with self-
referentiality.

It does have something to do with the reformulation of set theory. When
anything described by "x such that y" was a set, statements dependent on
the axiom of choice were true. Now their dependency on the axiom of
choice, which is independent from and not one of the axioms of ZF set
theory, is a matter of interest.

Yes -- that's right. I know quite a lot more about this than you
probably thought I did when you decided to try attacking me. Next time,
think twice before picking a fight online, you never know who will turn
out to be the equivalent of the Hurricane that you thought would be a
featherweight wimp.

Some other idiot tossing off elsewhere on the net recently was similarly
shocked when I turned out to actually know a thing or two about nuclear
physics.

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.

It was the first theorem to do so because before that people blithely
assumed that you could always do that sort of thing and the sets in
question would have all the expected elements in them. Then the ZF
axioms replaced "anything, more or less, goes" and this turned out not
to be a theorem of those axioms or even provable (or disprovable!) from
them. Then you had to explicitly state it as an extra axiom or
assumption. So then people started to call it "the axiom of choice" and
make use of it.

Now I suggest that you drop it. There is nothing you can gain by
continuing to flame me, nor by attempting to ignite new flamewars in
formerly uninvolved newsgroups.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

Also in version 5 and 6.

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

And again someone jumps at an apparent opening in order to attack me
without actually reading carefully first.

Bad luck, Arne.

My remark:

was in response to:

as is evident in the quoted material at the start of this post. And it
is quite true that, since version five, to return a literal int or
double you are not forced to wrap the return type. You can have, say,

boolean fooAvailable;
int foo;

....

public Integer getFoo () {
if (fooAvailable) return foo;
return null;
}

and the compiler will be happy to do the wrapping for you. So you are no
longer forced to wrap anything -- sometimes the compiler does it for you.

You do still need to declare the return type as Integer or Double. But
the type of the expression in the "return" statement may now be int or
double.

In particular, if you want to return a literal, which was the particular
case at issue here, you can.

Pre-Java 5:

public Integer returnOneOrNull () {
if (foo) return Integer.valueOf(1);
return null;
}

Java 5 and later:

public Integer returnOneOrNull () {
if (foo) return 1; // An int literal is returned.
return null;
}

Nice try. Next time you want to pick a fight with someone, read more
carefully and choose your target more carefully, or better yet, think
better of it and just go on about your business.

Have a nice day.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

Yes.

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?

No.

There is a world of difference between a Common Lisp package and a box,
and between Common Lisp and a prize-draw.

 

[Adlai]

No.

There is a world of difference between a Common Lisp package and a box,
and between Common Lisp and a prize-draw.

Shame on Seamus.

If you're drawing on Star Wars metaphors, let me quote this to you:
"Why do you persist, Mr Anderson?"

Paul Foley's analogy is clear: a package is a package of designators,
not a package of things. If you don't understand it, then before you
go about talking about qualifying this and qualifying that, you should
probably go and qualify yourself.

- Adlai

 

[Kaz Kylheku]

Yes.

The above distinction isn't the true one. Yes, symbols are names, and reside
in packages. But they reside in packages by means of names of their own.
The distintion is this: "the method's name is in the package" versus
"the method name's name is in the package".

In Lisp there is a significant difference between "what is something's name"
versus "what is something's name called".

In some languages, a name is some compile-time identifier, which is resolved in
some package, and then from there we arrive straight at an entity like a type,
function or variable. The package itself /has/ functions, classes, et cetera.

A Lisp package contains entries which map identifiers to symbols. The symbols
themselves are names for things, but that is irrelevant the package system.
Symbols are not identifers in the sense of a character string like "foo". They
identify by means of their unique identities, which are addresses in the
machine's address space.

A naming system in which entities have names that are symbols, and in which
these symbols in turn have their own names which are character strings keyed
into a package, is different from a naming system in which things have names
that are identifiers in a package.

 

[Kaz Kylheku]

And again someone jumps at an apparent opening in order to attack me
without actually reading carefully first.

Yes, someone jumps at an opening to attack you. You. Do you think about why
/you/? I suspect you do think about this. I also suspect I know the conclusion
you come to when you think about this. You are thinking ``people are jumping
at opportunities to attack me, because I'm so much fucking better informed
and smarter than everyone else, that they all hate me! Everything that drips
out of my keyboard puts everyone in his proper place, and that's the
one thing they all can't stand. That is why random strangers attack me
left and right, and are soon replaced by other random strangers, and so
on.''

Am I close?

Say, here is a question. If smart people are attacked like this on Usenet, why
aren't the likes of Bjarne Stroustrup or Kent Pitman surrounded by biting
pirranhas?

Ah right; it's because they have made names for themselves, and so people
know better. What separates you from, say, Bill Joy and James Gosling is that
you're unknown.

Yep, that's it.

You're brilliant and well-informed, but unknown, and so people hate you
and attack you.

Yes, you /could/ simply descend down to their level. You could turn down your
brilliance a few megawatts, and start posting a bit of misinformed drivel here
and there.

If only you were wrong more often, the attacking would stop.

People don't ever attack misinformed morons (like themselves). Such people are
their friends. The clueless twits carry an an anti-flame waiver. They belong to
the same club and extend clueless twit courtesy toward each other.

You /could/ be like that, and avoid the flamage, but it's against your
professional integrity as a super-intelligent computer scientist.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

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

Narrowed it down for ya. The Lisp language I am talking about in this
thread is Common Lisp.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

Please stop these vicious personal attacks!

What?

That's a complete non-sequitur. There's no personal attack in my
statement. How can "yes, but the most frequently encountered example is
the string, so I said strings" *possibly* constitute a personal attack
against you or anybody else?

What would it do other than optimize?

Irrelevant. Anything else would break compatibility with CL, by making
some valid CL code (particularly CL code that is not valid if assumed to
be CLOS code but that is not CLOS code) not work correctly or else not
compile.

Seriously I think you need to declare the troll accomplished and find
someone new to bait

Another personal attack! You should learn how to properly debate
something. Calling your opponent names is tantamount to admitting you've
lost the argument.

No one believes that you actually consider that to be a /vicious/
personal attack.

Why? Lots of people consider being called a fool, especially in public
and before an audience, to be a vicious personal attack, because it is
one. So it isn't exactly hard to believe. There's no reason not to take
my statement that I am one of them at face value, since it's not a
particularly implausible claim and since there is circumstantial
evidence in favor of it, and none against the alternative. None of you
know me anyway, so why would you have any preconceived notions whether I
do or don't consider it "vicious"?

Your behavior is mystifying. Many of your beliefs are mystifying. And
this has nothing whatsoever to do with either Java or Lisp.

I'm quite please that I got you all to say frobnobdicate over and
over, however.

Gave me a chuckle, anyway..

This suggests ego and the derivation of gratification from exerting some
sort of influence or dominance, rather than reason, motivates your
actions here. This is not good.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

I don't know which Lisp you tried, but it must be a very bad one.

It's Common Lisp. Which has, as you should well know, rational, float,
complex, symbol, cons cell, vector, and stream. Rational includes the
integers and vector includes the strings.

That's it.

You still have forgotten to mention hash-tables, functions,
conditions, structures, pathnames, many kinds of streams, classes,
methods, generic functions (yes, those are Lisp objects as well), and
implementation-specific types like foreign data, sockets, gray-
streams, locks, threads, ...

None of these are fundamental. Hash-tables are implemented on vectors.
Functions are lists, i.e. ultimately made of cons cells, at least
semantically, though the compiler may generate code that actually
represents them differently as an optimization. Most of the rest are
ultimately built out of conses or arrays.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

The point being missed here is that if you make a class foo, and a
subclass bar, foo and bar do NOT join this set. They are not put on an
equal footing with rationals and conses and symbols, so "rationals and
conses and symbols and foos" would be a sensible grouping. Not like how
Java makes Foo and Bar have an equal footing with String and Integer
and, more importantly, have the uniformity in the type system that the
same basic rules apply to all reference types. And most importantly of
all, the compiler is free to REASON about Foos and Bars instead of only
being able to reason about Objects.

I have a feeling that alienating Seamus might be the healthiest thing

Now we have an overt act of incitement of hostility here. This might
even be illegal in some parts of the world. Including the United States
-- ever heard of Lori Drew?

Shame on you, Adlai, and on anyone else who ever says such an awful
thing as "I think alienating <person> might be the healthiest thing" and
apparently means it as a recommendation.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

Optimist !

These pointless jabs and pokes do not advance your case for Lisp. All
they do is make the both of you look like mean-spirited, egotistical
idiots that, lacking rational arguments that will sway me, resort to
chest-beating and rudeness in a primal, instinctive attempt to get their
way by dominance instead.

Unfortunately for you, that does not work on me, here in this
environment. If you want to convince me you will need to use EVIdence.
If you have none, then you cannot convince me and will have to accept
that fact and agree to disagree with me.

Them's the breaks.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

You don't appear to know anything about Common Lisp

A lie.

so that can't possibly be the case.

Assumes a premise that proved to be false. Unsurprising then that the
conclusion also comes out false.

People are to interpret what you are saying as being about Common Lisp
Yes.

you look like a complete twit

Insults will not convince me that Lisp is better than Java. Only
evidence will, if you can find some and present it here. I am coming to
suspect ever more strongly that you cannot.

 

[Adlai]

Narrowed it down for ya. The Lisp language I am talking about in this
thread is Common Lisp.

Let me quote Seamus himself, in a message which you can view here:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/ac9c8f90557a0bb7?hl=en

"I just said that. Why are you extracting little pieces of what I
said
and repeating them, apparently thinking that by doing so you are
successfully attacking me?"

By the way, Seamus, the fact that you /complain/ about how it's bad
that CLOS could be hacked-up independantly shows that you don't know
enough about Common Lisp to criticize it. The whole idea of Common
Lisp is that ANYTHING other than the 32 "axioms" of Lisp (QUOTE, ATOM,
EQ, CONS, CAR, CDR, COND, and the 25 special operators such as
TAGBODY, GO, CATCH, THROW, EVAL-WHEN, etc) can be hacked up on your
own. That is the whole mindset of CL.

If we talk about a compiler that makes good code for something, that's
just one of the perks that have accumulated over the years.

- Adlai

PS -- I don't see a qualifier in front of your name yet; are you sure
that you're :USEing :COMMON-LISP?

 

[Seamus MacRae]

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.

He isn't.

Obviously it can't really be proved. Just as I can't prove beyond a
shadow of a doubt that you and Kaz Kylheku aren't the same person,
though I have multiple reasons to suspect you are not.

It is fruitless to speculate about these things, and furthermore, it has
nothing whatsoever to do with which is better, Java or Lisp. Or Lisp
macros. Or Java type-checking. Or any of that stuff.

I suggest you forget about irrelevancies that not only have no bearing
on the topic at hand but regarding which there is no way for you to make
headway of any sort in answering the questions you seem to have. Give it
up as forever unknown, or assume the common case, i.e. assume two
seemingly-distinct people ARE different unless *proven* otherwise.

 

[Adlai]

The point being missed here is that if you make a class foo, and a
subclass bar, foo and bar do NOT join this set. They are not put on an
equal footing with rationals and conses and symbols, so "rationals and
conses and symbols and foos" would be a sensible grouping. Not like how
Java makes Foo and Bar have an equal footing with String and Integer
and, more importantly, have the uniformity in the type system that the
same basic rules apply to all reference types. And most importantly of
all, the compiler is free to REASON about Foos and Bars instead of only
being able to reason about Objects.

Actually, they are. Everything has a type in Lisp, and since CLOS was
added to the language standard, everything has a class. Lisp had this
idea before Ruby, Java, or Blub.[1]

Now we have an overt act of incitement of hostility here. This might
even be illegal in some parts of the world. Including the United States
-- ever heard of Lori Drew?

Shame on you, Adlai, and on anyone else who ever says such an awful
thing as "I think alienating <person> might be the healthiest thing" and
apparently means it as a recommendation.

Come on Seamus, please recognize some humor. I realize that you can't
see my face or hear my tone of thought as I type posts, but please try
and take everything with a grain of salt. Also, note that you cut off
my quote mid-sentance -- something that you got a bit ticked-off about
when somebody did that to you only a few posts ago.

- Adlai

[1] http://paulgraham.com/avg.html

 

[Seamus MacRae]

Just because different people argue in favor of Common Lisp doesn't mean
they're on the same side.

Sure it does, almost by definition. The sides in this case are "prefers
Java" and "prefers Lisp". If two people argue in favor of Common Lisp,
clearly neither of them belongs to the "prefers Java" camp. This is
really very elementary logic. You should not be having so much trouble
with it.

Some of them are Lisp novices and don't really understand their own
arguments very well.

Then perhaps they are not in a position to be claiming it's better than
Java. They need to know more before they can have enough information to
decide such a thing, and their going around asserting it in public with
weak arguments laced with ad hominem attacks seems especially foolish.

When you learn CL, you learn new concepts, not just the details of
language features. The stuff you learn works together with a lot of
synergy. So you aren't likely to actually learn much of anything useful
by engaging in this kind of argument.

I'm sure you find this stuff very fascinating, but it's also totally
irrelevant, since my goal here is not to learn CL, but to respond to the
attacks upon Java that were made earlier, and now to the attacks on my
own person. To do the latter, though, I keep having to reiterate the
points I raised about Java and Lisp, since people keep attacking them
and in so doing indirectly attacking me. And often, directly attacking
me also.

You would be much better off spending your time downloading Practical
Common Lisp and a CL system, and spending the time with those that you
would have spent arguing here.

If my goal were to learn CL, rather than to prevail in this debate, then
you would be correct.

(Here, "prevail" means "the debate ends with a neutral or pro-Java
outcome, and the personal attacks cease". So that allows a draw, rather
than requiring a loss for your side.)

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

Maybe someday when I have more time I will learn more of it. Right now,
I'm too busy trying to catch up on fucking Usenet. So if you'll excuse
me ...

Programmers who don't think they need to improve are near the start of
their learning curve.

Is this intended as yet another personal attack? I have made no
assertion of not needing to improve. It's simply not relevant to the
matter at hand.

 

[Seamus MacRae]

I have posted no misguided nonsense. On the other hand, you have so far
devoted all three of your posts to this thread to exactly that.

The word "nonsense" is justified because [insult] and you have not shown
any interest in providing any corroborating evidence (or even a cogent
argument).

Seamus, engage your obviously superior reasoning skills and consider
the following, which you abbreviated to "[insult]":

[insult]

I bear no interest in your opinion of me whatsoever, so repeating it can
accomplish nothing of worth.

Let's return to the subject of comparing Lisp and Java, which I *am*
somewhat interested in, and leave our personal opinions of one another
out of it please.

Yes, Seamus

Retraction accepted.

I don't see any such post.

EVERY SINGLE post where you have engaged in petty namecalling and
similar behavior instead of discussing Lisp and Java.

Note that I am still not calling you a liar, or even a troll.

Is that a threat?

 

[Seamus MacRae]

Pillsy wrote: [...]

Your lucid writing

Thanks

almost makes up for your hypocrisy and willful ignorance.

But no thanks. None of that's true of course.

OK, fine: your crappy writing does nothing to make up for your
hypocrisy and willful ignorance.

More stupid ad hominems. Please tell me how you get from this insulting
drivel to a conclusion that Java is inferior to Lisp. Let me guess: you
can't, because the latter does not logically follow from the former.
That's called a fallacy, in this case argumentum ad hominem. Now in the
future, you need real arguments that actually hang together logically.
That means no more ad hominem. No more arguing against the man. If you
take issue with an argument I make in favor of static typing, say, that
means you argue logically against static typing rather than that you
call me names and then say "well, then, since he's an idiot, whatever
he's saying must be stupid, so static typing is stupid, and Lisp's the
best, yeah!!!1!1one" when in fact "he's an idiot" is a false premise,
the conclusion that static typing is bad wouldn't follow from the
premise even if the premise WERE true, and indeed the conclusion that
Lisp beats Java wouldn't follow from static typing being bad even if
THAT were true -- otherwise it would follow that a dynamically-typed
INTERCAL dialect also beat Java, which seems doubtful.