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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
I have many mysterious powers, not the least of which is apparently the
capacity to tie *you* in knots with what was meant to be a simple and
humorous remark.
I have many mysterious powers, not the least of which is apparently the
capacity to tie *you* in knots with what was meant to be a simple and
humorous remark.
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
I am not.
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
No. YOU missed the point. Indeed, you missed the point of this entire
thread. This thread is about how Lisp stacks up against Java, remember?
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
Now you're just contradicting yourself.
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
No. I accused you of flaming people because you flame people.
How can anyone "accuse" anyone of advocating for Lisp, when advocating
for Lisp is not inherently wrong in the manner that being a chronic
flamer is?
The only time anyone inferred that you were advocating for Lisp was when
you insulted and argued with the two remaining Java advocates in the
thread and with none of the Lisp advocates. This implies the choice of a
particular side.
Why, thank you.
You take pride in being a brutish, angry man whose primary means of
self-expression is the put-down?
I'm glad you have reached the same conclusion.
Since it is normal human nature, it would be unless you were from Pluto
or something.
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
I did not. I said your pointless jabs and pokes did not advance the case
for Lisp. You said that that was incorrect. I pointed out that it was
not incorrect.
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Seamus MacRae
You implied a threat to disrespect my wishes and continue to publicly
badmouth me, right there in that quoted text.
That would be unwise.
So you claim. I think you would not be making that claim unless it
served your purpose. Since your purpose seems to be to have the last
word and to do so at my expense, and since that would have undesirable
consequences for me, it follows that you are probably attempting to
deceive me into pursing a poor strategy that will enable you to have
that all-important last word.
Therefore I should ignore what you are suggesting.
Once again you err. I am not interested in controlling people's
viewpoints. I had some things to say about Lisp versus Java.
Subsequently, I have endeavored to correct the public record regarding
my own person, after several people set about to doctor that record. At
first I believe they did so inadvertently, by arguing about Lisp in ways
that unfortunately insinuated things about me that were inaccurate.
However, it is now apparent that at least some of you are doing it
deliberately, though you formerly were either silent or doing it
accidentally.
Shame on you.
Regardless, you are all entitled to your personal opinions and
viewpoints and I would not dream of trying to change those by force.
However, what you publish in writing about me is another matter entirely
and I am entitled by law to some influence over that.
Yes, it does. Why are you accusing me of lying, when I have no motive to
do so and especially when the evidence clearly supports what I said?
In other words, you suggest that I should lie about whether I've
actually caught up on usenet, by claiming to have done so when I have
not? How illogical.
No, they would not. None would ordinarily prefer that the public record
contain an erroneous negative statement about them than that the public
record contained no such statements.
The rest of your insulting and vaguely threatening post has been deleted
unread. Have a nice day.
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Seamus MacRae
Did I ask you for another example of anything? No? Then please don't
clutter up both newsgroups with irrelevancies. TomSW and I were
discussing something. Your interjection is neither useful nor warranted.
From this I conclude that either you are lying or you have not grown up
yet.
You assume, incorrectly, that I am trying to learn something. Perhaps
earlier I was, but at the moment my goal is purely to set the record
straight and then get on with other, more pleasant tasks.
I did not ask for, nor do I need, your pity. Such things are also
inappropriate subject matter for discussing openly in a public place
according to the rules of polite society.
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
I find nothing amusing about Paul's insulting and rude insinuations.
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
No, it is not. I just had a look, and Series Expansion is posting from
74.*. Assuming that Jerry Gerrone is the individual you are referring to
as "twisted", I examined several of his posts as well, and they appear
to come from 70.*. Different class-A net blocks. Interestingly, both are
currently owned by the same ISP, but the consistent difference between
the two posters' IP addresses argues that they are different users of
that ISP, perhaps located in different parts of the region where they do
business, or for other reasons, such as one has a residential account
and the other a business one.
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
What they would appreciate is irrelevant. Kaz Kylheku has no reason to
care, and I've already indicated my own wishes.
In your opinion.
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Seamus MacRae
Paul said:
When 900 years old you reach, look as good you will not, hmm?
Then (param1 param2) is ambiguous: param2 might be a second parameter,
or a type for the first.
One you can totally ignore or circumvent at any time tends to have that
trait, yes.
A class of your own devising, if you want such a type. The number of
such primes is small enough for it to likely be feasible to make it an enum.
In Lisp, perhaps not. In Java, it could ensure that expressions assigned
to that variable had a compatible type, or else a run-time check to
throw an exception whenever they were not.
The things I "very forcefully assert" about Lisp that are not mere
opinions are restatements of, or deduced from, the things you "very
forcefully assert" about Lisp.
No. The most plausible explanation is that the things you "very
forcefully assert" about Lisp include honest mistakes, as well as
omissions that are misleading and unclear or ambiguous statements with
the property that the interpretation that is most plausible to someone
without specific prior knowledge otherwise, and the interpretation that
you intended, are distinct.
In simpler language, that you're not idiots, but not managing to explain
things very well either, at least partly due to some internal
disagreements. It is possible that there have been statements made about
several versions of Lisp that are inconsistent if treated as statements
solely about Common Lisp, as well, and therefore that the impression of
Lisp you have created inadvertently is of a chimerical fusion of several
actual Lisps, yet identical to none of them.
(In much of the above, "you" can be taken as referring to multiple
persons from comp.lang.lisp, rather than you personally.)
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Seamus MacRae
Adlai said:
What they show is that I haven't used Lisp in quite a while and don't
have a reference or an implementation handy at the moment, nothing more.
The remainder of your insults and unwarranted jumping-to-conclusions has
been deleted without dignifying any of it with point-by-point responses.
Suffice it to say that Google's archiving of your post will be more
embarrassing to you than to me.
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
No, it's a silly question, since it's clearly irrelevant to the great
Lisp vs. Java debate.
It does not. Personal attacks from you, however, do seem to "happen all
the time". Perhaps you should find something more constructive to do?
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
How is anything that I have said in response to Adlai any of your concern?
That is not treating me with respect. That is launching another insipid,
pointless, and irrelevant personal attack into this Java versus Lisp
debate. Not only that, you couldn't even be arsed to be original.
Irrelevant.
S
Seamus MacRae
Then why work so hard at it, posting here constantly to needle me and
say nothing constructive about either Java or Lisp?
I'm demonstrating nothing of the sort. Why should I wish to bite a
bullet? Firearm ammunition is not edible.
You are being controlled by your need to make others appear incorrect.
There what is? I made a polite request that you not continue to clutter
up two newsgroups with off-topic posts. Hardly unreasonable.
My request that people abide by the charters of two newsgroups hardly
constitutes insistence on anything. It is simply a reminder of basic
netiquette, something you clearly lack experience of.
Neither. At no time did I say that I would only say it once more. I said
that I would say it at least once more.
No, that I SHOULD only have to say something once. There really is no
point in one of you repeating something over and over again ad nauseam.
Once you have said it, you have said it.
You are wasting your time and our bandwidth, and, in particular, you are
not advancing your position with respect to Lisp's putative superiority
over Java.
You are fruitlessly spinning your wheels.
This quite clearly cannot be correct. The only way to remove the
misinformation would be to destroy Google's servers, and their backup
tapes. It follows from the illegal, vandalous, and infeasible nature of
such a task that in practice one cannot remove it at all, and must
instead combat it in some other way, perhaps by spreading an equal and
opposite message, in some sense of the phrase "equal and opposite".
Removing myself from the conversation would only result in it continuing
"behind my back", as it were, hardly a desirable state of affairs from
my point of view.
That is not your decision to make. It is an arrogant presumption of
yours to profess to have both the wisdom and the authority to dictate to
me what I "must" do, particularly when the evidence suggests instead
that you possess neither.
No, it does not. Your recent posts have exclusively been about this
"controlling people" obsession of yours, which is a completely unrelated
topic. I shall add that that obsession seems unhealthy. Perhaps you'd be
more comfortable in a Communist country? I can recommend China as well
as North Korea, if people controlling people is what turns you on.
Not everybody shares your fascination. Furthermore, even if this
justifies your posting of large volumes of off-topic material to
comp.lang.lisp, you shall have to search elsewhere for a justification
for posting it to comp.lang.java.programmer, and I suspect that your
search will be long and fruitless.
I've done nothing of the sort. I have in fact used Lisp in the past,
though not recently. Furthermore, I may well learn more about it and use
it again in the future. I have no particular intentions like that now,
but that is hardly a refusal of any kind, merely a possibly-temporary
lack of interest.
Google's archive of this thread should suffice to prove that statement
incorrect.
It certainly does. Your concern is clear: almost your every word part of
an attempt to convince me to stop posting. There are only three likely
goals of yours that a successful such attempt would aid you in
accomplishing:
1. To spread disinformation about me unopposed.
2. To have the last word.
3. To reduce the amount of off-topic material in comp.lang.lisp.
However, it is clear that posting to tell me, very elaborately, to shut
up is failing to achieve all three goals. Furthermore, you could make
greater progress with goal three by ceasing to reply to my posts than
you will by continuing to do so. If your goal were solely number three,
your strategy would therefore be different. It follows that your goals
include at least one of the first two items. If it includes item two,
we're done. If it includes item one, however, a closer examination of
the strategy is in order.
That goal, to spread disinformation about me unopposed, can be furthered
in two ways: one, by posting more disinformation, and two, by
obstructing efforts at opposition. Posting anything, including just
endless repetitions of "Seamus is an idiot", would suffice to apply
method one. Attempting to coax or coerce me into remaining silent falls
clearly within method two.
Success via method two takes the form of your posting something
disingenuous about me and my failing to reply to correct the inaccurate
portrayal. In other words, it takes the form of your getting the last
word. In other words, even if your primary aim is goal number one on
that list up there, goal number two is a secondary objective in
furtherance of goal number one.
From the above reasoning it is concluded that your goals include,
though perhaps are not limited to, having the last word.
Since your behavior is antagonistic and its effects upon me deleterious,
you'll pardon me if I don't believe you.
But I am not. If your aim is to have the last world, and you are a
child, then I would have been bested by a child only if you had
succeeded in having the last word. Thus far, nothing of the sort has
occurred and there is no indication at this time that it ever will.
Furthermore, you conflated the notion of your being childish with the
notion of your being a child. The two are not, however, identical.
I am a vertebrate. Please be more careful in the future when making wild
guesses about an organism's phylogenetic status.
This statement is illogical. I can only assume it stems from a system of
religious faith, or some similar world-view, given its clearly
irrational character and its resemblance to the tenets of the numerous
submission-oriented belief systems that were originally promulgated in
early agricultural civilizations and reached their peak during the
feudal period because they aided in the preservation of the power
structures of societies with those forms of organization, in which a
small number of despots maintained control over a large number of farm
laborers. Clearly such a society is rendered more stable by convincing
the laborers that they are better off submitting than attempting to
stage a revolution, particularly as they outnumber the overlords and
wield sharp objects in their day-to-day work. Thus the beliefs enabled
the societies that carried them to outcompete those that did not, and
those societies in turn propagated the beliefs further, a relationship
not unlike a host and symbiote in biology.
More egalitarian societies have no use for such belief systems, however,
and they are detrimental to human dignity, freedom from oppression,
egalitarian values, technological advancement, and industrial
productivity. As a result, they are themselves now being outcompeted.
I suggest, therefore, that you abandon yours as obsolete.
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
You keep saying that. It doesn't become any truer from repetition; it's
simply false. Nor would it be evidence in favor of either Lisp or Java
were it true.
This is also not relevant to either Lisp or Java. I suspect you intended
it as a disparagement, but it fails to accomplish even that dubious goal.
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
I did not.
It indicates that the email provider has servers in Canada. Since it is
a free web-based email, however, the location of the servers says little
about where any particular user is located.
P
Paul Foley
Seamus MacRae said:
Context matters. In some contexts (x y) is two parameter names. In
some contexts, it's a name and a value. In some, it's a function and
argument. In some it's a variable name and type. In some, it's just
data - a two-element list. Etc. None of those are ambiguous.
If you ignore and circumvent the type system, you either get errors at
compile time (if Lisp can detect what you've done), errors at run time
(if the compiler is set to perform run-time checks), or segfaults and
other misbehaviour at run-time (if it isn't)
Just a pointless example. Extend it to whatever range you like.
[And any random value that fits the specification, from a source that
knows nothing about your "class of your own devising" should test as
being of that type]
It'll do /that/ much in Lisp (might even check them at compile time);
but it's not likely to compile better code with that information,
etc., the way it can if it knows you have an integer that fits in a
hardware register, etc.
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Seamus MacRae
Arne said:
I did not, until I quoted and replied to a remark on that topic by you.
This has nothing to do with any supposed inability to learn to use an
editor, only the limited capacity for memorizing trivia that most human
brains have, along with the complexity of the particular editor in
question and the deficiencies of its help and user-interface.
It is a vast and unsupported leap from "a user finds a particular
editor's interface cumbersome" to "that user is incapable of learning to
use any editors at all".
Please be more careful next time, lest you take another tumble from a
high place. Instead, you leap to the attack without looking before you
leap, and look where it gets you.
If you want a further argument, I have a reductio ad absurdum one for
you: if your logic were sound, it would necessarily follow by the same
kind of reasoning that anyone who found any piece of software whatsoever
difficult to use, and in particular had to sometimes think about how to
make it do a particular task, was incapable of learning to use software.
Yet this conclusion is clearly unreasonable. Obviously, there is
software that you would find cumbersome to use, perhaps due to its
interface or simply its complexity. CAD software, perhaps, or specialist
financial tools. Yet you clearly are capable of using some software.
Your ability to use a newsreader is evident, though unfortunate given
your apparent inability to think of anything to post that makes the
world a better rather than a worse place.
The overall structure of the argument you have made is particularly rotten:
* Seamus has trouble using a particular editor's interface; the editor
in question has a primitive, pre-1990s one.
* Therefore Seamus is incapable of using any text editor.
* Therefore (implied) Seamus is an idiot.
* (established elsewhere) Seamus advocated in favor of Java over Lisp.
* Therefore (the topic of the debate) Lisp is better than Java.
The first statement is true. The second is false, as evidenced by my
composing this post in the one built into Thunderbird, and indeed it
does not follow from the first for the reasons previously outlined. The
third statement is false and furthermore it fails to follow from the
second -- a blind mute quadriplegic would be incapable of using an
editor regardless of his IQ. The fourth statement is true and
independent of the first three; it's the second, and an implied, premise
in your argument. And finally, the statement about Lisp does not follow
from statements three and four, because the syllogism formed by the
final three statements is a fallacious argumentum ad hominem argument
rather than a rational one.