Who were the opponents of Lisp?
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From: Don Phillipson on 20 Apr 2010 19:22 Robert Uhl <eadmun...(a)NOSPAMgmail.com> wrote: > As Halmos said in his classic little essay: > > http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/pg/data/halmosw.pdf [3.3 MB, 30 pages] > How to write mathematics > P. R. Halmos > ... > 6. Write in Spirals > The best way to start writing, perhaps the only way, is to write > on the spiral plan. According to the spiral plan the chapters get > written in the order 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. You think you > know how to write Chapter 1, but after you have done it and gone > on to Chapter 2, you'll realize that you could have done a better > job on Chapter 2 if you had done Chapter 1 differently. There is > no help for it but to go back, do Chapter 1 again differently, do a > better job on Chapter 2, and then dive into Chapter 3. And of course > you know what will happen: Chapter 3 will show up the weaknesses of > Chapters 1 and 2, and there is no help for it... etc., etc., etc. This is the method recommended by some professional authors (Somerset Maugham and P.D. James come to mind) who say every day's work should begin by rereading at least the previous week's output. > I especially have always liked this bit: > > When you come to rewrite, however, and however often that may > be necessary, do not edit but rewrite. It is tempting to use a > red pencil to indicate insertions, deletions, and permutations, > but in my experience it leads to catastrophic blunders. Against > human impatience, and against the all too human partiality everyone > feels toward his own words, a red pencil is much too feeble a weapon. > [...] Rewrite means write again -- every word. For literature (not mathematics) this is the opposite of most well-regarded advice. The best general maxim is to shorten wherever possible, removing words or whole sentences. (On computer, it takes no time to restore them if the writer has second thoughts.) It seems a mistake to plan to rewrite every word regardless of differences between the first, second and third class qualities of what you wrote earlier. -- Don Phillipson Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada)
From: Peter Moylan on 21 Apr 2010 07:41 Don Phillipson wrote: > Robert Uhl <eadmun...(a)NOSPAMgmail.com> wrote: > >> As Halmos said in his classic little essay: >> >> http://www.maths.ed.ac.uk/pg/data/halmosw.pdf [3.3 MB, 30 pages] >> How to write mathematics >> P. R. Halmos >> ... >> 6. Write in Spirals >> The best way to start writing, perhaps the only way, is to write >> on the spiral plan. According to the spiral plan the chapters get >> written in the order 1, 2, 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. You think you >> know how to write Chapter 1, but after you have done it and gone >> on to Chapter 2, you'll realize that you could have done a better >> job on Chapter 2 if you had done Chapter 1 differently. There is >> no help for it but to go back, do Chapter 1 again differently, do a >> better job on Chapter 2, and then dive into Chapter 3. And of course >> you know what will happen: Chapter 3 will show up the weaknesses of >> Chapters 1 and 2, and there is no help for it... etc., etc., etc. > > This is the method recommended by some professional > authors (Somerset Maugham and P.D. James come to mind) > who say every day's work should begin by rereading at least > the previous week's output. > >> I especially have always liked this bit: >> >> When you come to rewrite, however, and however often that may >> be necessary, do not edit but rewrite. It is tempting to use a >> red pencil to indicate insertions, deletions, and permutations, >> but in my experience it leads to catastrophic blunders. Against >> human impatience, and against the all too human partiality everyone >> feels toward his own words, a red pencil is much too feeble a weapon. >> [...] Rewrite means write again -- every word. > > For literature (not mathematics) this is the opposite of most > well-regarded advice. The best general maxim is to shorten > wherever possible, removing words or whole sentences. (On > computer, it takes no time to restore them if the writer has > second thoughts.) It seems a mistake to plan to rewrite every > word regardless of differences between the first, second and third > class qualities of what you wrote earlier. > Most of the writing I have done has been technical writing - research papers, lecture notes, etc. - and I started doing that before the days of word processors, when cut-and-paste had a much more literal meaning. Any correction was likely to mean that the typist had to redo an entire page. Whether it was for that reason, or some other, I don't know; but I adopted a rule that said "Don't revise; get it right the first time". This has served me well over the years. I do revise things like e-mails, which is perhaps a little silly. For serious writing, I write once, and that is the final result. In my experience, revisions only lower the quality. Now and then, of course, what I write is complete junk. I don't revise that either. It goes straight into the garbage junk. I then either rewrite from scratch, or abandon the project. (A lot of my writing was heavily mathematical, too. In that case I did revise, in a sense, but not in the way Halmos meant. Instead, I used a method of successive refinement, where I started with an outline and then gradually filled in the details. You have to do that if you want to present theorems but haven't yet figured out the proofs.) Here's an interesting example from my teaching computer programming. Programmers typically expect to have to revise over and over, with numerous recompilations as errors are revealed. Once, though, I set a programming assignment with the rule "You only get one chance to have it compile and run correctly." (This was in the days of punched cards, where the turnaround was one compilation per day.) Remarkably, about 70% of the class turned in a working program. Since the students knew they couldn't use trial and error, they took more care to avoid inserting the errors in the first place. Modern programming languages, especially the object-oriented ones, seem to encourage a philosophy of "Let's try this and see whether it works". That's a big mistake, in my opinion. -- Peter Moylan, Newcastle, NSW, Australia. http://www.pmoylan.org For an e-mail address, see my web page.
From: Adam Funk on 21 Apr 2010 08:00 On 2010-04-20, Xah Lee wrote: > Actually, just yesterday i wrote: > > • The Writing Style on XahLee.org > http://xahlee.org/Periodic_dosage_dir/bangu/xah_style.html The paragraph on dashes goes against every standard for English that I've seen. In typeset work, em-dashes should never be spaced (although I use " --- " for them in plain-text formats such as USENET), and there is a useful distinction between em- and en-dashes (the latter are for ranges of numbers, for example). Many British publishers follow a custom of using spaced en-dashes instead of em-dashes; I don't like this, but at least they are making the distinction. -- Mathematiker sind wie Franzosen: Was man ihnen auch sagt, übersetzen sie in ihre eigene Sprache, so daß unverzüglich etwas völlig anderes daraus wird. [Goethe]
From: Tim Bradshaw on 21 Apr 2010 08:21 On 2010-04-21 00:22:25 +0100, Don Phillipson said: > For literature (not mathematics) this is the opposite of most > well-regarded advice. The best general maxim is to shorten > wherever possible, removing words or whole sentences. (On > computer, it takes no time to restore them if the writer has > second thoughts.) It seems a mistake to plan to rewrite every > word regardless of differences between the first, second and third > class qualities of what you wrote earlier. I don't think the quote is about shortening or otherwise. I think it is saying that, rather than annotating the text with a lot of markup to indicate changes, you should write out a new version of it. I think that, in the days of typewriters, this was clearly true - I have some (small) experience of sub-editing text, and you do quite rapidly end up with something which is hard to read. At that point you really need to type / write out a clean, new version of the text. I don't think this applies to text managed on a computer so much, although there is still a question as to whether it's better to hand write or type, and if you type do you do it on a typewriter which does not allow editing or a computer? Obviously most people do the latter, at least for non-mathematical text. --tim
From: Tim Bradshaw on 21 Apr 2010 08:38
On 2010-04-21 13:00:16 +0100, Adam Funk said: > Many British > publishers follow a custom of using spaced en-dashes instead of > em-dashes; I don't like this, but at least they are making the > distinction. I am not sure this is right, though I may be wrong. I think you see spaced en-dashes, and unspaced em-dashes for different things. I've not done enough careful reading recently to be sure, however, and it may be that there has been a historical shift - certainly I'm reasonably sure that people like Jane Austen (or her publisher) would have used unspaced em-dashes a lot more than you now see, and it may be that you never see them now. I agree with you about the spacing/not-spacing thing (the dash above would be an en-dash if I thought it would not cause my newsreader to use some weird encoding which the server would reject). |