Who were the opponents of Lisp?
in [Lisp]
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From: His kennyness on 27 Mar 2010 23:04 Tim Bradshaw wrote: > On 2010-03-27 17:06:13 +0000, His kennyness said: > >> It took him ten years just to lay out type > > To be fair, I think he basically had to discover how typography works, Right, and I am supposed to pay for his self-education? He set out on a programming task and got distracted into a typesetting task. Clear sign of a weak mind. He is a computer science professor and his contribution to computer science was to explain that Lisp was a mistake. QED/RIP. > including mathematical typography, invent algorithms that could do a > decent job of it, implement them and (not least) design a typeface (OK, > a horrible typeface,.. He giveth with one hand and taketh with the other. > but I think he was constrained by the typeface his > publisher had already used) and write a program in which to implement > that design. > > That's actually pretty good going for ten years. Sure, if one is fundamentally a useless academic. > >> TeX is notoriously hard to mark up, > > TeX is indeed a horrible language > >> and there is no wysiwyg GUI. > > People who can type generally don't want such. Never ever having had one, they are not in a position not to want one. Given a horrible language, wysiwyg is a necessary language tutor. I am sorry I had to explain that. But wysiwyg was beyond knuth, he's...an academic. They know nothing about teaching (see "Costanza, P." .ca 2007) > Though TeX is horrible, You could not stop there? > ..it is still a pretty good way of creating printed maths - certainly far > better than anything else I've seen. And in ten years I could implement cold fusion. Not seeing the win here. kt > > (None of this should be taken as implying I think Knuth has anything > interesting to say about programming languages: I don't.) >
From: Tim Bradshaw on 28 Mar 2010 18:06 On 2010-03-28 04:04:40 +0100, His kennyness said: > > Right, and I am supposed to pay for his self-education? He set out on a > programming task and got distracted into a typesetting task. And in the process invented what a tool which has enormously improved the ability of people who use maths in their work to communicate. Yes, you are meant to pay for that. > Clear sign of a weak mind. He is a computer science professor and his > contribution to computer science was to explain that Lisp was a mistake. No. >> >> People who can type generally don't want such. [GUIs] > > Never ever having had one, they are not in a position not to want one. They have many, of course, and yet somehow they still persist in typing. I have at least two good ones to hand, and I still type stuff in TeX when I need to type maths. > > And in ten years I could implement cold fusion. Not seeing the win here. Good, go and do so! You will both make yourself extremely rich, and solve the world's energy problems at a stroke. Hot fusion would do, in fact.
From: His kennyness on 28 Mar 2010 21:14 Tim Bradshaw wrote: > On 2010-03-28 04:04:40 +0100, His kennyness said: >> >> Right, and I am supposed to pay for his self-education? He set out on >> a programming task and got distracted into a typesetting task. > > And in the process invented what a tool which has enormously improved > the ability of people who use maths in their work to communicate. Yes, > you are meant to pay for that. hey, at least it is an honest application, something I always whine about academics needing to do more. > >> Clear sign of a weak mind. He is a computer science professor and his >> contribution to computer science was to explain that Lisp was a mistake. > > No. > >>> >>> People who can type generally don't want such. [GUIs] >> >> Never ever having had one, they are not in a position not to want one. > > They have many, of course, and yet somehow they still persist in > typing. I have at least two good ones to hand, and I still type stuff > in TeX when I need to type maths. Actually, text is good. I certainly would not want a visual programming language. But I doubt you have experienced a serious math editor unless you have played with this: http://www.stuckonalgebra.com/index.html > >> >> And in ten years I could implement cold fusion. Not seeing the win here. > > Good, go and do so! You will both make yourself extremely rich, and > solve the world's energy problems at a stroke. Hot fusion would do, in > fact. > Funny you should mention that. I googled the princton reactor recently to see what they were up to. Plug pulled, 1997. I wonder how warm superconductivity is doing. As for solving the world's energy problem, I think having limitless cheap environmentally clean energy would be the worst thing that could happen to the planet: imagine what we would do to it then. hk
From: Tim Bradshaw on 29 Mar 2010 10:41 On 2010-03-29 13:02:54 +0100, Tamas K Papp said: > I am not sure that I would want to capture semantics when I am typing > math, it would usually add a lot of overhead. A lot symbols/conventions > are used for various different things, depending on the context. I agree with this. I also suspect that for most people who actually do a lot of maths in their work, the semantics is often pretty vague. I think people often think of everything being enormously precise, but my esperience was that there is a fair amount of hand-waving even among proper mathematicians (I was a physicist so obviously I waved my hands really a lot). > > Although you can program in TeX, very few people think of TeX as a > programming language. Its main focus is not programming, but typing > mathematical text, and that it does rather well (there are no serious > competitors in its market). The "programming" one can do in TeX is > just it for extending the language, and most TeX users don't have to > do any of that. What I specifically meant is that TeX is, I think, unduly abominable if you need to write non-trivial macros. You can do it, of course, and people do write very complex packages (witness LaTeX and even plain TeX), but it just should not need to be that difficult and unpleasant. > > Even though I am sometimes frustrated with TeX, I admire it as an > achievement. Created decades ago, it is still the most used > typesetting environment for texts that use math. People who dislike > TeX have hard time convincing others, because it TeX gets the job > done, so it is good enough. Yes. I would still use it if I needed to type maths.
From: Scott Burson on 31 Mar 2010 01:19
On Mar 25, 2:39 pm, Mark Tarver <dr.mtar...(a)ukonline.co.uk> wrote: > > David Turner for one. There is a famous quote from him. > > 'It needs to be said very firmly that LISP, at least as represented by > the dialects in common use, is not a functional language at > all. ....... My suspicion is that the success of Lisp set back the > development of a properly functional style of programming by at least > ten years.' I can't speak to that directly, but I do recall that in 1980, when I was trying to adopt a more functional style in ZetaLisp, I had to invent some tools to make it easier. I wasn't aware of the work going on in functional languages, so what I did was somewhat idiosyncratic, but the point is that I don't recall anyone else around the MIT AI lab trying to write as much functional code as I was (though I never tried to write only functionally). I think Lisp always held the potential for writing at least a fair amount of functional code, but it required a certain determination and willingness to go against the prevailing culture to realize that potential. -- Scott |