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From: Captain Obvious on 5 May 2010 10:53
??>> Do you think that McCarthy is stupid?

That was more of a rhetoric question.
Or rather a proof by contradiction -- if you don't think that McCarthy is
stupid, then you should reject a hypothesis that "symbolic expression" was
an established term an McCarthy have redefined it.

Hk> ISTR Lisp was shaped fundamentally by what even McCarthy concedes was a
Hk> misreading of Church. But that does not mean he is stupid, that means
Hk> he is a hacker at heart more interested in solving problems (AI) than
Hk> studying dead trees.

Well, sure.

From: Don Geddis on 5 May 2010 12:22
His kennyness <kentilton(a)gmail.com> wrote on Wed, 05 May 2010:
> ISTR Lisp was shaped fundamentally by what even McCarthy concedes was a
> misreading of Church.

In what way was McCarthy mistaken about Church's work?

And how did that impact Lisp?
_______________________________________________________________________________
Don Geddis http://don.geddis.org/ don(a)geddis.org
From: RG on 5 May 2010 13:50
In article <87eihqtj2s.fsf(a)mail.geddis.org>,
Don Geddis <don(a)geddis.org> wrote:

> His kennyness <kentilton(a)gmail.com> wrote on Wed, 05 May 2010:
> > ISTR Lisp was shaped fundamentally by what even McCarthy concedes was a
> > misreading of Church.
>
> In what way was McCarthy mistaken about Church's work?
>
> And how did that impact Lisp?

"Mistaken" is putting it a bit strongly:

"To use functions as arguments, one needs a notation for functions, and
it seemed natural to use the lambda-notation of Church (1941). I didn't
understand the rest of his book, so I wasn't tempted to try to implement
his more general mechanism for defining functions. Church used higher
order functionals instead of using conditional expressions. Conditional
expressions are much more readily implemented on computers."

http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/node2.html

rg
From: Duane Rettig on 7 May 2010 10:05
On May 5, 1:13 am, "Captain Obvious" <udode...(a)users.sourceforge.net>
wrote:
>  ??>> Once again, McCarthy _defines_ what symbolic expressions are, in his
>  ??>> own way. If he would take some widely used term and hijack it defining
>  ??>> it in its own way, that would be really stupid. Do you think that
>  ??>> McCarthy is stupid?
>  ??>>
>  KM> You are too emotional.
>
> Huh? That was logical reasoning.. Syllogism.

A logic that has a flawed assumption.

>  (1) McCarthy creates new definition for symbolic expression.
>  (2) One who creates new definition for something which is already defined
> in other way is dumb.
>  (3) Symbolic expressions were already defined.
> => (4) McCarthy is dumb.

What makes you assume (2)?

Duane
From: Captain Obvious on 7 May 2010 19:00
DR> A logic that has a flawed assumption.

I guess most practical syllogisms have overly general and not quite right
assumptions...

??>> (1) McCarthy creates new definition for symbolic expression.
??>> (2) One who creates new definition for something which is already
??>> defined in other way is dumb. (3) Symbolic expressions were already
??>> defined. => (4) McCarthy is dumb.

DR> What makes you assume (2)?

Of course, it is only a problem when new definition means a different thing,
significantly different from the old one, that is.
Then it creates confusion -- when term is mentioned, it is not clear whether
it means one thing or another and it needs to be clarified.
Or, if it is not clarified, misunderstanding can happen, and it is bad.

For example, "functional programming". Some time ago in this group we've
established that it can mean two things:
1. programming style which uses first-class functions and closures a lot
2. programming style which avoids side effects at all costs
(Perhaps there are other things too, but let's focus on these two.)

Now imagine you're reading a resume which says that person knows "functional
programming".
What a hell does it mean? If it is "functional programming" in first sense,
then it might mean that person used closures, perhaps as callbacks in
JavaScript, and it doesn't mean a lot -- that stuff is mainstream and there
are lots of programmers who know this.
But if it is "functional programming" in the second sense, then perhaps
person knows how to work with immutable data structures and write
side-effectless algorithms, that's much more rare knowledge at it might be
very useful.

So, if we've established that giving terms other meanings is bad, we can
move to the dumb thing.
McCarthy is a scientist. Scientists are supposed to work on making things
more clear, not on confusing people.
Why would a scientist add confusion?
* either he doesn't realise he does, then he is dumb
* or he does this deliberately, then he is malicious, as doing a bad thing
deliberately is a definition of being malicios

So he is either dumb or malicious. But this kind of an evil act won't go
unnoticed. And that might impact scientist reputation.
Smart malicious people should work in more subtle ways.
So we have only one possibility -- that scientist is dumb if he does that.

There is also some uncertainly on what qualifies as redefinition. If those
terms are used in unrelated contexts then it is probably ok, as one can
deduce meaning from context.
But I wouldn't call that a smart move, since it still might cause problems.
E.g. you search it in Google and it shows you totally unrelated results from
the same term from different fields, then you need to narrow down search,
and this is not easy.
So it is better to make things as unambiguous as possible, and I think
scientists know this. At least now, when there is Google... I dunno, can it
cause confusing in the library index?

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