do...until wisdom needed...

[Alex Martelli]

"Douglas Alan" <nessus at mit.edu> wrote in message
news:lcitk2escz.fsf at gaffa.mit.edu...
    [snip]
> I know one thing for sure: I know more about programming languages and
> programming language design than you do or ever will with your
> attitude.  Regarding listening to Alex, I'd listen to him if he
> weren't also a prick.

Possibly.  On the other hand, I seem to be slightly more refined
than you at Usenet flamewars, judging for example from the styles
used to insult -- rude, direct name-calling on one side, subtler
indirect venom on the other.


> I'll tell you who I've listened to quite
> carefully: Guido, who has a lot of good ideas, and the designers of
> Lisp (eg, Dave Moon, John McArthy, Guy Steele, all of whom I've met

You may have been so busy _listening_ that you never cared
enough to *read* anything by or about the second one of these
guys -- pretty hard, otherwise, to understand how such an
outstandingly brilliant individual as you could possibly
have so laughingly failed in such a simple spelling task.

Spelling flames are tacky, but, of course, here I'm engaging
in nothing of the kind: just trying, helpful as ever, to ease
the task of readers who might otherwise spend unfruitful time
looking for works by the McArthy guy.  John McCarthy's home
page is at http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/ and links to
many of his most important papers.

In particular, I wonder if you have read his 1980 paper he still
holds up (as of Jan 2001) as representing his current thinking
on LISP.  His comments there on POP2 succintly express his belief
that 'algol-ish' syntax (Python's is similar) is inappropriate
for a language where as in LISP "anyone can make his own fancy
macro recognizer and expander".  Also the note that even in LISP
"certain macro expansion systems" lead to "over complicated
systems when generalized" (although they "always work very nicely
on simple examples") is interestingly topical.  Fancy seeing you
quote the guy (albeit in a mis-spelled way) and asserting you
have "listened carefully" while apparently ignoring his words.
One might wonder if the LISTENING has resulted in any amount at
all of UNDERSTANDING.

Of course, the designers of _Dylan_ (who can hardly be accused
of being LISP-ignorant:-) disagree with this stance -- they
built a powerful language with algol-ish syntax and macros (as
we as truly powerful underlying semantics, multi-methods first
and foremost) and with it they've been trying to take over the
world for quite a bit longer than Python has.  Reflecting on
the similarities and differences, and the different amount of
success that has so far (the first 12 years or so...) smiled
on both endeavours, might perhaps (to a person of refined
perception) prove more fruitful than _just_ reading about
theories.  It appears to me that the crucial design-goal that
Python and Dylan did not share was *SIMPLICITY*.  Exactly what
such additions as a macro-system would destroy in Python.  Oh,
yea -- others of your pet theories, too, like optional use of
declarations, are prominent in Dylan (indeed, they are very
prominent there, though they focus on type-hierarchies and
the RAD-vs-optimization tradeoff rather than on trivialities
such as typos -- but anyway, there IS extra cruft^H^H^H^H
design effort to enable compile-time checking which Python
is definitely not oriented to).


> personally), who are far smatter than you, me, or Alex will ever be.

There is (fortunately, I think) no single axis along which
"smartness" is measured (cfr. Gould, "The Mismeasure of Man",
IMHO still his masterpiece, for a very well written and deep
examination of pseudo-scientific attempts to establish such
an axis, all the way up to that fraud named "the IQ").  I may
exhibit satisfactory mental performance in several activities,
such as program design, writing in natural languages other than
my native one (Italian), or declarer play in contract bridge,
and not in others such as _defensive_ play in contract bridge,
musical composition, or remembering where the heck I parked
my car. Some other individual may easily exhibit a completely
different mix of attitudes.  Although the querelle is unending
and moot, I'm personally sure that both innate and environmental
factors play a role -- in no other way could I explain to my
own satisfaction the large individual variations between people
raised very similarly AND at the same time such correlations
as are observed between performance at certain tasks and time
and place of birth and education (high population density of
excellent musicians and bridge-players in Italy, low _average_
performance at foreign languages of US natives wrt Northern
European ones, etc).

An interesting, if idle, pastime, is to wonder whether the
variety of human endeavours can possibly be so vast that
at some of them even _YOU_ might be called 'smart'... sure,
the mind boggles, and yet...


Alex