Genuine computer Scrience >Re: Autocoding project proposal.

[Stefaan A Eeckels]

On Mon, 28 Jan 2002 16:53:17 GMT
"Timothy Rue" <threeseas at earthlink.net> wrote:

> This is to those who in reading this, will know who they are.
> 
> 
> Genuine Computer Science doesn't have any place for the emotional pissing
> matches that's gone on in this autocoding thread.
> 
> This Project is NOT a pissing Match Project.
> 
> It is computer science.
> 
> A configuration of computer functionality that provides a tool of Virtual
> Interaction as refered to in the field of science called Physics.
> 
> But unlike how the Term is used in Physics to describe a physical particle
> traveling map of all possibilities, the way it is used here is to
> describe the particles called "abstraction" and allow it to move on all
> possible paths in the world of abstraction.

It doesn't seem useful to associate abstractions with particles. 

> Now that's probably hard to grasp for some of you.

No. What gives you the idea? 

> But just because you don't understand it, it doesn't mean you have a right
> and duty to piss on me.

Agreed. It's the fact of your posting to a public forum that gives us
the right to reply to you, and to reply in a way that you might not
like. You are not responsible for the reactions of others, and neither
are they for your reactions. If your idea has merit, it will survive
being laughed at.

> So knock it the Fu& off.

You should take the politician's attitude: "Positive or negative,
as long as people react to my posts I'm happy". 

> It's science, not a project to bath in emotions and ego.
> 
> But in doing such emotion bathing all that you accomplish is proving me
> right about the non-scientific corrupt intent of the industry. And maybe
> you should consider where I got that idea from! I call it "experience" in
> having to deal with such.

If you mean that the corrupt idea of the industry is to keep so-called
non-programmers from programming, then I think you suffer from a 
persecution complex. As has been pointed out, ever since COBOL and
FORTRAN the goal of language designers has been to make programming 
easier for non-programmers. COBOL was meant to allow clerks to 
describe the problem in business terms. FORTRAN was designed to be
familiar to scientists. BASIC was invented to provide programming
concepts in terms understandable by everyone.
What is a fact is that computer languages require the human to 
provide most (if not all) of the circumstancial information because
it is not accessible to the computer by its own means. This is
understandable, because the computer is not a human, and hence a lot
of the common assumptions that make human language possible aren't
available to the computer. Hence the task about making a computer
programmable by all is not an exercise in language design, but a
quest to endow computers with a human background (like the proverbial
HAL) that will enable them to infer the information that today needs to
be spelled out in great detail. It's these detailed enumerations of
how _not_ to behave as well as how to behave, that make programming
difficult for those not versed in the art. 

> If you want to prove me wrong, then prove me wrong about that, by
> genuinely helping on what is a project of logical computer science.

It's only partially a computer science project, as it deals with 
the interface between the human and the computer. Computer science
can not help you with human side of the interaction, which is far
more complex and far less understood than the computer side.

> Or at least not trying to hinder the project.

How can people hinder the project by posting to g.m.d? Just bow
out, stop posting and get on with coding VIC.

-- 
Stefaan (GPG Fingerprint 25D8 551B 4C0F BF73 3283 21F1 5978 D158 7539 76E4)
-- 
"Object-oriented programming is an exceptionally bad idea which
 could only have originated in California." --Edsger Dijkstra