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State of the Onion 7
chromatic writes "One of the highlights of every OSCON is Larry Wall's annual State of the Onion address, covering Perl, philosophy, linguistics, music, theology, science, and usually a few other things thrown in for good measure. His talk from OSCON 2003, State of the Onion 7, is now online."
heh...polly wanna cracker?
I read this first page, thinking "this is quite amusing". I think got to the bottom, and saw it was 11 pages long. I don't think I've *ever* read something 11 pages long online in my life. The end of page 1 he's on about deconstructionism. I skip randomly to page 7. First paragraph:
"Let's take another look at the pink tennis court. I mean, the universal architectural diagram. It really isn't quite as universal as I've made it out to be. First, let's get rid of the pink."
This is the thoughts of the man behind perl. This explains a *lot* about perl.
Read reviews of shopping cart software
Is Larry a slashdot regular ? :)
Now, some of you young folks are too steeped in postmodernism to know anything about postmodernism, so let's review. Postmodernism in its most vicious form started out with the notion that there exist various cultural constructs, or texts, or memes, that allow some human beings to oppress other human beings. Of course, in Soviet Russia it's the other way around. Which is why they managed to deconstruct themselves, I guess.
Well... it isn't very funny anymore, and they have too many ads. I mean how many times can you read a story like "Local Man Proud of Coffee Cup Collection?"
Slashdotter are stupid and biased.
Anyone else expecting a link to a cover story from The Onion?
Karma: NaN
For those who are wondering, a 'pony' is cockney rhyming slang for crap:
Pony and trap: crap.
Funny, I saw no statements from T. Herman Zweibel regarding the state of The Onion...
There are some people that if they don't know, you can't tell 'em.
mod me down as troll if you wish, but I have one question: why doesn't he aknowledge that Perl has reached its goals long ago and give up development. Seriously, what's the point?
The similiarities are beyond skin-deep
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
'state of the onion' address is here
Boy, was this right on target or what?
Creationists are a lot like zombies. Slow, but powerful and numerous. And they all want to eat our brains.
What, better than making geek jokes? Are you mad? Perl-ease! ;-)
J.
You're only jealous cos the little penguins are talking to me.
What a cheap comment. Who modded this to +5, are we suddenly all Perl haters too ?
I don't know Perl, but I know I like the text and I get his points. It makes me consider studying Perl.
There is some really interesting low level language stuff going on. State of the art I suspect.
You sir, are part of the ungrateful and you are certainly unwilling to get any clue about the article at all. You only produce a cheap flamebait...
In his speech Wall referred to an attempt by Python to attempt to buy a high powered regular expression engine from a small African nation. This statement was later noted to be incorrect.
I think the Perl6 effort should concentrate on real short term acheivable results rather than claim to support all languages. The runtime behavior of Java or C#, for instance, could never be properly supported by Parrot due to the lack of thread support and the structural changes it would require to support these JVM/CLR thread constructs. Sure, anything could be done - but at what cost? It would take many man years of effort just for this one feature. It's not worth it if it would delay the completion of Perl 6 by several years. Ponie is a step in the right direction. Parrot should just concentrate on Perl. When people see these smaller milestones being acheived there will be more interest in the project as a whole and it would increase its chance of success. Otherwise it will likely end up like Topaz before it.
I still maintain that whoever wrote this MUST have worked in IT.
We the unwilling,
led by the unknowing,
are doing the impossible
for the ungrateful.
We have done so much for so long with so little
We are now qualified to do anything with nothing.
Blog,Twitter
For God's sake, give this man back his caffeine!
Take life easy: one bit at a time.
Dry, funny, in touch with hacker culture, informed, astutely political, funny, broadly educated, an enthralling speaker, a brilliant coder and funny again...
Larry Wall is everything that Eric Raymond believes himself to be.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
Source here.
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
Geez as open-minded as people on Slashdot claim to be, anytime something different comes along let the flames fly!! You don't have to like Perl, but why flame Larry for that? How many of you built a an extremely popular programing language from the ground up. I mean surely Perl must have gotten something right or growing numbers of people wouldn't have used it for the last 14? years and ported it to more platforms than I can count.
Sure Larry can be a bit eccentric but he's mildly amusing and he has some really good ideas about language design that challange the current ones. He's also willing to learn from good ideas from other languages (Creating a VM for example for multiple languages to target to).
And another thing, the whole "You can't read Perl or figure out old programs" bit is getting old. You can do that in ANY language. You can also follow some generally accepted formatting rules and your code will look just fine and be readable by any halfway experienced coder.
Rant off.
The Anti-Blog
Larry Wall is clearly a genious, and actually has a huge range of interests aside from software. One year, he talked about chemistry. The last time I was at the Open Source conference, he talked about music (and demonstrated his abilities in playing about 30 different instruments). I can still remember the puzzled look on many people's faces and some even getting up and leaving. So this year, the theme is jokes ...
For the harcore Perl person, I guess the key is to look carefully for anything related to the future of the language in between all the silliness. Maybe he's trying to tell everyone there are a great many things to life outside programming. More likely he's just got a twisted sense of humor. I found the best thing to do was to kick back and enjoy it for the entertainment value - a relatively tough concept when you're not seeing it in person and only looking at a printout though :-(
Did Larry mean Painted Pony?
Don't Tread on OpenSource
of Larry's genius. Discussing 'memes', Larry happens to weave in the 'In Soviet Russia...' meme without drawing too much attention to it.
You've unintentionally nailed a fairly deep truth about both Larry and Perl.
Both are very, very amusing/accessible, and very complex.
If you skip around in an attempt to "get" either of them, looking for an executive summary, you end up walking away scratching your head, because neither was "designed" (although Larry would have no trouble with that word, I do) that way. They both evolved (and now I'd really wonder what Larry would say to *that*).
But if you give a little time towards trying to understand them, both are hugely rewarding, make you think, and have proven themselves extremely useful.
The "peeling an onion" metaphor is is especially apt - there's always something new to learn.
I forget what 8 was for.
to know that Larry covered that in his speech and somewhat dismissed the Mother Teresa connection (the quote has been attributed to all sorts of people). Yes, he talked about every random topic you could possibly think of.
... I don't quite understand you but that's ok. Just please don't ever offer me anything of the stuff you smoke. :-)
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
-Cyc
/.'s 10 Millionth
Know why? They're probably using HTML::Mason to script pages that should have been flat HTML. Instead, the cutesy query string for each page gets processed for every request.
And, golly, why break the talk up into 11 "pages" in the first place? For better advertising for O'Reilly, perhaps? Or do the webmasters think that we can't handle a long vertical scroll bar? Give it to me straight up!
Before you think this is a pure troll, I love Perl and I think Larry is cool. But I have yet, after many years of working with Perl, to come to grips with the business relationship between Perl and O'Reilly. (And yes, I have lot's of Nutshell books and most of the Perl lineup on my bookshelf.) C'mon, Tim, you can make money fast without resorting to counting every click-through on the perl.com site and ensuring there's a unique ad at the top of the page. That's so 90's.
Well it's pretty clear that you're trolling on both the Ruby-vs-Perl and criticize-the-man fronts simultaneously, but I'll answer with just one short statement on the latter anyway.
Ruby is a bloated godawful idiosyncratic mess with even less elegance than Perl, and it combines that with the unpardonable sin of being horribly slow:
Execution times for recursive FP factorial(n)
Language / seconds for n=1 n=180
C 0.001 0.013
Lua 0.010 0.080
Ocaml 0.130 0.180
Perl 0.020 0.360
Python 0.110 0.780
Ruby 0.290 1.230
So, good luck to you, always nice to see a troller make the wrong decision and limit his future prospects.
Perhaps his prior "State of the Onion"s are better... can't say I've read them.
I don't know Mr. Wall, but from the way others gush about him, I suspect he is an interesting fellow, and I certainly love Perl... but his humor doesn't appear to be his strong point. :(
His talk really could have been only 10 seconds:
o The movers of the world tend to be the unreasonable.
o Deconstructionism is about understanding and breaking down "oppressive" memes.
o Postmodernism is about using a common word to mean its opposite.
o Perl5 is done, a new Perl 5 based on Parrot will be called Ponie and will be the transition step to Perl 6, which will also be based on Parrot. (Which everyone who cares about Perl already knew anyway.)
If this a typical "State of the Onion", I hope the organizers cut him down to those ten seconds sooner, rather than later...
"Why should I be content to simply live in this world, when I, as a human being, can CREATE it?" - Oertel
...Onion was good, but to hear it you had to sit through five other "State of" speeches which were terminally boring. (Well, the "State of the Snake" wasn't boring, but its schizotypic references to the "Pythonic way" of doing things went a long way toward explaining why the Python community is so paranoid.)
A hidden gem appeared later in the week when Yukihiro "Matz" Matsumoto gave his "State of the Corundum" speech. (Actually it wasn't called that. It was called "The Power and Philosophy of Ruby.") The subtitle alone ("how to create babel-17") had the packed room buzzing before he started: "He's going to turn us into uber-assassins with no sense of self!"
The slides are available online (link above) and are definitely worth taking a look at. He's kinda sensitive about his English, so don't flame him unless your Japanese is better. Matz's philosophy is also guided by this maxim: "Be humble, be minor, be happy."
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Maybe I'm reading this wrong, but in all those pink tennis court diagrams was the concept of Parrot as a universal interpreter for Perl 5, Perl 6 & a heap pile of other languages. While it's an interesting concept in & of itself, it suggests to me that the advent of Perl 6 will not mean the demise of Perl 5, which is something I find quite comforting. And then Wall takes the "impossible object" widget, turns it into a comb & uses that to illustrate Parrot. Whoa!
This was the most fun read I've had in a while.
"Obviously, I'm not an IBM computer any more than I'm an ashtray" (Bob Dylan)
I found it interesting that Larry didn't mention how this is positioned (philosophically, or technically) in relation to .Net which is offering a similar sort of framework.
I guess one big difference here will be that you probably wont have to compile your programs, even down to byte-code - it will just do it on the fly. (At least it seems that it will be that way, given the current nature of perl)
What could be cool though would be being able to call code from python, perl, php, java, and whatever from within your app (which could be in any of these languages too). But I guess that is just the whole .Net buzz anyway - Theoretically at least.
Yes, working with Perl is very much like peeling an onion. After five minutes I walk away crying.
Listening to Larry's speeches also leaves me crying, but it's crying with laughter.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Perl remembers that you still have to use functions to cause things to happen. According to your fancy object-oriented stuff -- Java, Ruby and the like -- the recipe for making beans on toast goes like this; At least Perl remembers that you still have to execute functions. A saucepan on a stove is a function: you put something into it, it gets changed in some way {in this case it gets hotter}, and you take something out of it. Now, beans do have a measurable temperature, but to me at least it doesn't make any sense to imagine sliding the thermometer to cause the temperature of the beans to change. I expect to have to call a function to cause the beans to get hot.
Speaking of functions, I do love the way you call functions in Perl; you don't need to know or care in advance how many arguments your function is going to need, nor what to call them, because they just come through as one array which is always called @_. Oh, and Perl {and this definitely influenced PHP} indicates variable types with a prefix, so even within speech marks, it can spot a variable and insert the value.
PHP is a bit easier for creating web pages. It automates some of the things Perl makes you do for yourself {like grabbing form variables and function parameters} and you don't have to remember to send a MIME type, but comparing PHP to Perl is like comparing DJ's record decks to a Dansette autochanger. A DJ needs a level of control over the record playing process that automation would take away. Someone who just wants to listen to a stack of records from beginning to end and doesn't mind waiting a little while between songs doesn't need that level of control.
Another "feature" of Perl is that it's possible to write a piece of code you completely understand one day, and it to be so perfect, crystal-clear and obvious that commenting would spoil it; yet a mere 24 hours later, that same code whose beauty you appreciated and with which you Became One, has turned to gibberish.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
I grew up in BC, so I have no problem with Engrish. Instead I'd like to take a moment to flame his content:
It's actually a pretty good talk. Of particular amusement is his explanation (on slide 55) of why Ruby prefixes global identifiers with dollar signs.
Seems pointless to argue this point, since I can't imagine why it matters.. but Larry spoke first.
Personally, I found his speaking style mildly amusing, but only in a geeky way, and I can't stand geek humor despite being thoroughly a geek myself. I split after Guido spoke since I am a Python programmer.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
Wasn't that Tracy Lords?
Oh, sorry, I'm think of the Adult Film Best Actress Award...
Sharks and some other life forms haven't evolved* much in the last little while (although I assume with the presence of humans as predators, they are now). This is because they fit their niche perfectly. Most of the languages you mention, either do not fit their niche perfectly (as in the case of C++), have a rapidly changing niche (PHP), or don't really have a niche at all (Python). C, on the other hand, is nearly perfect for its purposes.
If you look at a list of the C99 features, they are either minor syntactic sugar (I know '//' comments will change my life) or issues with the standard library or preprocessor (both of which are far from perfect). Now contrast that with C++0x. The C language itself, as a form of portable assembler, cannot be significantly approved upon. Someday, maybe the rest of those languages will achieve such greatness, but I doubt it.
* By "evolved" I mean "experienced genus-wide change due to natural selection".
As far as I can tell from what I've read, Perl 6 is an attempt to make the world's most unreadable language. The purpose of the "mutability" is to allow programmers to change the language on the fly, right? So when you sit down to read a piece of Perl 6 code, first you'll have to figure out what changes were made to the language. It'll be just like LISP macros, except instead of having brackets all over the place you'll have every punctuation symbol in Unicode.
(Yes, that's the smart-match operator from Perl 6.)
It's about time someone made it explicit: the reason that Perl 5 is not being retired is because Perl 6 is just something for the developers to do. It's going to be too essoteric to be useful for anything that LISP isn't used for already. So if you're actually working for a living, don't waste your time reading about Perl 6, go contribute to the Perl 5 codebase instead: it's too important to be abandoned while the lead developers go jerk off.
in L.A., you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, the Party can always find YOU.
Does my bum look big in this?
Larry has an ulcer, poor health insurance and low income. Perl6 is large, complicated and not done yet. But they'd like to, you know, just include a little universal scripting language engine in there, as well as all the actual Perl stuff.
It's A Beautiful Mind all over again. Perl 6 is the Riemann Hypothesis. Larry Wall is John Nash, except there may never be a Nobel prize for scripting languages. It's going to kill him or drive him mad. Forget about killing Microsoft, how do we keep Larry alive and sane?
I largely agree with your points, except about regexps.
Does he want Perl 6 to be flex or something?
No, given the power of Perl6 regexps, a comparison to lex+yacc would be more appropriate. And I think this is one good thing, too. Strong parsing of data is IMO a very good thing to have tightly integrated into a language.
-Lasse
Try here or here.
Just trust that there are many talented people working on Perl 6.
"There is significant evidence suggesting that phonetic alphabets (such as Hiragana) are easier to learn and extend."
-Have you learned a non-phonetic alphabet before? Personally, I have great trouble reading only "hiragana." Kanji (chinese characters) set the flow of the sentence and helps the reader find the important ideas easily. I believe that once mastered, non-phonetic alphabets allow for faster and more accurate transfer of information. Since language is such an important tool throughout an individual's life, being easy to learn is probably the least important aspect of a good language.
"I could go into what Wittgenstein would say about that, but instead I'll just assert that conversations are not stored in plain-text, they're compressed. That's why you remember the gist long after the specific phrasing is gone."
-Maybe you should go into what Wittgenstein said . . . To me there has always been a clear distinction to me between speakers that are constantly converting languages in their heads and speakers that are actually using the second language to think. I have seen students understand things in Japanese (hw assignments) but when they return to the English speaking world for a week, they never retrieved that information (in time to do their hw). It is almost like in such cases the brain is storing this information in slightly different places.
"The Strong Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis has been largely discredited."
-Again, you might want to give a little more information than "so and so said so." Japanese as a second language speakers who do not change the way they think when speaking Japanese are very often misunderstood and rejected. Proper usage of a language requires certain assumptions which effects human thought. Just the type of words you will learn first (becuase they are considered the most important) will limit the type of thought possible when communicating with others.
"No, you need an interchange format. I assert that programming languages are a low-bandwidth method for communicating between brain-machines and computer-machines."
I think he is trying to point out that people can talk to one another easily because they have similar assumptions and machines can talk to one another easily because they are similar in design. However, when people and machines try to talk there is a "culture gap" that needs to also be addressed.
Maybe your and my comments are a result of culture gap? In which case we have further proven Matsumoto san's point about the importance of the assumptions (ways of thought, culture, human components) behind all languages, in which case I thank you for your participation.
Sdelat' Ameriku velikoy Snova!
It's interesting that these virtual machines exist primarily for strategic reasons. Each group wants to control their run-time platform. So they have to insert an interpretive layer between their language and the operating system. Why? Because the operating system is usually from Microsoft, and Microsoft keeps changing their API to lock people into Microsoft products.
It's worth noting that taking this route implies a battle with Microsoft. They hate it when someone puts a portable platform on top of their OS. Look what they did to Java, Netscape, Borland... This decision puts Perl on a collision course with Microsoft.
On a side note, I do not know Larry Walls feelings concerning biological evolution. I can say, however, that it would be wrong to assume that all Christians concider the theory of evolution incompatible with Biblical truth.
Have you learned a non-phonetic alphabet before?
I've learned enough to know how difficult it would be to be fluent. Why do they teach Chinese children pinyin? Why do the Japanese use hiragana, katakana, and romaji if kanji is so superior?
I believe that once mastered, non-phonetic alphabets allow for faster and more accurate transfer of information.
Faster, I might give you, but given the redundancy, interoperability, and modularity in phonetic alphabets I think that accuracy is not on your side. Europe took over the world because of their language, not in spite of it.
To me there has always been a clear distinction to me between speakers that are constantly converting languages in their heads and speakers that are actually using the second language to think.
Unfortunately, the history of Psychology and AI has shown that introspection and observation teaches you jack-all about what's actually going on inside someone's head. Yes, languages that are fluent are implemented in a different part of the brain than for those that are conscious symbol-manipulation, but that doesn't tell you anything about what format is being used underneath. By analogy, I challenge you to demonstrate whether your computer uses ones-complement or twos-complement arithmetic without opening the case.
Again, you might want to give a little more information than "so and so said so."
There's this thing called Google, please try and learn how to use it. Vocabulary does not limit thought, ideas limit thought -- otherwise how can you think something when you have the word "on the tip of your tongue"?
I approve of your cultural-gap interpretation of Matsumoto's claim. And my local Wittgenstein guru did not sign off on that part of my argument.
Restrict seems like a questionable attempt to graft bits of an effect system onto C's already tenuous type system. I'm not convinced that it's a great idea, but to tell you the truth, I haven't looked into it enough to be sure. Some people have, though.
But yeah, you're right: if it works it certainly is a significant development.
I am interested in language design and once did a fair amount of programming in Perl. So although I don't like it right now, I am interested in where it's going (and frankly, right now I'm having trouble figuring that out). Part of that interest is expressed as what I believe are valid criticisms (such as the parent) which I'd like Perl advocates to respond to. And some of it is an attempt to be funny -- I'm sorry if my attempts were so bad as to offend you, perhaps you should moderate them appropriately?
I am also in the process of praying for protection of those poor souls who post to let us know that they are considering learning Perl.
I dunno, the response to lini's question scares me.
So the best case scenario is that understanding Perl 6 programs written by gurus will require knowing the syntax of a bunch of other Parrot languages? Allowing you to write gluable libraries (like .Net) is one thing, but intermixing languages is just evil.
Objects have methods, is what I was saying. But it's senseless to pretend that a method belongs only to an object. It's just a function underneath, after all.
Why should I design a bean object with a method for heating it, when I can design a saucepan function that can make anything hotter, not just a bean?
Maybe I'm old fashioned. But that's the way I like it. And passing function parameters in Perl is nothing like in assembler, where you have to know exactly how much you're passing and where. If you pass in registers, you have to know which registers; and if you pass on the stack, you have to know how much of that stack to look at. Well, OK, you can make the first parameter say how many more are to follow. That's easy and I'll give you it.
Perl doesn't make artificial impositions on you, like insisting you treat strings, integers and floats separately. You don't have to call a function on an integer if you want to add it to a float. If you've got a string like "999 Lettsby Avenue", you can add 0 to it and get 999 or 999.0. Ooh, Perl just called a function behind my back. Or maybe it extracted a property from an object. Um.
Je fume. Tu fumes. Nous fûmes!
Sometimes he writes well. CatB is good. I also really like his rebuttal to SCO, although it benefited from other contributors.
His detractors make fun of stuff like this.
I don't think Perl is hard to follow. I think Perl makes it extremely easy to write hard to follow code though. But hard to follow code can be written in any language.
There are good programmers and bad programmers. Good programmers can write clear, easy to follow code in most languages (exceptions being Malbolge and Intercal). Bad programmers manage to make life incredibly difficult no matter what their chosen tongue.
I'd be reluctant to use Perl at work for any code that has to be maintained by anyone except myself. It's a very expressive language and it's way to easy for different, equally competent coders to come up with incompatible idioms. In constrast, a language like Java places strong restrictions on the way you approach coding in it. On the one hand this is a good thing because you can quickly figure out what another coder is doing. It's not so good because it sometimes prevents you finding the neatest (and easiest to follow) way of doing something.
That said, I really enjoy coding in Perl for fun for the same reasons I like Go and composing music: intellectual stimulation. I usually write Perl programs to solve real problems but non-critical ones. That way I can have fun exploring different ways of solving problems.
"Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge, and where is the knowledge we have lost in information?"-T.S.Eliot
This "article" reminds me of the song "Alice's Restaurant", by Arlo Guthrie, where he describes a police officer who "talked for forty-five minutes, and nobody understood a word that he said." I mean, I greatly respect Larry Wall and what he's accomplished, but that had to be *the* lamest speech I have ever read. If he had nothing to say, he could at least have tried to say it more succinctly.
(which he stole form MIT), and the second-half of fetchmail
(which he continued from earlier work).
THIS IS NOT SERIOUS WORK FOR ANY PROGRAMMER!
Your serious statement that Eric is "very important to present and future of
computer programming", is at best comical.
Disclaimer: I write and enjoy using both perl and Java.
All I think your complaint boils down to is that people should set up inheritance properly, so that rather than setting bean.temp one should call saucepan.heat(Food bean) or similar. It's a question of design rather than language I reckon.
As for the question of type, I think there are situations where one approach is better than the other and vice versa. Again, it's a question of design. Do you want to fix the type as an int at the outset for reliability (e.g. in assigning a value to $trucks_required, $days_in_month etc) or do you want to treat everything as a string and cast it as needed? Depends on the situation. Most langauges treat integers as floats internally rather than Mathematica style integers, so it really is just a question of design / taste.
Java I find better for large projects with many folks that need to understand each others code easily (in Java there's generally one technically / cultural way of doing things). Perl I prefer for solving problems where several basically incompatible systems need to talk to each other, and it doesn't matter what the resulting code looks like. And text munging of course, perl excels at that.
Short version: perl for web and sysadmin, Java for apps. Cross platform openness all the way, baby.
Vino, gyno, and techno -Bruce Sterling
...since your response was entirely too polite and reasonable for designation as a flame. I am sure Matz would have no problem with a discussion of his ideas.
I don't believe Matz would disagree with you. He only said ideographic alphabets are a "great invention," not that they were better than phonetic alphabets. He even joked about it being a defense against cultural imperialism because it is so hard for non-Japanese to learn.
A discussion between Wittgenstein and Matsumoto about their link through Wittgenstein pupil Alan Turing would indeed be worth considering. What Matz is saying here is that he translates English to Japanese before thinking about it or storing it in memory. The test is not whether he remembers the gist long after the phrasing is lost. The test, I suspect, is whether he can remember the English phrasing shortly after hearing it. Or does he remember it in Japanese and translate it back to English again? This would be fairly easy to test since his translations to English are imperfect (often ignoring pluralization, for instance). I imagine Wittgenstein would approve of such a test, but disapprove of drawing overly broad conclusions from the results.
While Babel-17 was, in fact, based on the strong form of the Whorfian hypothesis ("language determines thought"), I don't think anyone would argue that Matz's formulation ("language influence human thought") is the strong form. Many even find it hard to believe Sapir and Whorf themselves believed the strong form (although there are plenty of hints they did). But there is widespread acceptance of the weak form.
Missing from the transcriptions of the talk I've found on the web was the uncanny imitation of a modem squeal Matz did after reading this quote.
I doubt Matz would disagree with your assertion. He also argues they should be optimized for the human side of the communication.
I suspect Wittgenstein would have a great deal of sympathy for some of the thinking Matz is using, but little patience for some of the ways he phrases things. I suspect "Every conversation is stored in my brain in Japanese" would set off some alarm bells in his head, prompting something along the lines of "What do we really mean when we use the language in that way?" Perhaps, though, he would attribute the awkwardness in the phrasing to the fact that he was using a second language. Wittgenstein himself gave up German when he abandoned the Vienna School and taught in English at Cambridge.
One could even argue Turing's inability to get across to Wittgenstein the gist of Goedel's proof derived in part from the fact that Goedel expressed the conclusions in a sloppy fashion before he published the actual paper. That sloppy version could easily have benefited from some good, old Wittgensteinian deconstruction.
Eternal vigilance only works if you look in every direction.
Damn, good responses. It's nice to actually hear from somebody who heard the actual talk. You win. :)
Hey man, if not for this, then what other point could the Friend/Foe system have? :)
and the first word that came to mind is 'certifiably...'
- rabs
I was wondering if somebody was going to find that...
Does it need to be done in assembler? Does anyone have something other than a twos-complement machine they could try this on: