Slashdot Mirror
The Age of the Essay
bluFox writes "Paul Graham, has just published a new article on the English literature and role of Essays. It is not connected to lisp or languages or hackers for a change, but still feels like a continuation of his earlier articles."
This is another area where the Internet has had a clear impact on a topic. Whereas it used to be like pulling teeth to get kids to write and submit essays, now you can't turn a corner on the web without running into one blog or another, loaded with essays on a wide range of controversial topics. While the Internet has had a clearly detrimental effect on our spelling abilities, I think it has had a correspondingly positive impact on our willingness and enthusiasm to express opinions of all kinds. Even sites like Slashdot are loaded with rants on all sorts of topics. Heck, I have a positive-karma modifier on trolls and flamebait posts, just because those threads are often the ones with the most spirited, passionate discussions. :)
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...is that they usually seem to be about filling out a point to meet a word limit and not about getting to the point.
I think this arises because "the point" is usually nothing profound in itself so the only thing you can do to stand out is blabber on in a particularly well way.
Being a scientist I'm necessarily biased about anything that can be called an "essay". The closest thing in science is probably a review paper but that also should be as concise as possible.
I blame schools.
The better you become at reading, the better you become at writing. It only made sense to combine the two disciplines by requiring writing to be about things you read.
Now, having said that, I believe that once a student has achieved proficiency at writing about what they read, they should be encouraged to write about other things as well.
To quote Thoreau, "How vain it is to sit down to write when one has never stood up to live."
As to the question "Why is this on Slashdot?" I have a degree in English Literature. When I took my first job in IT, my boss told me that most IT people were an inch wide and a mile deep. Perhaps the person who posted this is trying to help some of us nerds broaden our horizons!
To quote one of the nerds from the movie "War Games" "Remember when you told me to tell you when you were acting rudely and insensitively? Well you're doing it now!"
Read any good sonnets lately?
Now I know why I like Paul Graham's essays so much. You read the essay, and you follow along with the thoughts. You never feel forced in a certain direction, or at least not for a long time. Eventually, the essay often manages to convince you of something, but it's not by force. It's because you draw your own conclusions, that may or may not agree with the author's.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
I think that the essay rules ruined the essay.
In school we focus on the rules, in terms of how an essay should be structured, and what it should contain.
Rules like spelling and grammar ARE important, but not as important as the content. I'd rather read an easy by a brilliant person with English as a second langauge, who doesn't write very well, opposed to an essay written perfectly by a random bloke.
This is where the English class ruined the essay. It was graded on those rules, and seldom on content.
They should focus on free thinking, creative writing, as much, if not more than the structure.
I like Heinlein's answer to that question: "We laugh because it hurts to much to cry.".
Basically Heinlein was of the opinion (and I agree) that it is ONLY misfortune that we find funny. That the laugh, the joke etc. are coping mechanisms we have developed to let us deal with bad things.
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Makes me wonder if people will look back hundreds of years from now and wonder... 'What the hell were they thinking writing in that horrible format?' Kinda like I do now with some of the weird medieval writing styles. I wonder if English teachers ever reflect on sort of things before they make their students write yet another essay.
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Firstly, Paul Graham is both a geek and a nerd. But more importantly, in its purest form, nerd-dom is nothing more than socially maladjusted intellectualism. His essay is talking about how essays are a great way to think about ideas. Therefore, his essay is nerdy, therefore, it's appropriate to talk about it on Slashdot.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
I think there are a couple of good reasons to study ancient literature:
1.) To foster an appreciation for literature as a whole by looking at its history. Many modern works of literature contain references to earlier works, and are often directly inspired by them.
2.) The idea is to teach students how to analyze literature in general. The hope is that you will take the skills you learned analyzing Shakespeare and apply them to other works.
3.) When teaching analysis, it's a lot easier if you're teaching a text that has been analyzed thousands of times by thousands of other people already. It makes it less likely people will think you're just making stuff up if many others throughout history support your analysis.
In essence, the point of learning Shakespeare is not solely to learn Shakespeare, but to learn skills of analysis that will serve you in many aspects of your life. A large part of learning is simply learning how to learn.
wish
that
they
were
formatted
better.
:)
Tierce
Who sponsors your feelings?
I can't help thinking that it would end up a better language if you employed your "thinking out loud" essay technique in which people could respond to you and then to one another with ideas that you would study before making the final decisions.
It seems to me that a multipartite (written) discussion forum is the natural extension of an essay by an individual writer when it comes to "searching for truth".
But with Arc you seem to be talking to yourself, which you decry in your essay on essays as likely to lead to the petering out of a project. That or talking to a select handful of colleagues whose opinions you probably trust because they're so similar to your own, which is not so different from talking to yourself.
If you want interesting surprises, why not open the discussion to people who care about things that you and your friends might not have put much thought into?
What are the security implications of your design ideas? Some people don't care about dynamic vs. static typing per se but care a lot about the security issues, some of which might be impacted by this decision. Is there some relatively minor issue that might hamstring automatic decomposition into massive parallelism that you could change now but not later? Are there text models that would dramatically improve your chances of ending up with powerful text processing libraries? And what text model would be most likely to survive the radical changes in computer architectures that we will see over the next century?
You say the world has waited for 45 years for a good Lisp, and you're correct in the sense you intended, but in another sense, of course, the world hasn't waited for Lisp at all. It has left it behind and built up massive ecosystems around its competitors. Those ecosystems are relentlessly growing and create a moving target for what a language is expected to have if it is to be a contender.
Any really successful Lisp will need a lot of time after release to build up such an ecosystem, and the longer it takes to release it, the longer it will take *after* release to become a contender. I think it *will* make a difference whether it is released in 2 years or 10, though even if I'm right, you aren't obligated to do anything about it, of course.
It just seems to me that you'd have a better chance of creating a better overall language if you had an open discussion of the design while change is still easy. You might even get things done sooner by delegating more of the implementation of everything from design comparison prototypes to docs.
"Those who have never entered upon scientific pursuits know not a tithe of the poetry by which they are surrounded."