Of course the system is coercive, in the sense that physical force will be used, if necessary, to compel you to pay your taxes. Do you disagree?
Well I agree that if you don't pay your taxes, there is the possibility that you will be coerced on over to a prison. But that is true of most (all?) of our laws -- run afoul of them and you will suffer the consequences. But laws are the price of civilization; surely we're not arguing about whether there should be laws with physical consequences or not?
My point is that if you and enough citizens don't like a law, you can elect those with like minds and have it repealed. If coercion can be eliminated through the same system that put it in place, then I wouldn't call it coercive in an oppressive way. It in fact is the will of the people that such coercion exists; nay, we demand it! We're masochists, not prisoners.
No, my comment was not the most profound and original in the world.
Just having a little fun at your expense. Sorry. One forgets one's manners in the relatively anonymous world of the internet. Hope you got a little chuckle out of it, though.
Also unlike that author, I would not force the village's help at the point of a gun. (If you think this is not what is happening, try not paying the taxes to fund programs "for the children.")
Actually, I have a serious disagreement with this kind of logic. Whatever your feelings on the former first lady, no one's holding a gun to your head. The budget is not an a la carte affair, with tax payers selecting what they do and do not want to pay for. You affect the budget indirectly through your vote, and I for one like it this way. You are free to differ, but I disagree that the current system is coercive.
Instead, I would urge folks to help those around them when they can, because it is the right thing to do.
Agreed. Although if I was still feeling playful, I would echo "can't we all just get along"...
Go forth to the land of heathens. Ascend your divine milkcrate and preach the Word of Lisp among them. Do not be deterred by the two-letter commands they hurl your way; do not listen to their treacherous Larry Wall-isms. For they know not what they do.
In the begining was Lisp, and Lisp was with God(el), and Lisp was God(el).
And Lisp was made flesh, and the Lisp Machine/OS dwelt among us...
For C/Unix was given by Kernighan/Thompson, but grace and truth came by McCarthy/MIT.
i just saw the movie a few hours ago with some friends, my wife, and two young daughters. i thought it was mediocre at best. here are some reasons why:
(1) terrible music selection. it begins with smash mouth's supersaturated "all-star" and ends with a ridiculously overblown wedding number, with several lowlights in between.
(2) chock full of fart jokes, gross stuff, and other items that appealed to the 9 year old boys in the audience but left those younger and older less than amused.
(3) eddie murphy is seriously unfunny in what's supposed to be the humorous sidekick role. nearly all of his lines are pointless; any laughs are due to solely the aural properties of his voice. by comparsion, he was freakin' hilarious as moo-shoo in "mulan". don't go just expecting to see a repeat performance the caliber of that role.
(4) lithgow is terrible as the short bad guy. you never forget it's john lithgow. this is disconcerting because lithgow is a big, boxy old guy and the prince most definitely is not.
(5) the movie doesn't feel like it actually needs to be a computer-generated cartoon. in this sense, it's no "toy story (2)", "bug's life", or "antz". i kept thinking it could have just as easily been a conventional picture with a bit o' CGI. in other words, it doesn't push the medium artistically.
it's not all bad, of course. myers and diaz are quite good as shrek and the princess. the insults of the disney franchise are clever, if a bit monotonous after a while. (we get it -- katzenberg's still pissed at eisner.) just go in with low expectations.
I am glad Martin Luther King did not think like you.
I'm glad the Dali Lama did think like him and fled Nepal. Otherwise, instead of alerting others to the illegality of the events that befell the Nepalese, he'd be assembling Nikes and burning counterfeit copies of Office2000.
More precisely (although still not perfectly), the time it takes to move a distance D to a target of size S is proportional to the logarithm of D/S. Academic HCI types make a big deal about Fitt's law and other empirical regularities of thinking.
Another is Hick's law, which (roughly) states that the time to choose between a set of N alternatives (e.g., in a menu) is proportional to the information-theoretic entropy of the decision. If the N choice are equally probable, the entropy is the logarithm of N.
Academic HCI and the application of Fitt's and Hick's Laws to this domains begin with Card, Moran, and Newell's 1983 book "The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction". I recommend chapter 2 for those particularly interested in the psychological basis of their recommendations. This is the book that introduced the GOMS modeling technique that Raskin covers as well.
Personally, I've never found much insight in this line of thinking about HCI. Knowing this stuff does not make you a good designer of computer interfaces. Artistic flair and empathy for users plays a crucial role that is not addressed in this tradition, and perhaps not addressable at all within mechanistic approaches to cognition. All of this is IMHO, of course.
Card and Moran were at Xerox PARC in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I believe, which is where Raskin was before Apple hired him to develop the machine that would be taken over by Jobs and become the Macintosh.
Go to O'Hare, JFK, or Hartsfield. Find the point through which all travelers departing on international flights must pass. Hold up a piece of cardboard, preferably torn crudely from a box, with the message "Will work overseas for plane ticket". Cradle dirty, sweating baby in non-sign-holding arm if possible, if available. (If none available, youthful, deceptive midget can sometimes be persuaded to act as a confederate.) Make sure dupe is heading for a first-world country, preferably with socialist leanings. When you arrive, ditch prospective employer. If this proves difficult, talk loudly about the merits of "Dubya" and how "we saved your asses twice last century". When free, hook up with band of south american indians playing quaint aboriginal music for tourist money. When enough has accumulated, go to internet cafe and submit "Ask Slashdot" question about how Americans can find work in Europe. (This question comes up every few months, but the editors don't seem to mind.)
Think of it as about the time required to conceive, raise, and train a new human artist!
Though, come to think of it, it's written in LISP --- it's amazing it's shipping at all.
(No smiley after that comment.) Actually, Lisp proponents think of it as the language for writing programs that would otherwise be impossible in other languages for want of expressive power. How far do you think the artist author would have gotten if he had been using another programming language of the era -- K&R C for example -- or even one of its more modern descendants? He'd probably be chasing down bad pointers or implementing a half-assed version of Lisp's symbolic functionality or wondering from which base class to derive the "cubist" class. (Everything's an object!)
Or picking off random passers by from the UCSD bell tower.:)
Heheh....1.5mb of lisp...let's see...that would be 750K of code and 750K of parentheses, right?
There are three possible answers to a question like this:
(1) What percentage of your C++ and Java programs are braces, semi-colons, and parentheses? I suspect the percentage of C++ and Java programs composed by these characters -- which serve roughly the same purposes as parentheses in Lisp -- is on par with the percentage of parentheses in Lisp programs.
(2) Heheh...1.5mb of lisp...let's see...that would be 15mb of code in your non-lisp language, right?
The more jealously garded IP is, the less useful it is.
Large US companies are starting to recognizing the truth of this statement. For example, I have it on good word that the Coca Cola company is about to GPL the formerly-secret recipe for Coke. The slogan will be changed from "ain't nothing like the real thing" to "free as in Coke".
(The Escobar family is reportedly considering suing over copyright/trademark infringement, filing suit in the US because our court system is much more naive and easily influenced than the Columbian legal system.)
Which makes more sense when writing an application using an object oriented programming language to develop an application? Using a database that is consistent with the programming paradigm and performs database operations transparently or one that requires the developer to go through additional hoops to get data, is generally slower, and involves writing more code?
How about using the appropriate paradigm for the application at hand (which is not always OO), the right paradigm for the data in the database (which may be relational, OO, etc.), and establishing a sensible protocol between the two?
The point of your target article is well-taken, but don't get too religious about OO. uniformity for uniformity's sake is seldom convincing.
Now then, if you managed to find a language whose native types were *all* expressed as objects, where my data were all most naturally expressed as an object
Eiffel? C#? How about the originial -- Smalltalk.
(god bless Objective C and Scheme)
I don't know much about Objective C, but Scheme? In no sense are, for example, numbers treated like OOP objects in Scheme. I mean, you can't subclass them. They are objects in a non-OOP sense, I guess -- you can query their type and all. But this sense is irrelevant to the current thread.
but i;m nearly certain that Lucid Common LISP would do the transform with a high enough optimization level.
You may be right; Lucid had the original "sufficiently smart compiler". And to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, "any sufficiently smart compiler can magically transform common recursions into tail calls.":)
Well, not my Lisp snippet, since it isn't tail recursive. However, the following could be rewritten by a sufficiently smart compiler:
(defun factorial (x)
(factorial-helper x 1))
(defun factorial-helper (x result)
(if (= x 0)
result
(factorial-helper (- x 1) (* x result))))
(Again, excuse the indentation.)
Tail recursion is when the last expression of a function is a recursive call to the function. The recursive call cannot be a mere subexpression, as it was in my original code snippet:
(defun factorial (x)
(if (= x 0)
1
(* x (factorial (- x 1)))))
if you want a string and somebody passes you a cons, you've got a cons, and that's a problem. that's what the "strongly typed" crowd means by "weakly typed".
What the original poster is saying, I think, is that in Lisp OBJECTS are (strongly) typed, whereas in other languages VARIABLES are (strongly) typed. That this type information is not thrown away at compile time (as in STATICALLY-typed languages), but is available at run time, means that lisp is also DYNAMICALLY typed. This is particularly critical because new types (e.g., classes) can be created at run time in Lisp.
C is relatively strongly typed (with the exception of the short/long int business, the "see-through" typedefs and the "no formal paremeter" nature of cast operators)
I assume the original poster felt more strongly about the "exceptions" (as do I in the case of casts) than you do!
And, polymorphism: once again, lisp allows you to implement powerful polymorphic capabilities with its first-class user defined types, but it is notpolymorphic in the sense that OOP people mean. You might argue "better", ok, but still, it's not polymorphic.
Common Lisp has an object system, and it's in that context that it is polymorphic. For example, you can define:
(defmethod foo ((x string))...)
(defmethod foo ((x cons))...)
and Common Lisp will select the correct method
depending on the type of the argument it is
passed. In other words, it's polymorphic. This is because foo is a "generic function" with several methods. Methods in Common Lisp are more expressive than those in C++ and Java, what with the elegant and extensive method combination protocol, the flexibility of lambda list keywords, the presence of multimethods (e.g., you can write (defmethod bar ((x string) (y cons))...)).
Slashdot Mirror
I can't post it here correctly due to formatting limitations, but it can be found at the above lined page.
I have discovered a marvelous algorithm for finding the day of the week for any date in history but the margin is too small to contain it...
Of course the system is coercive, in the sense that physical force will be used, if necessary, to compel you to pay your taxes. Do you disagree?
Well I agree that if you don't pay your taxes, there is the possibility that you will be coerced on over to a prison. But that is true of most (all?) of our laws -- run afoul of them and you will suffer the consequences. But laws are the price of civilization; surely we're not arguing about whether there should be laws with physical consequences or not?
My point is that if you and enough citizens don't like a law, you can elect those with like minds and have it repealed. If coercion can be eliminated through the same system that put it in place, then I wouldn't call it coercive in an oppressive way. It in fact is the will of the people that such coercion exists; nay, we demand it! We're masochists, not prisoners.
No, my comment was not the most profound and original in the world.
Just having a little fun at your expense. Sorry. One forgets one's manners in the relatively anonymous world of the internet. Hope you got a little chuckle out of it, though.
Also unlike that author, I would not force the village's help at the point of a gun. (If you think this is not what is happening, try not paying the taxes to fund programs "for the children.")
Actually, I have a serious disagreement with this kind of logic. Whatever your feelings on the former first lady, no one's holding a gun to your head. The budget is not an a la carte affair, with tax payers selecting what they do and do not want to pay for. You affect the budget indirectly through your vote, and I for one like it this way. You are free to differ, but I disagree that the current system is coercive.
Instead, I would urge folks to help those around them when they can, because it is the right thing to do.
Agreed. Although if I was still feeling playful, I would echo "can't we all just get along"...
Hmmm.
A child needs to learn to read, write, do math, and think clearly.
Got it. Readin', writin', 'rithmetic.
A child needs to learn morals, wisdom, and how to get along with his fellow man.
Family values.
Parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, family friends, please get in the faces of the kids you care about!
Slow down, slow down. Let me see here...it takes a village?
Hint: You're probably not on a soapboax if you're stating what's obvious to everyone. Moderators: This post is "Insightful"? I'd say "Redundant".
The ones I have seen on the shelf have a "Region Free" notice displayed prominently on the front of the case.
:)
How about the ones in your home? What do they say?
Amen brother!
Go forth to the land of heathens. Ascend your divine milkcrate and preach the Word of Lisp among them. Do not be deterred by the two-letter commands they hurl your way; do not listen to their treacherous Larry Wall-isms. For they know not what they do.
In the begining was Lisp, and Lisp was with God(el), and Lisp was God(el).
And Lisp was made flesh, and the Lisp Machine/OS dwelt among us...
For C/Unix was given by Kernighan/Thompson, but grace and truth came by McCarthy/MIT.
For the love of God, can't someone do something for fun?
Why do would someone do something for fun?
D'OH.
My fault, Dix.
I think, therefore I am. (For this one picosecond anyway--all my memories might be just a static ROM image.)
Is this the Dixie Flatline Construct?
Are there any developers out there really developing cross platform products that target Macs?
...
Hmmm. There's Microsoft, Adobe, Macromedia,
In a similar vein, Mac enthusiasts like to focu on aesthetics
Actually, they seem to focus on usability, which includes aesthetics among other characteristics.
i just saw the movie a few hours ago with some friends, my wife, and two young daughters. i thought it was mediocre at best. here are some reasons why:
(1) terrible music selection. it begins with smash mouth's supersaturated "all-star" and ends with a ridiculously overblown wedding number, with several lowlights in between.
(2) chock full of fart jokes, gross stuff, and other items that appealed to the 9 year old boys in the audience but left those younger and older less than amused.
(3) eddie murphy is seriously unfunny in what's supposed to be the humorous sidekick role. nearly all of his lines are pointless; any laughs are due to solely the aural properties of his voice. by comparsion, he was freakin' hilarious as moo-shoo in "mulan". don't go just expecting to see a repeat performance the caliber of that role.
(4) lithgow is terrible as the short bad guy. you never forget it's john lithgow. this is disconcerting because lithgow is a big, boxy old guy and the prince most definitely is not.
(5) the movie doesn't feel like it actually needs to be a computer-generated cartoon. in this sense, it's no "toy story (2)", "bug's life", or "antz". i kept thinking it could have just as easily been a conventional picture with a bit o' CGI. in other words, it doesn't push the medium artistically.
it's not all bad, of course. myers and diaz are quite good as shrek and the princess. the insults of the disney franchise are clever, if a bit monotonous after a while. (we get it -- katzenberg's still pissed at eisner.) just go in with low expectations.
One can always hope that space program technology will eventually trickle down to us.
;-)
Well, there's Tang.
(And perhaps that "ice cream of the future" that's been sold in mediocre malls across the US for years now?
I am glad Martin Luther King did not think like you.
I'm glad the Dali Lama did think like him and fled Nepal. Otherwise, instead of alerting others to the illegality of the events that befell the Nepalese, he'd be assembling Nikes and burning counterfeit copies of Office2000.
More precisely (although still not perfectly), the time it takes to move a distance D to a target of size S is proportional to the logarithm of D/S. Academic HCI types make a big deal about Fitt's law and other empirical regularities of thinking.
Another is Hick's law, which (roughly) states that the time to choose between a set of N alternatives (e.g., in a menu) is proportional to the information-theoretic entropy of the decision. If the N choice are equally probable, the entropy is the logarithm of N.
Academic HCI and the application of Fitt's and Hick's Laws to this domains begin with Card, Moran, and Newell's 1983 book "The Psychology of Human-Computer Interaction". I recommend chapter 2 for those particularly interested in the psychological basis of their recommendations. This is the book that introduced the GOMS modeling technique that Raskin covers as well.
Personally, I've never found much insight in this line of thinking about HCI. Knowing this stuff does not make you a good designer of computer interfaces. Artistic flair and empathy for users plays a crucial role that is not addressed in this tradition, and perhaps not addressable at all within mechanistic approaches to cognition. All of this is IMHO, of course.
Card and Moran were at Xerox PARC in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I believe, which is where Raskin was before Apple hired him to develop the machine that would be taken over by Jobs and become the Macintosh.
Parens or Perens?
:)
I like Lisp as much as (heck, more than) the next guy, but let's keep it out of this discussion, okay?
Go to O'Hare, JFK, or Hartsfield. Find the point through which all travelers departing on international flights must pass. Hold up a piece of cardboard, preferably torn crudely from a box, with the message "Will work overseas for plane ticket". Cradle dirty, sweating baby in non-sign-holding arm if possible, if available. (If none available, youthful, deceptive midget can sometimes be persuaded to act as a confederate.) Make sure dupe is heading for a first-world country, preferably with socialist leanings. When you arrive, ditch prospective employer. If this proves difficult, talk loudly about the merits of "Dubya" and how "we saved your asses twice last century". When free, hook up with band of south american indians playing quaint aboriginal music for tourist money. When enough has accumulated, go to internet cafe and submit "Ask Slashdot" question about how Americans can find work in Europe. (This question comes up every few months, but the editors don't seem to mind.)
30 years is overdoing it, I'd think. :-)
:)
Think of it as about the time required to conceive, raise, and train a new human artist!
Though, come to think of it, it's written in LISP --- it's amazing it's shipping at all.
(No smiley after that comment.) Actually, Lisp proponents think of it as the language for writing programs that would otherwise be impossible in other languages for want of expressive power. How far do you think the artist author would have gotten if he had been using another programming language of the era -- K&R C for example -- or even one of its more modern descendants? He'd probably be chasing down bad pointers or implementing a half-assed version of Lisp's symbolic functionality or wondering from which base class to derive the "cubist" class. (Everything's an object!)
Or picking off random passers by from the UCSD bell tower.
Heheh....1.5mb of lisp...let's see...that would be 750K of code and 750K of parentheses, right?
There are three possible answers to a question like this:
(1) What percentage of your C++ and Java programs are braces, semi-colons, and parentheses? I suspect the percentage of C++ and Java programs composed by these characters -- which serve roughly the same purposes as parentheses in Lisp -- is on par with the percentage of parentheses in Lisp programs.
(2) Heheh...1.5mb of lisp...let's see...that would be 15mb of code in your non-lisp language, right?
(3) You're a moron.
IHMO I don't see the big deal about running out to get the `latest` high speed (Mhz) chip to run from any vendor be it Intel, AMD, Transmeta, etc.,
:)
To cheaply achieve the same raw performance as the latest and greatest from Transmeta, just buy a 1-2 year old product from Intel or AMD
The more jealously garded IP is, the less useful it is.
Large US companies are starting to recognizing the truth of this statement. For example, I have it on good word that the Coca Cola company is about to GPL the formerly-secret recipe for Coke. The slogan will be changed from "ain't nothing like the real thing" to "free as in Coke".
(The Escobar family is reportedly considering suing over copyright/trademark infringement, filing suit in the US because our court system is much more naive and easily influenced than the Columbian legal system.)
Which makes more sense when writing an application using an object oriented programming language to develop an application? Using a database that is consistent with the programming paradigm and performs database operations transparently or one that requires the developer to go through additional hoops to get data, is generally slower, and involves writing more code?
How about using the appropriate paradigm for the application at hand (which is not always OO), the right paradigm for the data in the database (which may be relational, OO, etc.), and establishing a sensible protocol between the two?
The point of your target article is well-taken, but don't get too religious about OO. uniformity for uniformity's sake is seldom convincing.
Now then, if you managed to find a language whose native types were *all* expressed as objects, where my data were all most naturally expressed as an object
Eiffel? C#? How about the originial -- Smalltalk.
(god bless Objective C and Scheme)
I don't know much about Objective C, but Scheme? In no sense are, for example, numbers treated like OOP objects in Scheme. I mean, you can't subclass them. They are objects in a non-OOP sense, I guess -- you can query their type and all. But this sense is irrelevant to the current thread.
but i;m nearly certain that Lucid Common LISP would do the transform with a high enough optimization level.
:)
You may be right; Lucid had the original "sufficiently smart compiler". And to paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke, "any sufficiently smart compiler can magically transform common recursions into tail calls."
Well, not my Lisp snippet, since it isn't tail recursive. However, the following could be rewritten by a sufficiently smart compiler:
(defun factorial (x)
(factorial-helper x 1))
(defun factorial-helper (x result)
(if (= x 0)
result
(factorial-helper (- x 1) (* x result))))
(Again, excuse the indentation.)
Tail recursion is when the last expression of a function is a recursive call to the function. The recursive call cannot be a mere subexpression, as it was in my original code snippet:
(defun factorial (x)
(if (= x 0)
1
(* x (factorial (- x 1)))))
if you want a string and somebody passes you a cons, you've got a cons, and that's a problem. that's what the "strongly typed" crowd means by "weakly typed".
...)
...)
...)).
What the original poster is saying, I think, is that in Lisp OBJECTS are (strongly) typed, whereas in other languages VARIABLES are (strongly) typed. That this type information is not thrown away at compile time (as in STATICALLY-typed languages), but is available at run time, means that lisp is also DYNAMICALLY typed. This is particularly critical because new types (e.g., classes) can be created at run time in Lisp.
C is relatively strongly typed (with the exception of the short/long int business, the "see-through" typedefs and the "no formal paremeter" nature of cast operators)
I assume the original poster felt more strongly about the "exceptions" (as do I in the case of casts) than you do!
And, polymorphism: once again, lisp allows you to implement powerful polymorphic capabilities with its first-class user defined types, but it is notpolymorphic in the sense that OOP people mean. You might argue "better", ok, but still, it's not polymorphic.
Common Lisp has an object system, and it's in that context that it is polymorphic. For example, you can define:
(defmethod foo ((x string))
(defmethod foo ((x cons))
and Common Lisp will select the correct method depending on the type of the argument it is passed. In other words, it's polymorphic. This is because foo is a "generic function" with several methods. Methods in Common Lisp are more expressive than those in C++ and Java, what with the elegant and extensive method combination protocol, the flexibility of lambda list keywords, the presence of multimethods (e.g., you can write (defmethod bar ((x string) (y cons))