I'm a firm believer in free speech, regardless of what the creators of a language say.
I claim this has nothing to do with free speech. This isn't about Microsoft being or not being able to sell this particular product. This is about who gets to decide whether whatever Microsoft sells can be called a Mapuzugun-language product, and as such, whether any legal consequences of such a designation should apply to it.
Why else would the Chilean Ministry of Education be involved in the translation in the first place?
I suspect you were close to the problem at this point, but missed it. Have you considered the possibility that the Chilean Ministry of Education and the Mapuche indigenous organizations in question may be at odds about who should get what sort of participation into decisions as to what counts as standard Mapuzugun?
I have a strong suspicion that this is what the case is about: the Mapuche plaintiffs are complaining that the Chilean government is making decisions about what counts as an official Mapuzugun translation without giving them enough participation, and that Microsoft is an accomplice.
Likewise, no tribe, no people, no government has the right to dictate how a language should be used.
Why do you assume that this is what they're trying to do?
Let's do a hypothetical scenario: the Chilean government tomorrow passes a law that offers tax incentives to businesses that offer products in indigenous languages. Microsoft has something they claim is a Mapuzugun translation of their software, and they apply for the tax break. Who gets to decide whether in fact the product is in Mapuzugun? Or alternatively, what stops Microsoft from claiming a tax break on a Mapuzugun "translation" that no actual speaker can in fact use, because it is atrociously bad?
Clearly, one wants to be able to standardize the language to some degree in order to be able to evaluate these issues, and in general, to offer guidance to people who want to make such translations so they have something to shoot for. Now, who gets to decide what those standards should be?
In other words: I claim that the issue here is about who a word into what constitutes the Mapuzugun language for official purposes. This is of political importance because if the wrong people get to control those decisions, then people or businesses can claim to have offered "Mapuzugun" products or services that should in fact not be considered so.
I may be "anthropologically unsophistocated", but I understand basic human nature.
Yes, if you believe in "basic human nature," you are indeed anthropologically sophisticated.
If I were Microsoft, this is what I'd do: I'd shelve the project. Then if the tribal leaders decide they want an OS in their own language, they can make a request. But when you make a request of someone, it's silly to expect them to do it free of charge.
Their biggest complaint, as far as I can make it, is that Microsoft teamed up with the Chilean government to produce this translation, and did not consult them at all on it. The best I can state their case so far is as follows:
They have a legitimate claim to exercising authority as to how their culture and traditions are to be officially codified.
The Chilean government and Microsoft unilaterally assumed this authority, and denied it to them.
Or in other words, that if anybody has a claim on making official decisions about how their language is to be used software work, it is them, and not the Chilean government, and that Microsoft wronged them by going with the Chilean government.
Note that this issue may have legal implications: for example, if somebody tomorrow passes a law that has clauses that hinge on whether some service or product is offered in a native language, then the issue arises of judging whether a particular product or case is in fact offered in the Mapuche's language. Now there is an issue as to who should have the authority to make such decisions or to set the standards under which such decisions are to be made.
Who's to say that these 'tribal leaders' speak for everyone using the Mapuche edition of Windows?
I doubt they do. What I'm trying to do is to state as strong a case for them as possible; as opposed to what most people in this thread are doing--dismissing them offhand on the basis of things they likely didn't claim. (Or in other words: I'm interested in understanding the way they think, and not at all propping up my ego by making them look like dumbasses.)
Yes, their actual argument (which we do not know, let me remind us) possibly assumes that the Mapuche is a uniform culture (at worst), or that their traditional authorities are entitled to make some decisions about how their language is to be used (at least). It is likely that it also glosses over the fact that we, as Westerners, may judge a lot of their traditional institutions as opressing some segments of their society (e.g. women), and it is quite likely that some (if not many) of their own constituents would agree with us (but which still doesn't mean that they'd like us to impose our cultural standards on them; they may want to reform their own culture).
Still, the point is that this issue will no doubt turn out to be very subtle, that it will require a good amount of anthropological sophistication to understand it, and that the discussion here is sorely lacking such sophistication.
For once, Microsoft does something right and adds internationalization for some little two-bit language.
...without consulting the people who speak the language, to see what they think about it, or so does the plaintiffs claim. Because of course it's up to the Chilean government and Microsoft to decide what's best for the Mapuche. Right?
(Note that of course, the issue is going to be more complex than this, because you can bet that there are differences of opinion in the Mapuche community about this. But hey, at least I'm trying to interpret the suit charitably based on very little information, instead of trying to dismiss it out of hand based on assumptions nowhere confirmed by the TFA.)
So let me see if I get this straight -- the Mapuche tribal leaders are making the claim that Microsoft needs their permission to use a language because, well, they say they own this language?
I'm inclined to believe you haven't gotten it straight, because (a) the article is short in details, (b) it's a popular press article, and of course the popular press is well-known for not being extremely accurate.
Presumably we can believe the article that the Mapuche tribal leaders are suing Microsoft. What I'm not so quick to conclude (as most responders here just went ahead and assumed) is that this is framed as an intellectual property case. It could be framed as a human rights case, and in fact, the article does say that the Mapuche grievance is the fact that they were never consulted on anything in the process.
Indeed, the article does mention the possibility of taking this to an international human rights court:
"If they rule against us we will go to the Supreme Court and if they rule against us there we will take our case to a court of human rights," said Lautaro Loncon, a Mapuche activist and coordinator of the Indigenous Network, an umbrella group for several ethnic groups in Chile.
In any case, you are blindly applying your own cultural standards to a set of people who likely do not share them. In particular, you believe that by default, anybody has a right to any piece of obtainable knowledge, with some specific exclusions (e.g., privacy, confidential business information). This cultural assumption is not shared by every group in the world; people in some groups assume just as irreflexively that only some people are entitled to some kinds of knowledge (for example, only members of a certain caste may be entitled to know how to play some instrument). In this case, then the human rights issue has to do with mediation between the standards of two cultures when they clash; the Mapuche will claim that officialdom ought to respect their culture's standards.
Note that all I've said is every bit as much speculation as what you've said. But it should at least demonstrate that this issue is likely very, very subtle. Discussing issues like this fruitfully requires an amount of cultural insight and sensitivity that most people simply lack.
As the final sentence in the TFA (attributed to one Geoff Marcy) puts it: "Categorizing them does not magically add insight." Just because you have a set of rules, no matter how precise, that enables you to take arbitrarily many celestial objects and bin each of them into one category from a fixed set, doesn't mean that you've accomplished anything of interest.
Categorization schemes only make sense in the light of a theory that provides some insight about its object (e.g., allows us to use observations in one domain to make accurate predictions in another), and even better, allows us to do stuff we couldn't before. The correct order to follow here is theory first, categorization second.
In your case, you clearly have one theory in mind: a simple two-body system where one of the bodies orbits the other, which is somehow designated as "the sun" (by some procedure you don't bother to specify). That's just one special subcase of mechanics, and in fact, a theoretical one that never in fact holds. Why should it be privileged at all?
While I'm at it: the fact that categorization schemes are relative to theories also implies that there isn't one thing as The One True Categorization of a subject domain. The article provides a great example, in that some astronomers study the dynamics of celestial objects, while other study their composition. If your theory tells you that these two aspects of what intuitively to us are the same objects are orthogonal (as Newtonian mechanics usually assumes, by treating celestial objects as indivisible bodies in the theoretical sense), then whatever classification either branch comes up with will be orthogonal to the other's.
The methodology sounds completely reasonable. The reason the study is restricted to people who intend to buy an MP3 player in the next 12 months is because the study was likely designed to provide information useful for actually advertising those players for the next 12 months. The study is likely not actually trying to measure "brand loyalty" in any absolute terms; it's designed for some specific purpose in mind.
What you're obejcting to really seems to be a spin that was put on the results of a study that was reasonably designed to show something different than what the spin is saying it does.
Iraq once did have chemical weapons, and did have other objectionable weapons programs. This is generally accepted by all parties. The falsehood isn't that. The falsehood is the US government claim that it had them at the time they invaded, as a justification for that invasion.
Peoples' brains develop differently and different task competencies arise from parts of the brain that are more or less effective in different people.
I call bullshit on this, because I doubt you can actually substantiate this claim. (And citing somebody like Pinker doesn't count, you know.)
Let me close with by stating that the Standard Social Science Model (where all intellectual skills are culturally determined) is bunk.
Ah, I see where you're coming from. You'll certainly get me to agree that your precious Standard Social Science Modal is a strawman, which makes the fact that it's bunk not particularly interesting.
The problem is not that it's hard. The problem is that it's cumbersome as hell, and doesn't scale to doing really complex query generation. You're still writing your whole query as a string with named blanks in it, and then at the end saying which things go in those blanks. If you need to have conditional logic that dictates what's going to be put in that query, or, God forbid, if you wrote and maintain an application that needs to be able to generate arbitrarily complex queries based on a recursive description of a dimensional schema (as some of us do), you're going to be in SQL text append hell anyway.
Again, the common paradigm for accessing databases from programming languages (embedding SQL as strings in one's language) is crap. What Microsoft is doing qith LINQ, building query capabilities into the language itself, is fundamentally moving in the right direction (though I don't know their implementation well enough to actually endorse it).
You can do far, far better than that in Lisp. A SQL query is essentially a list of column expressions (the SELECT), a list of table expressions (the FROM), and a predicate over the tables/aliases named in the FROM (the WHERE). It's pretty straightforward to represent these as embedded language in Lisp that constructs three-part objects that represent queries with symbolic expressions, and then write a little interpreter to generate SQL statements from the objects in question.
Once you have this, you get the really, really big win: you can write an operation to merge multiple query objects into one, that works as follows:
Append the lists of column expressions from the source queries, removing duplicates.
Append the lists of table expressions from the source queries, removing duplicates.
Join the predicates from the source queries with an AND at the front.
This approach allows you to write code that generates really complex queries in a piecemeal fashion; you can generate separate query objects for individual parts of your query in separate parts of the code, and then merge all the bits at the end into the finished query object, which you translate into a SQL string just before execution. Your embedded language can also take care of escaping automatically for you. You never deal with queries as strings at all.
And this is of course an approach that is limited by the need to support SQL as your target query language; if you didn't have that, you could do a much better query language embedded within Lisp to start with.
That requires you to address the parameters positionally, and you may not be able to do so effectively if you don't know beforehand how your query's gonna look. You at least need to allow the option of having the binding of query parameters to values be done by name instead of position.
In general, people who push for current implementations of prepared statements as strongly as some do in this thread, even though they are right in the arguments they make, miss the point about how complex query generation needs to be for some applications. The real point, IMO, is that we need better ways of integrating database querying with programming languages; string-based composition of SQL statements just doesn't cut it. The LINQ feature that's getting added to C# 3.0 is definitely a step in the correct direction.
What exactly do you find "verbose" about Lisp? I find it makes for extremely succint code that's modeled closely after the concepts of the problem domain, myself. If I can understand the problem domain well, typically the most understandable program I can write will be in Lisp, because it will get in my way far less than any other language.
I think you've got the question backwards. The question is, how do doctors make money off of coming up with new diagnoses?
That's partly an ingredient, but you shouldn't think this is all there is to it. The common professional practices for defining and diagnosing "mental disorders" respond to a number of things. For example, the functioning of various health care-related bureaucracies; something as basic as trying to account on what things health care money was/should be spent (and what not). When the guys at the health insurance company review a claim, it better have a specific diagnosis there, that diagnosis better be on their list of things that they approve disbursing money for, and if they actually dig it, the doctor better produce some evidence that they actually checked that the patient met the official, well-defined conditions under which that diagnosis was made.
In general, health care works like that because it is not a "pure" search for knowledge about the human body (like a "pure" science would be); it's about providing actual care to actual people, which means that there are actual policy and resource allocation problems. In the case of mental health, which is way fuzzier than physical health, this only gets compounded.
So yeah, classifing "Internet addiction" as a "mental disorder" is really a policy question ("should we allocate more resources for providing assistance to these people?") disguising as a scientific one. That's a common strategy for trying to pass such policy decisions, because essentially, you're trying to co-opt the prestige of science.
[...] if you are stepping through a list and transforming each member in a common way, an iterative description seems more clear (particularly a for-each kind of approach.)
Um, when did you last ever write that in a real program?
Anyway:
;;; ;;; The unless macro is not R5RS Scheme, but most implementations ;;; include it, so you might not need to define it. (The R6RS draft ;;; does include it.) Just in case, here's an R5RS macro system definition ;;; (define-syntax unless (syntax-rules () ((unless cond expr . rest) (if (not cond) (begin expr . rest)))))
;;; ;;; Call proc for each number between lo and hi, inclusive. ;;; (define (iterate-over-range lo hi proc) (unless (> lo hi) (proc lo) (iterate-over-range (+ lo 1) hi proc)))
;;; ;;; this one is straightforward ;;; (define (print-line x) (display x) (newline))
;;; ;;; print each number from 1 to 10, in separate lines ;;; (iterate-over-range 1 10 print-line)
[...] Ruby focuses on expressiveness (an inherited "there's more than one way to do it" from the Perl in its genes), and Python focuses on clarity and readability.
But... the point of expressiveness is to make code more readable, by reducing the semantic gap between your language and the problem domain (a concept which is at the heart of the idea of domain-specific languages, which you mentioned as being part of the Ruby approach).
The fact that a language has fewer constructs than another only makes code in that language "clearer" if you assume that clarity consists in it being easier to figure out the low-level details of the code in question ("ok, here it's setting up a loop counter variable, then it's testing whether it exceeds x, then it's..."). If the standard, on the other hand, is to convey what a program is trying to do at a high level, the limitations that get you that "clarity" will hurt you.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a firm believer in free speech, regardless of what the creators of a language say.
I claim this has nothing to do with free speech. This isn't about Microsoft being or not being able to sell this particular product. This is about who gets to decide whether whatever Microsoft sells can be called a Mapuzugun-language product, and as such, whether any legal consequences of such a designation should apply to it.
Why else would the Chilean Ministry of Education be involved in the translation in the first place?
I suspect you were close to the problem at this point, but missed it. Have you considered the possibility that the Chilean Ministry of Education and the Mapuche indigenous organizations in question may be at odds about who should get what sort of participation into decisions as to what counts as standard Mapuzugun?
I have a strong suspicion that this is what the case is about: the Mapuche plaintiffs are complaining that the Chilean government is making decisions about what counts as an official Mapuzugun translation without giving them enough participation, and that Microsoft is an accomplice.
Likewise, no tribe, no people, no government has the right to dictate how a language should be used.
Why do you assume that this is what they're trying to do?
Let's do a hypothetical scenario: the Chilean government tomorrow passes a law that offers tax incentives to businesses that offer products in indigenous languages. Microsoft has something they claim is a Mapuzugun translation of their software, and they apply for the tax break. Who gets to decide whether in fact the product is in Mapuzugun? Or alternatively, what stops Microsoft from claiming a tax break on a Mapuzugun "translation" that no actual speaker can in fact use, because it is atrociously bad?
Clearly, one wants to be able to standardize the language to some degree in order to be able to evaluate these issues, and in general, to offer guidance to people who want to make such translations so they have something to shoot for. Now, who gets to decide what those standards should be?
In other words: I claim that the issue here is about who a word into what constitutes the Mapuzugun language for official purposes. This is of political importance because if the wrong people get to control those decisions, then people or businesses can claim to have offered "Mapuzugun" products or services that should in fact not be considered so.
I may be "anthropologically unsophistocated", but I understand basic human nature.
Yes, if you believe in "basic human nature," you are indeed anthropologically sophisticated.
If I were Microsoft, this is what I'd do: I'd shelve the project. Then if the tribal leaders decide they want an OS in their own language, they can make a request. But when you make a request of someone, it's silly to expect them to do it free of charge.
Their biggest complaint, as far as I can make it, is that Microsoft teamed up with the Chilean government to produce this translation, and did not consult them at all on it. The best I can state their case so far is as follows:
Or in other words, that if anybody has a claim on making official decisions about how their language is to be used software work, it is them, and not the Chilean government, and that Microsoft wronged them by going with the Chilean government.
Note that this issue may have legal implications: for example, if somebody tomorrow passes a law that has clauses that hinge on whether some service or product is offered in a native language, then the issue arises of judging whether a particular product or case is in fact offered in the Mapuche's language. Now there is an issue as to who should have the authority to make such decisions or to set the standards under which such decisions are to be made.
Who's to say that these 'tribal leaders' speak for everyone using the Mapuche edition of Windows?
I doubt they do. What I'm trying to do is to state as strong a case for them as possible; as opposed to what most people in this thread are doing--dismissing them offhand on the basis of things they likely didn't claim. (Or in other words: I'm interested in understanding the way they think, and not at all propping up my ego by making them look like dumbasses.)
Yes, their actual argument (which we do not know, let me remind us) possibly assumes that the Mapuche is a uniform culture (at worst), or that their traditional authorities are entitled to make some decisions about how their language is to be used (at least). It is likely that it also glosses over the fact that we, as Westerners, may judge a lot of their traditional institutions as opressing some segments of their society (e.g. women), and it is quite likely that some (if not many) of their own constituents would agree with us (but which still doesn't mean that they'd like us to impose our cultural standards on them; they may want to reform their own culture).
Still, the point is that this issue will no doubt turn out to be very subtle, that it will require a good amount of anthropological sophistication to understand it, and that the discussion here is sorely lacking such sophistication.
For once, Microsoft does something right and adds internationalization for some little two-bit language.
...without consulting the people who speak the language, to see what they think about it, or so does the plaintiffs claim. Because of course it's up to the Chilean government and Microsoft to decide what's best for the Mapuche. Right?
(Note that of course, the issue is going to be more complex than this, because you can bet that there are differences of opinion in the Mapuche community about this. But hey, at least I'm trying to interpret the suit charitably based on very little information, instead of trying to dismiss it out of hand based on assumptions nowhere confirmed by the TFA.)
Hardly any of the responders here has any degree of anthropological sophistication. They don't understand how deep culture clashes can go.
Couple this with the assumption (made in the summary) that this case is about intellectual property (which it nowhere says in the TFA.
Where does it say anywhere that this case is about intellectual property laws, and not about human rights?
So let me see if I get this straight -- the Mapuche tribal leaders are making the claim that Microsoft needs their permission to use a language because, well, they say they own this language?
I'm inclined to believe you haven't gotten it straight, because (a) the article is short in details, (b) it's a popular press article, and of course the popular press is well-known for not being extremely accurate.
Presumably we can believe the article that the Mapuche tribal leaders are suing Microsoft. What I'm not so quick to conclude (as most responders here just went ahead and assumed) is that this is framed as an intellectual property case. It could be framed as a human rights case, and in fact, the article does say that the Mapuche grievance is the fact that they were never consulted on anything in the process.
Indeed, the article does mention the possibility of taking this to an international human rights court:
In any case, you are blindly applying your own cultural standards to a set of people who likely do not share them. In particular, you believe that by default, anybody has a right to any piece of obtainable knowledge, with some specific exclusions (e.g., privacy, confidential business information). This cultural assumption is not shared by every group in the world; people in some groups assume just as irreflexively that only some people are entitled to some kinds of knowledge (for example, only members of a certain caste may be entitled to know how to play some instrument). In this case, then the human rights issue has to do with mediation between the standards of two cultures when they clash; the Mapuche will claim that officialdom ought to respect their culture's standards.
Note that all I've said is every bit as much speculation as what you've said. But it should at least demonstrate that this issue is likely very, very subtle. Discussing issues like this fruitfully requires an amount of cultural insight and sensitivity that most people simply lack.
As the final sentence in the TFA (attributed to one Geoff Marcy) puts it: "Categorizing them does not magically add insight." Just because you have a set of rules, no matter how precise, that enables you to take arbitrarily many celestial objects and bin each of them into one category from a fixed set, doesn't mean that you've accomplished anything of interest.
Categorization schemes only make sense in the light of a theory that provides some insight about its object (e.g., allows us to use observations in one domain to make accurate predictions in another), and even better, allows us to do stuff we couldn't before. The correct order to follow here is theory first, categorization second.
In your case, you clearly have one theory in mind: a simple two-body system where one of the bodies orbits the other, which is somehow designated as "the sun" (by some procedure you don't bother to specify). That's just one special subcase of mechanics, and in fact, a theoretical one that never in fact holds. Why should it be privileged at all?
While I'm at it: the fact that categorization schemes are relative to theories also implies that there isn't one thing as The One True Categorization of a subject domain. The article provides a great example, in that some astronomers study the dynamics of celestial objects, while other study their composition. If your theory tells you that these two aspects of what intuitively to us are the same objects are orthogonal (as Newtonian mechanics usually assumes, by treating celestial objects as indivisible bodies in the theoretical sense), then whatever classification either branch comes up with will be orthogonal to the other's.
A nomenclature similar to Chemistry is needed.
Needed for what? As TFA quotes Geoff Marcy at the very end: "Categorizing them does not magically add insight."
The methodology sounds completely reasonable. The reason the study is restricted to people who intend to buy an MP3 player in the next 12 months is because the study was likely designed to provide information useful for actually advertising those players for the next 12 months. The study is likely not actually trying to measure "brand loyalty" in any absolute terms; it's designed for some specific purpose in mind.
What you're obejcting to really seems to be a spin that was put on the results of a study that was reasonably designed to show something different than what the spin is saying it does.
Iraq once did have chemical weapons, and did have other objectionable weapons programs. This is generally accepted by all parties. The falsehood isn't that. The falsehood is the US government claim that it had them at the time they invaded, as a justification for that invasion.
Arabic is even worse than most human languages for being contextual and ambiguous.
Eh? I call bullshit on this.
Peoples' brains develop differently and different task competencies arise from parts of the brain that are more or less effective in different people.
I call bullshit on this, because I doubt you can actually substantiate this claim. (And citing somebody like Pinker doesn't count, you know.)
Let me close with by stating that the Standard Social Science Model (where all intellectual skills are culturally determined) is bunk.
Ah, I see where you're coming from. You'll certainly get me to agree that your precious Standard Social Science Modal is a strawman, which makes the fact that it's bunk not particularly interesting.
The problem is not that it's hard. The problem is that it's cumbersome as hell, and doesn't scale to doing really complex query generation. You're still writing your whole query as a string with named blanks in it, and then at the end saying which things go in those blanks. If you need to have conditional logic that dictates what's going to be put in that query, or, God forbid, if you wrote and maintain an application that needs to be able to generate arbitrarily complex queries based on a recursive description of a dimensional schema (as some of us do), you're going to be in SQL text append hell anyway.
Again, the common paradigm for accessing databases from programming languages (embedding SQL as strings in one's language) is crap. What Microsoft is doing qith LINQ, building query capabilities into the language itself, is fundamentally moving in the right direction (though I don't know their implementation well enough to actually endorse it).
There's nothing racist here. I'm just prejudiced against uncivilized people.
That's hilarious, because classic racism is predicated precisely on a contrast between "civilized" people and "uncivilized" ones.
You can do far, far better than that in Lisp. A SQL query is essentially a list of column expressions (the SELECT), a list of table expressions (the FROM), and a predicate over the tables/aliases named in the FROM (the WHERE). It's pretty straightforward to represent these as embedded language in Lisp that constructs three-part objects that represent queries with symbolic expressions, and then write a little interpreter to generate SQL statements from the objects in question.
Once you have this, you get the really, really big win: you can write an operation to merge multiple query objects into one, that works as follows:
This approach allows you to write code that generates really complex queries in a piecemeal fashion; you can generate separate query objects for individual parts of your query in separate parts of the code, and then merge all the bits at the end into the finished query object, which you translate into a SQL string just before execution. Your embedded language can also take care of escaping automatically for you. You never deal with queries as strings at all.
And this is of course an approach that is limited by the need to support SQL as your target query language; if you didn't have that, you could do a much better query language embedded within Lisp to start with.
Why do you need more?
That requires you to address the parameters positionally, and you may not be able to do so effectively if you don't know beforehand how your query's gonna look. You at least need to allow the option of having the binding of query parameters to values be done by name instead of position.
In general, people who push for current implementations of prepared statements as strongly as some do in this thread, even though they are right in the arguments they make, miss the point about how complex query generation needs to be for some applications. The real point, IMO, is that we need better ways of integrating database querying with programming languages; string-based composition of SQL statements just doesn't cut it. The LINQ feature that's getting added to C# 3.0 is definitely a step in the correct direction.
I was just commenting on how Americans are expected to feel guilty for everything, including too little food getting to Africa, and now too much.
Yeah, man. Those poor Americans, manipulated into feeling guilty by those heartless, starving Africans.
What exactly do you find "verbose" about Lisp? I find it makes for extremely succint code that's modeled closely after the concepts of the problem domain, myself. If I can understand the problem domain well, typically the most understandable program I can write will be in Lisp, because it will get in my way far less than any other language.
I think you've got the question backwards. The question is, how do doctors make money off of coming up with new diagnoses?
That's partly an ingredient, but you shouldn't think this is all there is to it. The common professional practices for defining and diagnosing "mental disorders" respond to a number of things. For example, the functioning of various health care-related bureaucracies; something as basic as trying to account on what things health care money was/should be spent (and what not). When the guys at the health insurance company review a claim, it better have a specific diagnosis there, that diagnosis better be on their list of things that they approve disbursing money for, and if they actually dig it, the doctor better produce some evidence that they actually checked that the patient met the official, well-defined conditions under which that diagnosis was made.
In general, health care works like that because it is not a "pure" search for knowledge about the human body (like a "pure" science would be); it's about providing actual care to actual people, which means that there are actual policy and resource allocation problems. In the case of mental health, which is way fuzzier than physical health, this only gets compounded.
So yeah, classifing "Internet addiction" as a "mental disorder" is really a policy question ("should we allocate more resources for providing assistance to these people?") disguising as a scientific one. That's a common strategy for trying to pass such policy decisions, because essentially, you're trying to co-opt the prestige of science.
[...] if you are stepping through a list and transforming each member in a common way, an iterative description seems more clear (particularly a for-each kind of approach.)
Ever heard of map?
Um, when did you last ever write that in a real program?
Anyway:
;;;
;;; The unless macro is not R5RS Scheme, but most implementations
;;; include it, so you might not need to define it. (The R6RS draft
;;; does include it.) Just in case, here's an R5RS macro system definition
;;;
(define-syntax unless
(syntax-rules ()
((unless cond expr . rest)
(if (not cond)
(begin expr . rest)))))
;;;
;;; Call proc for each number between lo and hi, inclusive.
;;;
(define (iterate-over-range lo hi proc)
(unless (> lo hi)
(proc lo)
(iterate-over-range (+ lo 1) hi proc)))
;;;
;;; this one is straightforward
;;;
(define (print-line x)
(display x)
(newline))
;;;
;;; print each number from 1 to 10, in separate lines
;;;
(iterate-over-range 1 10 print-line)
[...] Ruby focuses on expressiveness (an inherited "there's more than one way to do it" from the Perl in its genes), and Python focuses on clarity and readability.
But... the point of expressiveness is to make code more readable, by reducing the semantic gap between your language and the problem domain (a concept which is at the heart of the idea of domain-specific languages, which you mentioned as being part of the Ruby approach).
The fact that a language has fewer constructs than another only makes code in that language "clearer" if you assume that clarity consists in it being easier to figure out the low-level details of the code in question ("ok, here it's setting up a loop counter variable, then it's testing whether it exceeds x, then it's..."). If the standard, on the other hand, is to convey what a program is trying to do at a high level, the limitations that get you that "clarity" will hurt you.