developer.* Blogs - Practical Common Lisp - Comments

McCarthy

Edward G Nilges — Tue, 19 Apr 2005 01:14:01 -0700

He's identified as right-wing in his Wikipedia entry.

Unlike many "famous" people McCarthy at least used to post to usenet. Many famous people don't post to usenet because the guys on usenet are delighted to harass anyone who seems to be a "name". The lion will not touch the true prince, said Falstaff: but jackals will.

I had some interesting exchanges with McCarthy around the time of the first Iraq war.

During an interview for my book, Peter Neumann, the risks moderator, had some very interesting things to say about McCarthy. Suffice it to say that Peter is much more an admirer of Dijkstra, and that Peter Neumann is a good egg. Suffice it to say that good eggs admire other good eggs, and eschew low company. As Emily Dickinson said, the Soul selects her own Society.

Need I say more?

Visual Basic, and most other commercial languages, are in Max Horkheimer's sense "psychoanalysis in reverse" whereas merely reading about Lisp calms the mind, and brings to mind the recursive ontology of software, an ontology in which all things are just code, and Spinoza's monism applies.

Quotable Lisp

Donna L Davis — Mon, 18 Apr 2005 06:21:52 -0700

While searching for amplification on the closing tantalizing description ("neocon nutbar"), I ran across some interesting quotes which seem to confirm E.N's observations. (I didn't, however, devote enough time to find the answer I originally sought. Maybe some details are better left unknown.)

"Lisp has jokingly been called "the most intelligent way to misuse a computer". I think that description is a great compliment because it transmits the full flavor of liberation: it has assisted a number of our most gifted fellow humans in thinking previously impossible thoughts." - Edsger Dijkstra, CACM, 15:10

"Lisp is a programmer amplifier." - Martin Rodgers (first said by Chuck Moore about Forth)

"Lisp is worth learning for the profound enlightenment experience you will have when you finally get it; that experience will make you a better programmer for the rest of your days, even if you never actually use Lisp itself a lot." - Eric Raymond, "How to Become a Hacker"

"Lisp isn't a language, it's a building material." - Alan Kay

Practical Common Lisp

Edward G Nilges — Sun, 17 Apr 2005 22:44:05 -0700

Basically, what we're doing in OOD is trying to replace big and complex things not by means of the usual nonsense, where the complexity is dumbed-down, but by replacing them with the appropriate simple concept (*begriff*) which we then learn to deal with.