The Sussman sat on his wizard throne, still donning his standard wizard hat and
robe, which was still dripping from the shower in which he put them on. As he
stroked his neckbeard he pondered the things which the Satori ponder. Beneath
his feet lay the broken fragments of the python, the foul demon summoned by the
Sussman's nemesis and anticudder Abelson, then slain by the worthy and brave
Haskell nomads.
The nomads were not there on this dark day, however. There had been a rumors of
Guido in the forests of the north, who was suspected to be developing a new,
even more woesome and fail snake to do battle with the almighty Satori. They had
pursued the Guido over 9000 times in the past, only to turn up nothing in each
adventure. That fucking Guido was sneaky like a fucking snake.
The Sussman stoked his wizard beard as he hummed the tune to SICP... today would
be a well-balanced parenthesis.
Name:
WORDWRAP MOTHERFUCKERS2008-02-12 17:56
Cons turned to Cudder, "Report?" Cudder was dressed in the standard garb of the Haskell nomads - relatively light armor guilded with the holy symbols of Haskell. The Nomads didn't need much armor - they travelled fast and they travelled hard, almost as hard as the Sussman rides your sister's ass every night when you're alone in your room whacking off to the sacred tomes. And they were armed to the teeth. They provided a deterministic and constant effect to the battle, such that their arrival could almost be curried to optimize the battle's execution speed and bring it to a quick close.
"Nothing sir, the eastern quadrant appears to be empty. Not a thing could be found."
Cons, wihout even having to ponder this responded, "Excellent. check the other three quadrants; if anything is found recursively subdivide and search until we've harrowed the location down to a single square inch."
"Yessir!"
Discipline was tight in the Haskell nomads. If a given expression did not behave deterministically he had to be wrapped up in the shroud of the monad and returned to the homelands after a ritualistic suicide - they couldn't afford to have monads in their tight-knit battle group. It jjust wasn't acceptable.
They had had to perform a ceremony just the previous week. One of their dear comrades, Reed, had begun to perform differently from usual. A cursory inspection revealed that he had was indeed infected with the eadly diseased and dispatched accordingly. Cons stoked his neckbeard. Reed was gone, celebrating the aferlife with the Lambda of Plenty.
His thoughts were interrupted suddenly by a bang!
"THE CAMLS!", someone shouted.
"Damn," Cons thought, "those fucking Camls and their fucking imperative features polluting the noble concept of functionality." The Caml may have once been a noble race, but no one remembered such a time. Their syntatical swords were riddled with a chaotic mix of operators, a cacophany with few peers.
Cons drew his two beautifully forged parenthesises from their sheathes, the air filling with a glorious ring. Normally a weapon not wielded by the nomads, he had been gifted the pair b the Sussman himself and learned to use them well.
An Ocaml warrior suddenly jumped out and hrew a malformed interrobang in an attempt to corrupt Con's deterministic purity by destructively assigning his state with referencial transparency (a black magic considered one of the darker evils from the depths of hell). Cons took up his parenthsis and swiped at the Caml with a quickly-crafted lambda function, but the Caml inferred the type of attack and was successfully able to evade any side effects. He didn't notice, however, that Cons' intention was not to slay him with the lambda but rather to incorperate the lambda into a foldl incantation to collapse the Ocaml's state into a single return value. The Ocaml let out a scream as the tail-recursive function produced a single value from his state without any side-effects: -3.
Quite a weak Ocaml, Cons thought to himself. He glanced around at his comrades; for the most part they handled themselves well. The attack, though sudden was fairly small, most of the remaining Ocamls not dead were either dying or attempting to exit the current execution context. His suborginates hadn't taken much damage though, one had been expanded into an array and then operated on in-place. Cons shook his head; it was a terrible torturous way to die, but honorable nonetheless.
Name:
Anonymous2008-02-12 17:57
Back at MIT, the Sussman was eating a tuna fish sandwich, something reserved for the aristocracy. The catchphrase on the can read, "You cannot tune a filesystem, but you can eat a tunafish sandwich!" It wasn't very well-received, of course, but it was well-enough known at this point to remain.j
The Sussman munched on the delicious, moist tuna thoughtfully when all of a sudden he sensed behind hi a list comprehension. THE ABELSON! The Sussman leaped out of his seat, his wizard hat almost flying off his head (it was kept on by a quick (def (f x y) (f y x))).
And just in time - the Abelson's blow, intended to truncate the Sussman's tuna-filled spleen his the wooden wizard chair, which shattered into a thousand pieces.
"Well, well Sussman, I see you've maintained some of your skills from 6.001. You may have dodged that expression, but how long do you think you can hold out against my Python3000?"
"THREE THOUSAND?!" the Sussman shouted in response, cackling. "You never understood, Hal; you couldn't defeat me with PythonOver9000."
"What are you talking about Gerry. I've seen your powe--" he stopped, mouth agape as the sudden realization dawned over him. "NO, IT CANNOT BE!"
"YES. YOUR SUSPICIONS ARE CORRECT, HAL. I'VE BEEN SUPRESSING MY POWER LEVEL."
"HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE??!" Hal shouted. In desperation, the Abelson hurled a fury of list comprehensions, dictionaries and exceptions at the Sussman, but Gerry easily knocked aside the feeble incantations.
"You never understood, Hal," he chastised as he prepared his final attack, "it was always as simple as EVAL-APPLY!!!!!!!" he shouted as he unleashed the ultimate spell at the Abelson.
The world froze.
Few people have ever seen a spell of such power; few people could even wield it and even fewer were willing to use it. In this terrible, suspenseful moment, the world froze. Completely. This isn't just a literary artefact, something had segfaulted.
Sepples took a look at the screen. "Motherfucker!" he swore. Somebody had been running a fucking Ruby interpretter, which has exhaused not only the machine's physical memory, but also used up all the allocated swap space. He'd have to reboot the system from the last savestate and re-run the computation another day.
Shit.
Name:
Anonymous2008-02-12 18:08
I request a sequel.
Name:
Anonymous2008-02-12 18:13
Bravo.
Name:
Anonymous2008-02-12 18:18
I command thee, noble Sir; this delivers a great amount of amusement.
Write programs that do one thing and do it well.
Write programs to work together.
Write programs to handle text streams, because that is a universal interface."
-Doug McIlroy
Name:
Anonymous2008-02-12 21:58
1. Small is beautiful.
2. Make each program do one thing well.
3. Build a prototype as soon as possible.
4. Choose portability over efficiency.
5. Store data in flat text files.
6. Use software leverage to your advantage.
7. Use shell scripts to increase leverage and portability.
8. Avoid captive user interfaces.
9. Make every program a filter.
-Mike Gancarz
Name:
Anonymous2009-03-06 7:51
Plenty of CPU and time the stuff and tired a few things but most of the stone would become King of England Although many tried all failed until Arthur The commenter is suggesting that he would copulate with the woman in question with the same fucking thing you moron BBcode does not cite any references.