One: Guy Steele is a system software designer, not a PL researcher. In other words, he is in a class with Dennis Ritchie, Alan Kay, Brendan Eich, John McCarthy, John Warnock, John Ousterhout, Bjarne Stroustrup, Rob Pike, Larry Wall, Ted Codd, Tim Berners-Lee, Leslie Lamport, Ken Thompson, Dave Cutler, Sergey Brin, Luis von Ahn, Guido van Rossum, Linus Torvalds, and anyone else who has designed fundamental architectural components of code which everyone on earth points their CPU at a zillion times a day. Frankly, these men are heroes. They are literally warriors of God. And anyone who insults them is an asshole.
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Anonymous2008-05-16 16:36
tl;dr summarize plz k thnx ty
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Anonymous2008-05-16 17:24
It's possible to describe anything in mathematical notation. I recall seeing some paper once in which someone had created a mathematical description of C.
Facepalm
Sure, it would be harder for C than it is for, say, ML or Lisp, but does this shitwizard think that formal descriptions of programming languages are somehow esoteric or unusual?
I suspect this guy is a moron and doesn't have a clue what he is talking about. However, I feel very frustrated for not being able to articulate the exact reasons of why he is a moron and how big a moron he is. Also, I didn't read that whole piece of crap.
>>6
For one thing, maybe he could try actually reading a doctoral thesis in any field of computer science before spouting bullshit about whether or not they employ the scientific method.
Maybe instead of limiting the papers he reads to technical discussions abot programming languages that he's clearly not equipped to understand anyway, he could check out areas related to image processing, or data compression, where the existance of pretty tables should at least be able to get through to him that proper experimentation has been involved.
Also, Python got list comprehensions, a pretty major feature, from Haskell, thus validating the flow of ideas from research lanugages to pragmatic languages, and probably rendering most of his ranting moot.
I didn't read the whole thing either.
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Anonymous2008-05-16 18:20
>>6
I can articulate my reasons, which are
(i) the author is a fuckgrabbing dickstuffer; and
(ii) the author needs to kick himself in the balls immediately.