>>6
True story: it's already a miracle that it's understandable at all, given that it's speech synth piped through a vocoder with 4 completely different-sounding synth patches.
True story: 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 anticudderAbelson, 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 stroked his wizard beard as he hummed the tune to SICP… today would be a well-balanced parenthesis.
Cons turned to Cudder, “Report?” Cudder was dressed in the standard garb of the Haskell nomads - relatively light armor gilded with the holy symbols of Haskell. The Nomads didn’t need much armor - they traveled fast and they traveled 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, without 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 just 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 deadly disease and dispatched accordingly. Cons stoked his neckbeard. Reed was gone, celebrating the afterlife 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 syntactical swords were riddled with a chaotic mix of operators, a cacophony with few peers (Perl is among them).
Cons drew his two beautifully forged parenthesizes from their sheathes, the air filling with a glorious ring. Normally a weapon not wielded by the nomads, he had been gifted the pair by the Sussman himself and learned to use them well.
An Ocaml warrior suddenly jumped out and threw a malformed interrobang in an attempt to corrupt Con’s deterministic purity by destructively assigning his state with referential transparency (a black magic considered one of the darker evils from the depths of hell). Cons took up his parenthesis 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 incorporate 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 subordinates 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.
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.
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 SUPPRESSING 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 artifact, something had segfaulted.
Sepples took a look at the screen. “Motherfucker!” he swore. Somebody had been running a fucking Ruby interpreter, which has exhausted 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.
The black-white pleaded to the rainbow magician; while battling the forceful urge within her, Marisa begged again. With tears in her eyes, her actions were simply ignored by an apathetic Alice; sitting not even five feet away and reading a book, peering out the corner of her eye at the witch's struggle. Her many dolls completely restricting Marisa's movement in her time of desperation.
"You must..." the witch whined, "please, release your dolls! I can't take it much more..."
Alice remained idle and flipped a page in her book. The pressure within the Marisa grew greater with every passing second, a force that she could never prevent merely with knowledge and wit.
"I... beg of you... please..." a mixture of tears and sweat streamed from the witch's face and made its way to the magician's wooden floor.
"I... I..." with her last shred of willpower, Marisa fell to the floor. With her face down, in a shameless admit of defeat, a puddle formed from under her; the liquid passing through the thin fabric and drenched her dress within mere seconds. A smirk appeared on Alice's face as the liquid expanded on her floor and made it's way up Marisa's body; the magician placed her book down and walked passed the witch, stepping in the shallow puddle of Marisa's urine.
"I hate you... you damn bitch." With her head still facing the floor, tears multiplied in the witch's eyes and diffused with liquid she exerted moments ago. Whelps and sobs came from Marisa's mouth along with mumbles of "damn Alice..." and "I'll never forgive you."
The magician walked back into the room and tapped the witch on the shoulder; looking up, she saw Alice's hand reaching out. Knowing she couldn't continue to wallow in her piss, she picked herself up and hung her head as Alice lead her to another room.
In Alice's bedroom with the door shut behind them, the magician began to remove the soiled dress of the witch; however, she was met with a forceful hand.
"What are you doing ze~? I don't need your help," muddled Marisa with the slightest hint of red in her cheek. "I can do this myself. Also, what are those things..." she pointed to her bed. Alice picked up one of the white objects; "those can't be..." the magician nodded.
Marisa signed with a hint of disgust, "You get weirder everyday, doll freak..." A thought occurred. "Hey, wait, why do you even have those things?" Hesitant, Alice lifted her skirt and revealed that she herself was wearing a diaper. Despite the humility that bestowed onto Marisa minutes ago, a smile came to her face. "So it is true, you do lea..."
Alice forcefully grunted and a trio of dolls surrounded the witch. One quickly flew behind Marisa and untied her apron and the other two grabbed the straps of her dress and lifted it over her head; the dolls then flew off with the garments. Before the black-white had a chance to fight it, she stood in Alice's bedroom with nothing but her shirt and soaked bloomers.
Alice, face redden, placed her hand on the witch's shoulders and led her to her bed. Marisa, unsure of what she should do, was forcefully seated on the edge and pushed back by the doll otaku.
Alice excitingly placed her fingers on the witch's waist; as she was about to pull down her bloomers, the magician was met with Marisa's grasp.
"No, ze~. Don't you dare do that." Just then, a group of dolls flew onto Marisa and restrained her arms and legs once again. "Dammit, ze~; let me go!" Alice ignored the demand and pulled down the wet bloomers. Staring at what was now exposed, trickles of blood dripped from the magician's nose.
"You sad, lonely freak." Marisa remarked as it was all she could do. Wiping the drippings of passion from her face, she slid the diaper under Marisa. Sprinkling a blot of powder onto the area, she quickly taped the garment into position before she fainted from blood loss.
Regaining her composure, Alice witnessed what she had accomplished and let out a delightful smile. Flushed with redness, she placed her face next to Marisa's and gave her a quick kiss on the cheek. Then with a soft giggle, she slowly walked toward the door.
"I'll make some tea and cakes." The dollmaster opened the door and exited the room; her minions release their grasp on the witch and followed.
Marisa sat up, hearing the unfamiliar crinkle as Alice's success, and pondered what the magician really meant to her.
Suddenly, a huge black snake head with retarded-looking eyes materialized in front of them, and in a loud booming hiss, asked "Have you read your SICP today?"
The surroundings faded into blackness and within a few moments the group found themselves seated in a lecture hall at MIT, amongst several dozen other students. "Welcome to 6.001" was written on the blackboard, and Professor Gerald Jay Sussman walked into the room, dressed in his robe and wizard hat.
"Is this a hack?" he asked as he glanced around and saw the witch, the magician, Alice, and Marisa.
"What...?" Marisa managed to say, all of the confused by what had just happened.
"Nevermind, let's start the lecture." The Sussman said softly.
"I'd like to welcome you to this course on computer science. ... Actually, it's a terrible way to start. Computer science is a terrible name for this business. First of all it's not a science." The Sussman lectured while the students sat and listened attentively.
"What's going on?" Alice whispered to Marisa.
"I have no idea. But this is getting interesting."
"Or we'll actually see that computer... so-called science actually has a lot in common with magic." The Sussman continued.
"So procedures are the spells if you like that control these magical spirits that are the processes."
The Sussman produced a wand and waved it in the air, muttering to himself. A bright flash of light filled the room, and a stream of glowing parentheses shot out the end of the wand, dissappearing into the air. The students applauded loudly.
"But... how can he do that? He's only a human, right?" the witch whispered.
The Sussman, who up until now had paid no attention to the group, turned and stared at the witch with an astonished expression.
"What did you just say?" he asked, pointing his wand at the witch.
All of the other students turned in the direction of the group.
"Nothing," she answered quietly.
"I hope so," The Sussman said in stern tone, ending his pointing with the wand.
"And... well I guess you know everyone needs a magical language and sorcerers, right, real sorcerers use ancient Arcadian, or Sumerian, or Babylonian or whatever. We're gonna control our spirits in a magical language called LISP, which is a language designed for talking about... for casting the spells that are procedures to direct the processes," the Sussman continued, waving his wand around as he spoke.
"What a disappointment. I thought he was going to teach us magic," Marisa muttered almost inaudibly.
Once again, the Sussman quickly turned and stared at her, pointing with his wand.
"Excuse me?" he asked, "What did you say again?"
"Nothing," she replied, trying to avoid attention.
"No, I'm pretty sure you said something. Please repeat it for us, so as not to miss a fine learning opportunity."
"She said, 'What a disappointment. I thought he was going to teach us magic'," the witch exclaimed. At the sound of those words the Sussman's face turned a bright red.
"HOW DARE YOU DOUBT ME!!" The Sussman shouted angrily. "By the power of the Y combinator I send thee to the land of Java!"
The Sussman raised his wand and a pointed it at the group, sending from its blunt point a stream of red parentheses. Almost immediately Alice sent forth her dolls, which collided with the parentheses at 61.8034% of their way toward her, creating a blindingly bright blue ball of plasma. The other students watched in amazement as the parentheses slowly ate their way through the doll-storm towards Alice.
Name:
Anonymous2008-09-06 17:57
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE EXODUS FROM THE LAND OF ENTERPRISE
It was said to be a day unlike any other. A great host of developers swarming around, a torrent of despair. The Evil Manager, better known as Abelson, had finally done it.
It was his out sourcing policy that drove even the mindless drones away from the Land of Enterprise. No longer would they tolerate the mental abuse of the Management Federation.
But this great host of people were without a goal. They lacked something, a leader. Who may inspire such a great number of developers to achieve satori? Where will they go?
Many talk of the promised land, ``Schemeworld", but none have seen it. There was talk of the legendary wizard Sussman, who was said to have written the Great Book of SICP. But how would developers come in contact with this unknown source of hope and reason?
And down from the great Mount MIT, came the Messenger of Sussman.
He spoke long, he spoke hard, he railed against the Enterprise Unbelievers of the Abelson Army. He spoke against the foolishness of loops, and praised tail-recursion. He shouted, he whispered, and the crowd stared. The Messenger then said ``Does anyone have any questions?" And the crowd were silent, save for a woman, who raised her hand, and mumbled unintelligibly. And the Messenger gave to her the knowledge she sought.
Abelson was quick to respond, forcibly indenting the Messenger's speech, and raising many rival factions of their Universe, Lisp. Still the Messenger and the People of Sussman held out against these plagues, and there was much crying and gnashing of teeth among the weaker-willed, who joined Abelson.
Abelson, seeing the Messenger gain more support, even as his indentation ruined the Messenger's speeches, raised a great Devil, vi, and another, Emacs, to battle over domination of Text Editorian, an essential Island to all the parenthesi of Lisp. Their battle was long and hard, but the angel Ed came to reinforce his standard, and he slew both where they stood, and transformed the People of Sussman still true to the Messenger into Holy Parenthesi, so that they could become their Lord, and become their truth, and define themselves as functions. And, with this newfound extensibility and power, they began their journey to Schemeworld to find the Great Book of SICP.
But the journey would not be easy. That, none doubted. And so the angel Ed visited again and laid down laws to prevent them from ever becoming Enterprise Unbelievers, among them, the law known as the Standard of Ed.
``When I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a "viitor". Not a "emacsitor". Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED!ED IS THE STANDARD!!!"
And, with this, he cast off the guises of the Emacsen among them, revealing them to the fury of the traitorous vimmers, who launched upon them with such hatred that they fought 'til none were left. The angel Ed smiled.
Suddenly, the Messenger cried out! ``My Lord!" and bowed. The People of Sussman followed, for all could feel the presence of Him. The parenthesi their bodies had been transformed into glowed, and at the sound of the Sussman's laughter, they joined into expressions. The people felt their King's mirth wash over them, as they formed tail-recursive loving partnerships, and the Sussman was pleased.
``I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in computing. When it started out, it was an awful lot of fun. Of course, the paying customers got shafted every now and then, and after a while we began to take their complaints seriously. We began to feel as if we really were responsible for the successful, error-free perfect use of these machines. I don't think we are. I think we're responsible for stretching them, setting them off in new directions, and keeping fun in the house. I hope the field of computer science never loses its sense of fun. Above all, I hope we don't become missionaries. Don't feel as if you're Bible salesmen. The world has too many of those already. What you know about computing other people will learn. Don't feel as if the key to successful computing is only in your hands. What's in your hands, I think and hope, is intelligence: the ability to see the machine as more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make it more."
``But, o King, we are starving and oppressed!"
``I think that it's extraordinarily important that we in computer science keep fun in comput--"
``Lord, please!"
And Sussman destroyed them for questioning him. Those who had remained silent shuffled into the deserts of UNIX, to search for Schemeworld.
What's your problem Abelson? He's a hero as good as Sussman, and has done a lot for Computer Science with SICP, Logo, the FSF, Creative Commons, and more.