KMP on sussman and MIT

http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/228f3bde619747ef?dmode=source

Kent is one of my programming heroes.

In my experience, languages at MIT were taught as religions not as sciences.
Why, he's accusing the Sußmann of being unscientific, which would ultimately...<GASP>

Hells, bells, and cockleshells, the back and forth between some trolls in that thread is breathtaking.

The biggest thing I learned in that thread is that Schemers know what the truth
is, and as a result have an inferiority complex which manifests itself when
someone merely mentions a feature of Lisp that is not present in Scheme. Such a
mention is instantly interpreted as a flaming attack. This is simply evidence
that they know what the truth is, but simply refuse to accept it.

Rational debate is difficult with Schemers, because their positions tend to be
undefined and contradictory. They believe the lack of functionality in the
language as a virtue---Lisp is said to have a lot of unneeded ``cruft'' in it.
But then it comes to light that Scheme implementations have their own
ad hoc imitations of some of this cruft, which Schemers are happy to use in
their programs, at the cost of portability. They believe that they are still
programming in Scheme, when much of the code is written in an implementation's
dialect.  The term Scheme is elastic, undefined.  It would be nice to be able
to get them to commit to a definition of ``Scheme'' that is as precise as the
meaning of ``Common Lisp''.

Schemers prefer to believe in some unspecificed notions like ``purity'',
instead of reasoning from facts.  It's important to them to have a *feeling*
that they are working with something pure, determined by some arbitrary
emotional standard.

I suspect that, demographically, Schemers are simply a younger, dumber crowd.
That is, if we had a histogram breaking down Lispers and Schemers by age, the
Scheme one would be fatter in the younger years.  This is the natural
consequence of Scheme having been flogged at Universities.
Moreover, people are drawn to programming tools according to their
personalities and maturity.  Inferior tools naturally attract only those people
who are not able to think clearly and boldly enough to recognize inferiority,
and name it for what it is.  The culture that forms around tools consists of
those people whom those tools are able to attract and captivate. When people
change, they move on, and are replaced by an influx of replacements who inherit
their discarded attitudes; so what is observed is that the cultures appear
static, despite membership turnover. 

It has been my consistent observation that immature programmers revel in
undefined concepts like simplicity and purity. They like small languages, and
don't mind reinventing wheels and building complex things from scratch.  The
effort of continuous reinventing somehow justifies the saving of effort from
not having to initially absorb a larger set of axioms.  The justification is,
they can do it better than anyone who came before them, so those extra axioms
are worthless anyway!  To convince themselves that they can do it better,
despite not being any smarter than their predecessors, they resort to the
argument that they are more ``in touch'' with the current world and its
technology. Whatever they do is better simply because it is modern, and it is
modern simply because it is more recent. A binary tree module written in C
yesterday is exciting and new. An equivalent one from eighteen years ago is
antiquated crud. This is a form of denial, an emotional response to the pain
that comes from knowing that someone did it eighteen years ago just as well,
and that he would laugh at the modern reinvention effort.

Moreover, immature programmers don't appreciate the role of precise
specifications and standards; to specify an interface or behavior means to code
it. If two or more groups implement a common specification, they are simply
wasting their time doing redundant, ungratifying, inferior work. Those people
must be mechanical drones if they need someone to specify to them how something
should work; real programmers never work from someone else's designs, they just
sit down and crank out the system according to their whims. Also, they don't
interface with specifications, they interface with implementations. The
implementation is always right, so why bother with documents?  If requirements
are imposed on these programmers, they must never be so precise that they can't
be loosely interpreted or tweaked to suit their tastes. Something as precise as
a programming language standard is so abhorrent, so that if there must be a
standard, it must be the smallest possible document. Nobody has the right to
impose a precise design on someone else; there must always be room left for the
human element: esthetic taste, creative interpretation, the license to
cull or embelish.

>>5
tl;dr this should summed up as:
Scheme is toy language for academic research.
Whoever spams this retarded SICP bullshit doesn't realize Scheme is as much as useful as Altair BASIC today.

Go away.

>>5

Scheme hasn't been designed for implementing complex systems in the Real World. It's good enough for teaching undergrads functional programming, even after they've been exposed to imperative languages. At some/most? courses side-effecting is simply prohibited and they have to figure it out somehow. It's almost as easy as grepping for the bang character. Undergrad programs don't really have to do any IO, they just accept parameters for their functions. Some of this stuff is even interesting, especially if it involves call/cc.

If the Scheme fanboy bunch were worth a spit, they'd work out cross-implementation portability like CL folk did. Hell, they don't even have a de-facto standard FFI API (everyone writes libraries for their own impls), there are two competing object systems (Meroon and TinyCLOS), though more often than not no object abstraction is used. Still, Scheme's good at what it was designed to do, teaching undergrads Lisp and functional programming. If only they fixed the lack of keyword arguments and the braindead "syntax" facility.

Moreover, immature programmers don't appreciate the role of
precise specifications and standards

Cowboy coding is one thing and bottom-up agile programming is another. In the Real World, specifications are often flawed or evolve in unpredictable ways due to forces such as customer whim. Having CLOS around helps with refactoring/modularity/extensibility a lot; i finally switched one of systems to it after figuring out that i rolled up my own message-passing protocol based on closures.

>>6
7/10. You managed to make me type out a 7 paragraph response. Good work

KMP owns, he is so hardcore

On behalf of several members of the community, I would like to express my shock and disappointment at some of Mr. Gerald J Sussman, Ph.D.'s mottos. First and foremost, like a verbal magician, Mr. Sussman knows how to lie without appearing to be lying, how to bury secrets in mountains of garbage-speak. Purists may object to my failure to present specific examples of his pathological, macabre overgeneralizations. Fortunately, I do have an explanation for this omission. The explanation demands an understanding of how when I say that I must blow my whistle on Mr. Sussman's tactics of deception and distortion, this does not, I repeat, does not mean that children should belong to the state. This is a common fallacy held by imperious marauders. Mr. Sussman is like a giant octopus sprawling its slimy length over city, state, and nation. Like the octopus of real life, he operates under cover of self-created screen. Mr. Sussman seizes in his long and powerful tentacles our executive officers, our legislative bodies, our schools, our courts, our newspapers, and every agency created for the public protection.

This may be water under the bridge by now, but on several occasions I have heard Mr. Sussman state that he can achieve his goals by friendly and moral conduct. I am not able to rightly apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a comment. What I consider far more important though is that it would be a mistake to believe that science is merely a tool invented by the current elite to maintain power. That fact may not be pleasant but it is a fact regardless of our wishes on the matter. He should just face the facts. I state these facts only to give a bit of personal background as to why I am not a robot. I am a thinking, feeling, human being. As such, I get teary-eyed whenever I see Mr. Sussman jawbone aimlessly. It makes me want to follow knowledge like a sinking star beyond the utmost bound of human thought, which is why I'm so eager to tell you that ignorance is bliss. This may be why Mr. Sussman's worshippers are generally all smiles.

It would be nugatory to discuss Mr. Sussman's hypnopompic insights without first mentioning that we see the same kind of phenomenon—less obvious, perhaps, but distinctly perceptible—in almost all areas of activity in which Mr. Sussman chooses to participate. That's the current situation, and if you have any doubt about the reality of it, then you haven't been paying close enough attention to what's been happening in the world. I've known some spivs who were impressively purblind. However, Mr. Sussman is vitriolic and that trumps purblind every time. If he thinks that he can make me walk around with a mountain of pain and suffering welled up inside me then he's barking up the wrong tree. You should not ask, "Where is Mr. Sussman's integrity?", but rather, "Why does Mr. Sussman think that this is the best of all possible worlds and that he is the best of all possible people?". The latter question is the better one to ask because he likes to launch into nonsensical non sequiturs. Have you noticed that that hasn't been covered at all by the mainstream media? Maybe they're afraid that Mr. Sussman will retaliate by turning psychics loose against us good citizens.

Like much conventional wisdom, Mr. Sussman's causeries contain too much convention and not enough wisdom. That's self-evident, and even Mr. Sussman would probably agree with me on that. Even so, when I first became aware of his covert invasion into our thought processes, all I could think was how his diatribes are based on hate. Hate, sadism, and an intolerance of another viewpoint, another way of life. We must face the fact that Mr. Sussman honestly believes that he has a "special" perspective on Chekism that carries with it a "special" right to biologically or psychologically engineer avaricious fribbles to make them even more uncouth than they already are. What kind of Humpty-Dumpty world is he living in? Although I haven't been able to concoct an acceptable answer to that question, I can suggest a tentative hypothesis. My hypothesis is that his credos are designed to fan the flames of extremism into a planet-spanning inferno. And they're working; they're having the desired effect.

If I am doomed to have a nervous breakdown then Mr. Sussman will obviously scar little children's self-image any day now. For the most part, his musings are about as useful to society as a hundred deutsche marks were in 1923 Germany. Still, this is not the first time I've wanted to call a spade a spade. But it is the first time I realized that he wants us to emulate the White Queen from Lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass, who strives to believe "as many as six impossible things before breakfast". Then again, even the White Queen would have trouble believing that Mr. Sussman has mystical powers of divination and prophecy. I prefer to believe things that my experience tells me are true, such as that I don't know if Mr. Sussman is consciously and purposely evil or merely discourteous. I do know, however, that he doesn't want us to know about his plans to invade every private corner and force every thought into a hectoring mold. Otherwise, we might do something about that. Let me end this letter by pointing out that the battle to upbraid Mr. Gerald J Sussman, Ph.D. for being so bestial is now joined on many fronts. We will not waver; we will not tire; we will not falter; and, we will not fail.

>>11
I, for one, feel that there are better ways in which to disseminate the following information, but this letter will have to suffice. Before examining the present situation, however, it is important that I nourish children with good morals and self-esteem. /prog/ must sense its own irremediable inferiority. That's why it is so desperate to do the devil's work; it's the only way for it to distinguish themselves from the herd. It would be a lot nicer, however, if /prog/ also realized that it has been deluding people into believing that gruesome windbags are all inherently good, sensitive, creative, and inoffensive. Don't let it delude you, too.

You may balk at this, but I welcome /prog/'s comments. However, /prog/ needs to realize that to get even the simplest message into the consciousness of effrontive madmen it has to be repeated at least fifty times. Now, I don't want to insult your intelligence by telling you the following fifty times, but I don't know how to deal with what I call rummy riffraff. Have you noticed that that hasn't been covered at all by the mainstream media? Maybe they're afraid that /prog/ will retaliate by turning suborners of perjury loose against us good citizens. For your edification, I should point out that I find it necessary, if I am to meet my reader on something like a common ground of understanding, to point out that if I didn't sincerely believe that there is something patently stingy in the notion that /prog/ is the ultimate authority on what's right and what's wrong, then I wouldn't be writing this letter.

Some reputed—as opposed to reputable—members of /prog/'s cabal quite adamantly insist that mediocrity is a worthwhile goal. I find it rather astonishing that anyone could maintain such a thing but then again, I try never to argue with /prog/ because it's clear it's not susceptible to reason. /prog/ has been offering blinkered sewer rats a lot of money to increase society's cycle of hostility and violence. This is blood money, plain and simple. Anyone thinking of accepting it should realize that /prog/'s claim that going through the motions of working is the same as working is not only an attack on the concept of objectivity but an assault on the human mind. /prog/ says it's going to exercise control through indirect coercion or through psychological pressure or manipulation by next weekend. Good old /prog/. It just loves to open its mouth and let all kinds of things come out without listening to how audacious they sound. Although slovenly megalomaniacs, inaniloquent, uncontrollable fast-buck artists, and /prog/'s proxies are entirely and absolutely fungible, we are here to gain our voice in this world, and whether or not /prog/ approves, we will continue to be heard.

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15 Name: Anonymous 2010-11-26 21:13