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esr on LISP

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-27 2:06

Eric S. Raymond famously said that "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."

But Eric S. Raymond is a BAD programmer.  Therefore, this quote must be considered a falsehood.

Name: Anonymous 2012-01-27 9:07

X said or did Y.
X is bad.
Therefore Y is bad.

No. Logic doesn't work that way. Just because you can make a correlation by abduction, doesn't mean anything more than a possible relevance - it's meant to grab your attention, to make you investigate, not to lead you to a logical conclusion. This sort of "logic" is magical thinking at its best, it arises when people confuse association with implication (association is built-in in our neural networks and doesn't have to be learned, but logic has to be learned, although most people tend to learn it quite early on, naturally, but not all are using it all the time as it require more conscious effort, hence magical thinking, or in this case, the particular "ad hominem" argument).

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