Re: [9fans] nice quote

[Eris Discordia <eris.discordia@gmail.com>]

> There's a talk Doug McIllroy gave where he joked about how he
> basically invented (or rather, discovered) recursion because someone
> said ``Hey, what would happen if we made a FORTRAN routine call
> itself?'' IIRC he had to tinker with the compiler to get it to accept
> the idea, and at first, no one realized what it would be good for.

Are you implying Doug McIlroy hadn't been taught about (and inevitably 
occupied by) Church-Turing Thesis or even before that Ackermann function 
and had to wait to be inspired by a comment in passing about FORTRAN to 
realize the importance of recursion?! This was a rhetorical question, of 
course.



--On Sunday, September 06, 2009 00:23 -0400 "J.R. Mauro" 
<jrm8005@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 2:26 PM, erik quanstrom <quanstro@quanstro.net>
> wrote:
>> i'm not a lisp fan.  but it's discouraging to see
>> such lack of substance as the following (collected
>> from a few posts):
>>
>>> Oh, yay, a Xah Lee quote, he's surely a trusted source on all things
>>> Lisp. Didja read his page about hiring a prostitute in Las Vegas? Or
>>> the one about how he lives in a car in the Bay Area because he's too
>>> crazy to get hired?
>>
>> surely an ad hominum attack like this neither furthers an
>> argument nor informs anyone.
>>
>>> I forgot this: Graham basically accuses programmers who don't find LISP
>>> as attractive (or powerful, as he puts it) as he does of living on lower
>>> planes of existence from which the "heavens above" of functional (or
>>> only LISP) programming seem incomprehensible. He writes/speaks
>>> persuasively, he's a successful businessman, but is he also an honest
>>> debater?
>>
>> and here i don't see an argument at all.
>>
>>> I just read in Wikipedia that, "Lisp's original conditional operator,
>>> cond, is the precursor to later if-then-else structures," without any
>>> citations. Assuming that to be true conditional branching is a
>>> fundamental element of control flow and it has existed in machine
>>> languages ever since early days. There's really very little to brag
>>> about it.
>>
>> i'd love to argue this factually, but my knowledge isn't
>> that extensive.  i think you'll find in the wiki entry for
>> Computer that much of what we take for granted today
>> was not obvious at the time.  stored program computers
>> with branching didn't come along until about 1948
>> (einiac).  i hope someone will fill in the gaps here.
>> i think it's worth appreciating how great these early
>> discoveries were.
>
> There's a talk Doug McIllroy gave where he joked about how he
> basically invented (or rather, discovered) recursion because someone
> said ``Hey, what would happen if we made a FORTRAN routine call
> itself?'' IIRC he had to tinker with the compiler to get it to accept
> the idea, and at first, no one realized what it would be good for.
>
>>
>> in the same vein, i don't know anything much about file
>> systems that i didn't steal from ken thompson.
>>
>> - erik
>>
>>
>