Re: [9fans] nice quote

["J.R. Mauro" <jrm8005@gmail.com>]

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
>
>