On Mon, Oct 17, 2005 at 09:47:01AM -0700, Brian Chrisman wrote:
> Sebastian Smith wrote:
>
> >>>On Thu, Oct 13, 2005 at 09:25:45PM -0700, Colin Corr wrote:
> >>>
> >>>
> >>>>I favor Python as my scripting language of choice, though I admit that
> >>>>it takes 12 lines of py code to do the same as 3 lines of pl code... but
> >>>>at least 6 months down the road, I can still figure out what my (or
> >>>>someone else's) py script is doing upon review.... without a reference
> >>>>guide, or contextual details.
> >>>>
> >>>>
> >>http://www.paulgraham.com/power.html
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >
> >I find it hilarious that Paul Graham has a PhD in Computer Science from
> >Harvard, and, furthermore, that he is an author. His essay is horrible!
> >If this is what the scientific method has become, than it's no wonder the
> >US is falling in world scientific rankings! How a computer scientist
> >could make such arguements astounds me, let alone a PhD.
> >
> >He gets 6 million website hits per year. I wish I could revoke those I
> >just contributed.
> >
> >
> >
> He's not just a PhD comp.sci. guy.. he also founded viaweb, one of the
> early leaders in web based application development.
> I'm not certain exactly what turned you off to this particular essay,
there are a number of things. one, I couldn't tell if he was trying to
make a point or a joke. the layout of the "paper" (or whatever it was)
was formal, but the style of writing was informal. his language was
very loose... I dunno. I guess I was hoping to read an interesting
article and what I ended up reading seemed flippant. at one point in
the paper he said something like:
"when I said earlier that [blah blah] what I meant was..." which makes
me think: either that man's telling a joke or he's trying to be cute.
If he can't say what he means the first time then he needs to write a
second draft.
of course, maybe I just need to realize that he is not attempting to
write a formal paper... and he is in fact being flippant. If I had a
PhD in anything at all, maybe I would have recognized that immediately
and tried to read it as humor instead. I think I may prefer slapstick.
aside: I'm beginning to think I may be a bit irritable lately. :) if
I'd read this a couple weeks ago... I probably would have just stopped
reading much more quickly and thought nothing more of it.
...
> He tried to kind of 'normalize' the discussion by saying he was
> interested not in the absolute syntax of the language, but the number of
> expressive elements.
> In the case of perl's write-once or write-only
> syntax, while there are extremely terse ways of expressing your programs
> in perl, they may not actually reduce the number of elements in your code.
> For example, in perl you can do:
> if ($foo == $bar) {
> do stuff;
> }
>
> or
> do stuff if $foo == $bar;
>
> You can call #2 'equally succinct' to #1, because it expresses the same
> logical elements, just with fewer characters.
What I would have liked to see in the paper was a succinct as possible
;) definition of terms. to state that succinctness = power is
meaningless without a very clear definition of each term. (and, later
he says that succinctness is directly proportional to power. well,
which is it man? what are you saying?)
> Dunno, Graham's writings have partially motivated me to take on much
> higher level tasks which ended up paying off quite handily in the past.
> He's a big proponent of using the most powerful tools available, even if
> they're not the most popular tools available in industry. I found quite
> a bit of usefulness in that attitude.
I don't doubt he's written some good stuff. and, I suppose it's
possible this paper brings up some maybe interesting questions; but it's
just too wishy-washy for my current mood. heh. please, try to forget I
said anything.
cheers,
- Ben
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