Stopping cows

[pozorvlak]

There's a scene in John Wyndham's marvellous Chocky where the main character asks his father "Why does a cow stop?"

What he means by this is why does a cow's intelligence stop: why are cows smart enough to escape out of an open gate, but not smart enough to see that they could lift up the latch with their noses and escape whenever they want? Why

Comments

[elvum]

Ooh, harsh. :-) But some languages with a strong underlying theoretical basis have active development communities outside academia too, don't they? Trival example: Java and C++ have static typing, standards documents and the guarantee that each object will have a class that determines its behaviour - Java even (apparently) has formal semantics, although this must surely count as an area I'm unqualified to talk about... What about Lisp? Has anyone other than RMS and Paul Graham ever used it?

[elvum]

Obviously the type system in C(++) is an abomination and barely worthy of the name - I clarify this quickly before the hordes of Haskellites fall upon me and beat me with monads.

[pozorvlak]

Well, it was a pretty dreadful article, and anyone who describes Why's (poignant) guide to Ruby as "particular[ly] horrid" clearly has no soul.

To clarify - I'm not saying that the features listed are bad things, but I am saying that their absence isn't the automatic black mark that the author thinks.

Formal semantics for Java: intriguing. Without going too deep into that page, it's not clear to me if they've formalised the whole language or just the fragment that deals with concurrency. And they're using operational semantics, rather than the denotational semantics popular with the functional crowd - perhaps totherme can enlighten us as to the difference :-)

Lisp: a load of AI reseachers use(d) it, and it's the extension language for Emacs, the GIMP and AutoCAD, and the backend for the travel agents Orbitz is written in Lisp, and Reddit was written in Lisp until they rewrote it in Python, and a couple of the early symbolic algebra packages were written in Lisp, and, er... mostly it's used as a teaching language, AIUI

[elvum]

Obviously Emacs==RMS and wasn't Reddit funded by Y-Combinator, aka Paul Graham? :-) I think I tried Lisp last time I got enthused by neural nets, and cordially hated it, but then I am a thoroughly impure programmer with a moderate IDE addiction. Plus I dislike brace-heavy syntax. :-)

[michiexile]

I absolutely hated the poignant guide to Ruby and couldn't stand reading it. Must make me soulless - however, my ignosticism makes me view this as throughout irrelevant and safely ignored as a character fault.

[pozorvlak]

:-)

I'm surprised - I'm only a couple of chapters in, but I really like it. Then again, I do like technical books that don't take themselves seriously.