| Markus 2007-07-26, 10:05 pm |
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Dan,
>
>
>
> Markus E Leypold wrote:
>
> First of all, Marcus, Jon's signature does advertise his book, so
> he has directly advertised his book in this thread simply by posting
> to it.
Oh I see. How bad. If you follow my mail domain, you'll also find a
business web site (now somewhat out dated). Does that make me a
spammer too? And do you click on every link in signatures? I really
don't see how the word "hype" would apply to posting a link in a
signature. And what about www.prairienet.org/~dsb/? What about people
having their their company name in the sig?
> As for "hyping", it's not necessary to promote the book
> directly. It may be enough to draw programmers toward OCaml by making
> comparisons that are unfairly biased against Lisp, which Jon has been
> doing repeatedly.
And pulling them to himself just by alienating them to Lisp. Don't be
ridiculous. Jon is not the only OCaml developer around.
>
> Markus, do you consider it "true and useful" to say that pattern-
> matching libraries are "Greenspunning"? Do you think ML languages
Dan, actually I considered that as something that happens when the
discussion has alread detoriated enough - which certainly wasn't Jon's
doing alone. My dictionary doesn't contain the word "greenspunning" as
a verb, but I assume that Jon referred to "Greenspun's Tenth Rule"
which is, given the context, ironic, but, I think expresses very well,
why Jon distains pattern matching libraries in Lisp and thinks that
pattern matching belongs into the core language. So indeed the hint
'Greenspun' does communicate the argument very concisly.
> are "much more concise" than Lisp?
Unfortunately I'm programming in ML languages rather than Lisp,
preferrably in OCaml. So ... -- I'm certainly biased. Regarding
pattern matching -- Yes, I think ML (and Haskell pattern matching is
more concise than anything of that kind I have seen in Lisp so far,
and certainly more than nesting of conditional statements. In ML it
also ties in rather nicely with the type system: In many cases the
compiler will warn you about forgotten cases -- something I imagine
the Lisp systems must have difficulties with owing to the dynamic type
system.
> I don't think those statements are either true or useful.
> I don't think libraries and simple macros are Greenspunning, and I
I wonder what you think "greenspunning" actually is?
> don't think the ML family is "much" more concise than Lisp when you
> take macros into account.
You believe that. Other people believe differently. How can you reach
agreement? Certainly not by ad hominem attacks and attacking straw men
(what, at the end of the day, the argument "he sells book" actually
is. And if I consider further, trying to contradict my lack of
understanding of this argument by constructing a case against JH by
some other route ("Greenspunning", "It's wrong than ML is more
concise") is also a strawman, because it makes the "he sells books"
argument not any more valid, not one iota).
Regards -- Markus
(Who think's that some of the participants in this slug fest should
better their logic by reading e.g. here:
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies)
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