"xahlee@gmail.com" gmail.com> writes:

Oh Xah, it has just been so entertaining!

However, this takes the biscuit. You see, the only two people who were
actually taking your claims at all seriously are Don and Rainer. Kenny
on the other hand is just stirring the pot and playing with you. I'm
surprised that a genius such as yourself hasn't realised this.

With respect to your claims regarding your writing being better than the
average english professor or journalist, I have to say your sadly
mistaken. Your expressive style actually confuses and detracts from your
arguements. You seem to believe your style is a new radical form of
expression and those that criticise it are just morons who don't
appreciate your great talent. Such an arguement may have merit in a work
of fiction in which you are trying to push the boundries. However, it
simply detracts from what your trying to express when your dealing with
issues of fact or arguements regarding issues of technology, sociology,
philosophy or belief. If you honestly want to address such issues, you
need to express them in a clear concise manner that presents your
arguments without the distractions of unfamiliar style. I persoanlly
always asumed your poor grammer was due to english not being your native
tongue. If this is not the case, then I'd just have to assume you were a
student who was above average at math, but below average in
english. This is not uncommon. Many students find the more precise
nature of maths easier to grasp than the less precise rules of english
grammer (noting that english is often cited as the most difficult
language to learn because of its inconsistent and complex grammatical
structure). If your aim is to communicate and educate, then yu need to
write in a style that makes your points clear. Your claim that you are a
genius with a new style of expression is just a poor excuse for not
having a good grasp of english grammer and an inability to honestly edit
yourself to assist the reader rather than stroke your own ego. Rather
than an intelligent and philosophical genius, you come across as an
extremely insecure, lonely and bitter individual who has trouble fitting
in and blames everyone else rather than considering that their own
actions and personallity may have some baring on the situation.

In this current thread, I believe I can understand your arguement and I
even think Don and Rainer have missed your point. However, this is
primarily because of how you have tried to express it. I can
appreciate what your saying about the irregularities intriduced by
the 5 characters you reference. I agree that new users may be a little
confused at first and I agree that to a limited extent, editors could
parse the code easier at some levels without them. However, these are
not fundamental limitations to the language and I disagree they have
fundamentally limited or restricted the development of the
language. Your criticism is in fact quite shallow and certainly doesn't
identify anything fundamental. To disprove this, you need to make a
distinction between using the language, in the sense of actually coding
with it and all the associated tools, editors and convenience and the
actual power of the language i.e. what you can do with it - the types of
problems you can solve and how difficult/easy this is with the
language.

The only possible merit in your arguement is that if all the language
had followed the nested syntax properly, we may have more consistent
formatting of code and maybe more sophisticated development
environments. However, it is also important to note that most of the
people I've seen comment on this who have actually used rigid structured
editors have ended up not liking them. I also feel that what you are
talking about is an abstract theoretical advantage which you imagine is
superior, but which has never existed with any general purpose language
(there are some special purpose domain specific languages that have done
this, but that is a different and more precisely defined environment and
therefore easier to do and less likely to be inconvenient).

While Don and Rainer may not have understood your arguement, you have
totally failed to appreciate what they have been saying. You
immediately take the position that anyone who doesn't automatically
agree with your arguement is just a tech geek moron who can't appreciate
your great genius. This arrogance on your part makes you blind to the
valid points they are making and makes you appear insecure and
defensive. Rather than viewing alternative positions and criticisms of
your arguuement as a personal attack, start by assuming they are genuine
and attempt to address them in a genuine manner.

As an example, you argue that due to the irregularities introduced by
the characters you refernce, lisp has lost the opportunity of having
powerful and automatic formatting. I imagine you dream of a development
environment in which you can just express the ideas and the environment
will take care of all the formatting and we will have a utopian world of
consistently formatted code which everyone can easily
udnerstand. However, as has already been pointed out to you, the nested
syntax is not sufficient for this. While s-expressions do provide a lot
of convenience and while they may be sufficient for formatting pure
data, they are not sufficient for good formatting of code. This is where
your comparison with XMl falls down. A clear example of this difference
was provided in an earlier post in this thread (which I note you failed
to respond to directly and instead attacked by stating the poster was a
moron. As they say, you should play the ball and not the player)

Your claim that these irregularities reduce the power of the language
and are a fundamental problem with the language are also misguided. As
pointed out many times in this thread, these irregularities are handled
by the reader and are gone by the time the code is evaluated. for this
reason, its not a fundamental limitation in the power of the
language. However, it could be argued that it does make it harder to get
consistent formatting by the editor or that it causes confusion for new
users and this may have impacted on the adoption of the language (though
I don't believe this has in fact had any real impact and that in fact
these irregularities actually make the language more convenient and
easier to use for the experienced programmer). It cold also be argued
that because of these so called irregularities, the user is required to
put effort into formatting the code (e.g. hitting tab, enter etc) that
could be handled automatically. However, having used systems that do
this type of thing, I find such 'convenience' inconvenient. More of a
problem is that I rarely think in completed well formed
s=expressions. My code is often 'broken' as I move from an incompleted
s-expression to modify an earlier piece of code because I've realised a
minor change earlier makes what I'm doing next easier. A structured
editor would make this more difficult and not easier. I can fully
appreciate that others may adopt a different style of progrmming and for
them, a structured editor may be more convenient. But this just
emphasises that we all come from different perspectives and what may
appear to be a valuable alternative to one may be irrelevent or of
little value to someone else. this is a point you seem unable to
appreciate and assume anyone who doesn't agree with your perspective is
a moron or fuckwit. Someone who is a genius or at least a little smart
should be able to realise this and acknowledge that different people
have different priorities and requirements.

Whatever your pespective, arguing that the irregularities impact on the
power of the language is simply incorrect. If it was true, it would be
easy to show a straight-forward example of something you can do with a
purely nested syntax language that you cannot do with the existing
language. Don and others have asked you to show such and example. You
have failed to do so. All you have done is repeatably reference your
existing 'essays' - if these had such proof, people wouldn't continue to
ask you to provide one.

I have noticed a theme in many of your posts and essays. On the whole,
they seem to be inspired by frustration and anger at what you find
difficult and beleive should be easier. On one hand, this is fair
enough. However, you often lable and describe the problem in a
misleading and aggressive manner that writes the whole thing off because
of one or two issues. You also tend to attack a specific existing language or
technology when the problem is really across the whole discipline. for
example, your arguement about lisps irregularities in syntax is less
compelling when you consider that lisp probably has the most consistent,
straight-forward syntax of any language. I suspect your real issue is
with inconsistency in syntax generally and not specific to the lisp
family of languages. If you had written a well thought out and
structured essay on why many programming languages ar difficult to use
because they lack a consistency of syntax, you would likely have found
many would have supported your ideas and commended you on writing such
thought provoking material. Remember, if your real goal is to educate
then you want people to both hear what you are saying and think about
it. Presenting yor arguements in poorly structured grammer with lots of
emotional over-loading just causes 'line noise' and makes you appear to
be nothing more than an emotional dumb ass venting over what they find
frustrating about whatever current thing they are working with.

Your arguements are often undermined by the obvious fact that many of
your posts and essays are written from the perspective of a new user
with little experience with or in the language. You have freely admitted
you don't know common lisp and you make lots of examples out of emacs
lisp, which is a specialised dialect of lisp with a specific goal and
not a general purpose lisp implementation. It is also very much an older
style lisp dialect and not a good basis for making any judgement on the
current state of lisp as a language family. to have any real credibility
in arguing about the lisp family, you need to show a higher than average
familiarity with the main language implementations in the lisp family,
including more than just a couple of hours 'playing' with each. You
indicate you don't have time for such things and thats fine. However, if
you don't hae the time to learn, then you don't have the credibility to be
listened to either.

While on the topic of credibility, don't refer to yourself as a
genius. Yor obviously not. A true genius dosen't consider themselves a
genius because their superior intellect lets them know how much they
don't know. The label of genius is given to someone by others who are
impressed by the work they do. I suspect your above average intelligence
in some areas and well below average in others - for example, I suspect
you have a very low emotional intelligence. You have an obvious desire
to gain knowledge and don't limit yourself to any specific field or
discipline, which is an admiral trait IMO. However, I would say that
you are more a jack of all trades and master of none than anything
else. This is fine too - there are too many who are experts in just one
limited area and completely ignorant in everything else. A thirst for
knowledge is a very admirable trait, but a belief that such a thirst
makes you in any way superior to everyone else is just proof that your
thirst has failed to really educate you or teach you anything and that
while you may have a broad scope of knowledge, it is shallow and
superficial.

Consider that whenever you argue you have a superior intelligence, you
are really saying you have a superior something which is poorly defined
and for which nobody has ever been able to find a means of measuring in
an objective manner. I have no issue in agreeing you have a superior
poorly defined something that cannot be measured.

tim