[gambit-list] (no subject)

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky znmeb at cesmail.net
Tue Aug 14 22:10:56 EDT 2007


David Rush wrote:
>> Is there a split between the
>> serious computations folks like you on one side?  I don't know who I'd
>> put on the other side, the egg-headed theoreticians maybe :)
> 
> There is a split, and it's been around for a while. It's fundamentally
> much more psychological than technical, IMO. I'm not sure this is the
> right place to discuss it, but I wouldn't be too surprised if there
> was also a strong age correlation with the faction boundaries :)

Well ... I guess I know how old I am and which faction I'm in. :) But
seriously, folks, I've had the virtues of simplicity drummed into my
head since I first set my hands on an ancient 5-hole teletype paper tape
punch and wrote a hexadecimal multiplication table generation program
for ILLIAC I. And these days, it's so darned easy to invent a whole new
language, or build an "internal" domain-specific language in Lisp,
Scheme, Forth, Ruby or half a dozen others, that it doesn't seem worth
fighting for. So call me a serious, pragmatic egg-headed theoretical
software engineer. :)

>> How did the R6RS come to embrace feature-creep?
> 
> Because work always fills up to include all available brain-cycles :)

Don't tell my boss I have spare brain cycles, OK? :)




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