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Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question
From: |
Rusi |
Subject: |
Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question |
Date: |
Sat, 28 Mar 2015 19:41:58 -0700 (PDT) |
User-agent: |
G2/1.0 |
On Sunday, March 29, 2015 at 6:29:45 AM UTC+5:30, Emanuel Berg wrote:
> "Pascal J. Bourguignon"
> > The success of lisp and unix over the decades shows
> > that simplier tools win on the long term.
> > Contrarily to graphic programming languages (such as
> > UML) or other "experiments", or more complex
> > systems, object-based or other (LispMachines), which
> > will eventually break and be forgotten by most and
> > regretted by few).
>
> One hundred percent correct! All those silly tools are
> intended so the programmer can be replaced by people
> who cannot program. So far that hasn't happen - and
> I am confident it never will.
Its important to distinguish and orthogonalize two aspects:
1. Linearity
2. Charset
Starting from Turing's paper where he 'created' his machine, the big jump
from normal math to Turing-math (which would later become CS) was linearity.
Turing asks us to imagine a mathematician doing a computation on paper
(shortform compute-er!) and then goes on to show that the paper can be
linearized into a 'tape'.
This linearity persists today in our computers whose memories are linear
sequences of bytes numbered 0 to 4G (or whatever).
Likewise files are sequences of bytes.
Then, because we humans dont like linearity too much, we have devices like
- emacs that non-linearizes a file on disk into a 2-D display
- file-systems that non-linearize a block into a file-system
- and so on.
So html for example non-linearizes a linear text.
Unicode (charset in general) doesn't (ok there's bidi codes but ignoring that).
Things like UML are difficult and problematic because of non-linearity not
charset.
There are at least half-a-dozen programming languages and systems I can think of
that are already unicode-capable:
>From venerable to cutting-edge:
APL, Appletalk, Fortress, Erlang, Python, Julia, Haskell, Agda,
And even Elisp!
*** Welcome to IELM *** Type (describe-mode) for help.
ELISP> (setq α 1 β 2 γ 3)
3 (#o3, #x3, ?\C-c)
ELISP> (list α β γ)
(1 2 3)
ELISP>
How much costly was that α to type than alpha?? One backslash!!
Add to that the fact that programs are read
- 10 times more than written during development
- 100 times more during maintenance
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question now Unicode, (continued)
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question now Unicode, Rusi, 2015/03/25
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Pascal J. Bourguignon, 2015/03/25
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Rusi, 2015/03/25
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Emanuel Berg, 2015/03/28
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Rusi, 2015/03/25
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Emanuel Berg, 2015/03/28
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question,
Rusi <=
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Rusi, 2015/03/28
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Óscar Fuentes, 2015/03/29
- RE: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Drew Adams, 2015/03/29
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Óscar Fuentes, 2015/03/29
- Message not available
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Rusi, 2015/03/29
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Pascal J. Bourguignon, 2015/03/29
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Stefan Monnier, 2015/03/29
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Óscar Fuentes, 2015/03/29
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, Stefan Monnier, 2015/03/29
- Re: if vs. when vs. and: style question, tomas, 2015/03/30