Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rpi!zaphod.mps.ohio-state.edu!ncar!hsdndev!cmcl2!kramden.acf.nyu.edu!brnstnd
From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: The powerlessness of Lisp
Message-ID: <21189:Mar2521:55:0691@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 25 Mar 91 21:55:06 GMT
References: <1991Mar21.123512.22876@daffy.cs.wisc.edu> <16060:Mar2515:41:5691@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <22144@yunexus.YorkU.CA>
Organization: IR
Lines: 30

In article <22144@yunexus.YorkU.CA> oz@yunexus.yorku.ca (Ozan Yigit) writes:
> In article <16060:Mar2515:41:5691@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> Dan Bernstein writes:
> >Doug, you have made nothing of yourself in this newsgroup but a nuisance
> >for at least the last few months.
> I would dare say that this net has seen only one serious nuisance in the
> last little while, and that one has been posting from
> brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu.

I understand: It's a ``nuisance'' when someone refuses to accept the
dogma of current computer science. Sorry, folks, but sorting is linear
in the number of bytes, and you can implement composable functions in C,
and you can solve the halting problem in practice, and C has more
powerful pointer handling than Lisp. If you think it's a nuisance when
someone tells the truth as he sees it, then yes, folks, I guess I'm
Ozan's sort of nuisance.

Unlike Ozan, I don't see rational disagreement as a problem. The problem
in this group is the failure of people to try to see past differences in
terminology and stick to technical issues. Articles like Ozan's---like
this one, or almost any from Jim Giles---should be lost in the flood of
useful discussions about what can be done with various language features
and what should appear in future languages. I still wish it were
possible to start a conversation here about pointers and arrays without
having it degenerate into a series of religious arguments. It's not.

Except for the ``contributions'' from Ozan and Doug, I've found the
recent threads here quite useful. I only hope that this can continue
into future discussions.

---Dan