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What is interesting about this is that we can write procedures which construct other procedures. This is not to be confused with the ability to construct S-expression representations of procedures; t…
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If one constantly invents new combining forms to suit the occasion, as one can in the lambda calculus, one will not become familiar with the style or useful properties of the few combining forms that…
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Making that happen in a language design should involve some subtle shifts in the way data is conceptualized. That isn’t a digression in a discussion of types, because the way we conceptualize data ha…
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The first couple of weeks I learned JCL and the IBM mainframe. There were two old guys who worked there, my age today I imagine, and they worked on 6 batch applications simultaneously, making a single…
The Eric Naggum archive
I was too young to participate in these discussions when they happened, but it is particularly enlightening (IMHO) to comb through the "Erich Naggum archive". Sure, there is some of what we…
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But what about creative composition? In order to be creative one must first gain control of the medium. One can not even begin to think about organizing a great photograph without having the skills to…
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Induction, as applied in the physical sciences, is always uncertain, because it rests on the belief in a general order in the universe, an order outside of us. On the contrary, mathematical induction,…
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Don’t succumb to the siren songs of trivial optimizations – they make the more important optimizations much harder to locate. http://www.xach.com/naggum/articles/3080595393603693@naggum.no.html…
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When readability is highly valued, the readership falls. If it looks complex, it must be hard, right? So people get a sense of personal satisfaction from mastering the apparently complex, even though…
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The C-only train has left the station. Few departments teach surveys of programming languages anymore, and I don’t know of any department that teaches a required course in history of computing. I wor…
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We believe COMMON LISP suffers from being designed by implementors with beliefs in what is possible, rather than by users with beliefs in what is probable. /content/files/Files/clcrit.pdf…
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There was a belief that Lisp is the correct language for systems programming. This is a religious belief, especially in light of the fact that only a few operating systems, for example, have been writ…