ELLIOTTCABLE changed the topic of #elliottcable to: #ELLIOTTCABLE — do something cool, shove it into throats, everyone thinks it's crap, then it's all amazing.
<cuttle>
I conjecture that the Lisp-school essayists — Raymond, Graham, and Yegge — have not “needed mathematics” because they spend their time worrying about how to make code more abstract.
<ELLIOTTCABLE>
“One gets the impression reading Raymond, Graham, and Yegge (all self-styled Lisp hackers) that the ultimate goal of programming is to make a program that is more powerful than whatever program preceded it, usually by adding layers of abstraction. Call this the “Lisp school of programming.””
<ELLIOTTCABLE>
“In contrast to the Fortran tradition [...], the culture of Lisp is almost willfully ignorant of mathematics. This ignorance is disguised by all the talk of formalism and the instinctive genuflection before the Lambda Calculus, which, not unlike the Summa Theologica, is a closed computational universe that sheds little light on the observed world.”
<alexgordon>
interesting idea
<alexgordon>
I disagree, but interesting
<alexgordon>
mathematicians need to learn that not all of mathematics is as important as they think it is ;)
<alexgordon>
most programmers are generalists. it's our job to piece together libraries written by specialists
<alexgordon>
I don't know how to do video encoding. I bet if I spent 10 years learning I still wouldn't be able to do video encoding as well as ffmpeg does
<alexgordon>
I'm sure there's a lot of maths in ffmpeg, but that is totally irrelevant to me if I'm trying to encode videos
Sgeo has joined #elliottcable
<alexgordon>
if I'm a generalist, better ways of piecing things together is far more useful than any amount of mathematics ever could be
<ELLIOTTCABLE>
fairly astute point.
<ELLIOTTCABLE>
bbl chili's.
<cuttle>
alexgordon: well yeah but everyone who does something *important* knows math
<cuttle>
alexgordon: like, writing a video codec
<cuttle>
alexgordon: or something on that level
<alexgordon>
cuttle: sure, but do we need to use the same language for both?
<cuttle>
alexgordon: like, all the punctuations in the punctuated equilibrium of the programming world come from someone who knows math bringing it in
<alexgordon>
not saying ffmpeg would be better written in lisp or smaltalk
<alexgordon>
but I don't think instagram would be better written in fortran
<cuttle>
alexgordon: did you read the article? you're not really arguing with it
<alexgordon>
I am!
<cuttle>
just what you think it is based on the quote i posted
<cuttle>
unless you have read it in which case i apologize
<alexgordon>
I read all of it
<alexgordon>
:P
<cuttle>
ok
<cuttle>
:p
<alexgordon>
the article is saying that maths can be more important than abstractions, which is true
<alexgordon>
but the reverse is ALSO true
<alexgordon>
people don't generally implement fibonacci, they connect to databases and generate html, or they put buttons on a screen and display alerts
<alexgordon>
like I said, generalist programming vs specialist programming
<cuttle>
guess so
<cuttle>
help me think of a halloween twitter name
<cuttle>
:p
<alexgordon>
cuttle: Mormon Micah
<cuttle>
lol
<purr>
lol
<alexgordon>
ain't nothing scarier than mormons!
<cuttle>
some irl people follow me and the joke would not be the same to them :p
<alexgordon>
cuttle: do mormons celebrate halloween anyway?
<cuttle>
alexgordon: yeah
<cuttle>
alexgordon: you're thinking of jehovah's witnesses
<alexgordon>
well they don't celebrate christmas
<alexgordon>
cuttle: just thought, might be seen as a secularization of a christian festival