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[ba-unrev-talk] Not sure what to call this


It started based on a slashdot thang on a new way to deal with spam, which 
leads to this page: http://www.paulgraham.com/spam.html    (01)

But, his approach was built as an exercise of "Arc" and this fellow is a 
Lisp hacker, so I jumped there, http://www.paulgraham.com/arc.html    (02)

And he is billing Arc as a new kind of programming language and says you 
should read http://www.paulgraham.com/popular.html which is where I am now. 
Here's a couple of quotes picked out of the middle of the page:    (03)

"Common Lisp is unpopular partly because it's an orphan. It did originally 
come with a system to hack: the Lisp Machine. But Lisp Machines (along with 
parallel computers) were steamrollered by the increasing power of general 
purpose processors in the 1980s. Common Lisp might have remained popular if 
it had been a good scripting language for Unix. It is, alas, an atrociously 
bad one.    (04)

One way to describe this situation is to say that a language isn't judged 
on its own merits. Another view is that a programming language really isn't 
a programming language unless it's also the scripting language of 
something. This only seems unfair if it comes as a surprise. I think it's 
no more unfair than expecting a programming language to have, say, an 
implementation. It's just part of what a programming language is.    (05)

A programming language does need a good implementation, of course, and this 
must be free. Companies will pay for software, but individual hackers 
won't, and it's the hackers you need to attract."    (06)

Now, that point of view: you need to attract hackers, got me to write this 
post.    (07)

No, I haven't yet returned to his method of eliminating spam, about which 
he says:
"Using a slightly tweaked (as described below) Bayesian filter, we now miss 
only 5 per 1000 spams, with 0 false positives."    (08)

It will be worth getting back to that page, but, nevertheless, I think it's 
germain to the OHS vision to consider what he is saying about programming 
languages as well.    (09)

Cheers,
Jack
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XML Topic Maps: Creating and Using Topic Maps for the Web.
Addison-Wesley, ISBN 0-201-74960-2.    (010)

NexistWiki
http://www.nexist.org/wiki/    (011)