[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)