From ... Path: archiver1.google.com!newsfeed.google.com!newsfeed.stanford.edu!news-spur1.maxwell.syr.edu!news.maxwell.syr.edu!npeer.kpnqwest.net!nreader1.kpnqwest.net.POSTED!not-for-mail Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp,comp.lang.forth Subject: Re: Maintaining Minority Languages ( was Re: A small survey (if you have couple of minutes)) References: <1f4c5c5c.0108252226.330d6cac@posting.google.com> <1f4c5c5c.0108271934.2170ab88@posting.google.com> <3B8C20A6.C36A5912@ne.mediaone.net> <1f4c5c5c.0108301946.a8ae7da@posting.google.com> <3B8FCD31.47AA01D8@forth.com> <1f4c5c5c.0108312055.65591677@posting.google.com> Mail-Copies-To: never From: Erik Naggum Message-ID: <3208432857653037@naggum.net> Organization: Naggum Software, Oslo, Norway Lines: 47 User-Agent: Gnus/5.0808 (Gnus v5.8.8) Emacs/20.7 MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Date: Sun, 02 Sep 2001 15:21:02 GMT X-Complaints-To: newsmaster@Norway.EU.net X-Trace: nreader1.kpnqwest.net 999444062 193.90.207.245 (Sun, 02 Sep 2001 17:21:02 MET DST) NNTP-Posting-Date: Sun, 02 Sep 2001 17:21:02 MET DST Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.lisp:15386 comp.lang.forth:11954 * Erann Gat > The Forth seems pretty cryptic by comparison. What's that 'then' doing > by itself off at the end? Pardon me, but when you learn a language, you learn a language, and when you know a language, you know a language. It really is this trivial. If you neither learn it nor know it, what business do you have commenting on it at all? Do you think languages are designed for its non-users? Do you think anyone _cares_ what non-users think about their languages? You behave just like those immature tourists who visit foreign countries and laugh at street names, signs in shop windows and newspaper headlines. Imagine someone calling German "pretty cryptic" and "what's that verb doing by itself off at the end?" Germans have no problem with it, so what _is_ the big deal to you? > Postfix is very unintuitive to most people because it has no analog in > natural language. You can say "a plus b" to mirror infix, or "the sum > of a and b" to mirror prefix, but "a and b, the sum of those things" > sounds awfully contrived. Just because you never figured out how to use RPN calculators does not mean you have any right to make universal statements like "unintuitive" and "unreadable" or "cryptic". Some of us find infix unnatural and both prefix and postfix equally easy to deal with. Some of us are simply able to learn things quickly becase we can accept what we get on its own terms and premises. If you cannot do that, do not blame what you have not been able to learn and internalize because of a childish desire to ridicule things before you understand them. The real question when it comes to using a language is whether you are able to _think_ in it. If you cannot _think_ in the language, you are bound to run into so many problems that it is entirely irrelevant which language you are not thinking in. I find it rather curious that you should wake up from a long absence and start bad-mouthing not only Common Lisp, but Forth and a bunch of other languages, too. Do you seriously believe this is smart? Do you actually believe every language should be for everybody, that are no differences among people that manifest themselves in how they prefer to think and write when they want to express their problem-solving abilities? Do you think there are no problems that lend themselves to particular languages? All of this flies in the face of the genesis and evolution of languages, so all you do with your inflammatory nonsense is to look like a moron in _several_ language communities. What is this good for, Erann Gat? ///