Subject: Re: Norvig's latest paper on Lisp
From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net>
Date: Wed, 22 May 2002 06:32:11 GMT
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Message-ID: <3231037926708825@naggum.net>

* lin8080 <lin8080@freenet.de>
| When someone comes from java to lisp, he wish to have a java-like lisp.
| This is automatically done by brain, name it habit.

  This applies only to some people, apparently a minority of about 30%, who
  think they have a natural right or something to behave and think this way
  and so are impossible to cause to think differently.  You see this in
  tourists, too, who come to some other country, and behave just like they
  have a right to feel at home, who complain that local facilities are not
  as good as those at home, etc.  For some reason, Germans are known around
  Europe for this particularly annoying tourist behavior, but I find it
  kind of sad that you think this is so natural that you should not even
  try to limit such clearly stupid tendencies.

| (sorry for my poor english)

  It is quite ironic that you write so much German with English words and
  English grammer, which is just what people of the habit you think is
  unavoidable would naturally do.  However, many people actually manage to
  learn to speak and write a new language on its own terms, and retain only
  minor vestiges of their previous languages.  I think this is the natural
  behavior, and that getting stuck in whatever you first learned or saw is
  the aberration -- and it usually leads to serious problems, too.

  In other words, I reject your belief in the automaticity of this habit.
  It is a failure to think that causes this, and while one may call it some
  kind of default, and that thinking is not automatic, but requires effort
  -- claiming that non-thinking is automatic means you do not have the
  choice to think, and that is just plain wrong.  Believe it, though, and
  it becomes true for you.  Change that belief.  Reverse it: Do not make a
  conscious effort to think, _always_ make the effort to think, and then
  see that some things do not change, and then you do not need to think
  about them.
-- 
  In a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none.
  In a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief.

  70 percent of American adults do not understand the scientific process.