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> https://www.amazon.com/Essentials-Programming-Languages-MIT-...

That is a textbook, not research.

> "They" is me -- I wrote that article.

Makes sense. The HTML elements are broken in some of the code snippets by the way. A few of & scattered about the place.

> There are no axioms in that article because there are no proofs.

Google "Curry-Howard correspondence". Computation is defined through axioms; you cannot compute without them.

> You are apparently beyond my ability to help.

I think you are just incapable of reading and processing ideas from other people without insulting them due to some sort of ego-trip where you imagine you are the messiah sent from heaven to educate us poor ingrates about programming when you clearly are not. Be less obnoxious in future and more open to new ideas.



> That is a textbook, not research.

Where do you think textbooks come from? Have you ever looked at a textbook? Have you noticed that textbooks typically include a section called "References" (as this one does)? What do you think that is for?

> The HTML elements are broken in some of the code snippets by the way.

I know. That page was just exported from MS Word. Fixing it is not high on my priority list.

> you cannot compute without them.

What does that have to do with the fact that the article I pointed you to has neither proofs nor axioms in it?

> I think you are just incapable of reading and processing ideas from other people

> Be less obnoxious in future

Do you hear yourself?


> Do you hear yourself?

Yes, and I'm not the one compulsively ending every comment with a jab at the other guy's intelligence.

> What does that have to do with the fact that the article I pointed you to has neither proofs nor axioms in it?

So because you didn't write them down, you think they don't exist?

> as this one does

Quite frankly, I'm not going to spend $77 and wait for shipping to find out what's in the references section of some random text book. It seems like it should be an awful lot easier to find one of these hundreds of people you know.


> because you didn't write them down, you think they don't exist?

No, I just think they are irrelevant to adjudicating your claim that "If you have a list defined "al la lambda calculus" as a lambda term, you can't really write it down fully...". I've refuted you with an actual implementation (which you have obviously not even bothered to look at). The fact that my implementation could be axiomatized has nothing to do with it.

> I'm not going to spend $77 and wait for shipping to find out what's in the references section of some random text book.

EOPL is not "some random text book."

But it doesn't really matter. Pick up any textbook you like on programming languages published in the last 40 years. I'd be surprised if you could find even one that did not reference McCarthy's original Lisp paper.


> which you have obviously not even bothered to look at

Again, you presume my ignorance because the only alternative is that I understand you and still think you are wrong. How do you think I knew about the contents of your article if I didn't read it? Half the reason I noticed the HTML elements is because they gave me a syntax error why I tried to evaluate your code.

> I'd be surprised if you could find even one that did not reference McCarthy's original Lisp paper.

Well that's quite interesting. So the fact that some text books reference one specific paper is proof of thousands of hours of research across hundreds of people, all of whom would be insulted by my claim that lists aren't a very good processing primitive? Honestly, I suspect most of them would agree with me that they're better as syntax. You seem quite obsessed with lambda calculus yourself based on your articles and talks and you utterly despise all the list-based stuff from Del. Given that you always seem to write the lambdas with list syntax, you seem to agree with me in every point. So why are you looking for people to be offended by something that we both seem to believe?


> you presume my ignorance

No, I presume nothing. I conclude your ignorance because you continually supply me with evidence for it.

> the fact that some text books reference one specific paper is proof of thousands of hours of research across hundreds of people

No, it is not proof of anything. It is evidence that your claim that "People like to say that lisp had a much greater influence than it actually did" is wrong.


> No, I presume nothing.

So what is the word for when you say I haven't looked at your website based on no evidence and in the presence of evidence to the contrary? I would say "presume" fits the bill. And that is something. So it does seem that you have presumed something. And that is the exact thing I was saying you presumed. It's a pretty basic fact and it's written down. But you will still dispute it and claim I'm being stupid.

> It is evidence that your claim that "People like to say that lisp had a much greater influence than it actually did" is wrong.

I thought we were discussing the "hundreds of people" that my previous assumption apparently denigrates. But if you want to talk about inflating lisp's reputation, a good example would be talking about how a single paper on list being cited in _lisp_ text-books is evidence that it is "the foundation of all modern programming languages".


EOPL is not a lisp text book. It is a textbook about programming languages in general. (Which you would know if you had bothered to look at it.)


Would you say there are properties of this textbook that make it more related to lisp and lisp interpreters than the average textbook, and hence more likely to reference the early material about lisp and lisp interpreters?


What would you consider the "average textbook"?


Can you really not answer a question that simple? Every textbook has a certain amount of lisp in it. Take the average of all of those amounts (the mean, lets say), and you will get the amount of lisp in the average textbook. This is a substantially smaller amount than the one you just picked. Can you really not work that out of your own accord? Can you think of any definition of the average textbook that means it has as much lisp as the one you just picked out? No. I think you are just being obtuse.




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