on levels of disappointment (Was: Re: Lisp history: IF, etc.)

Kaz Kylheku <643-408-1753@kylheku.com> writes:

On 2024-04-03, Kaz Kylheku <643-408-1753@kylheku.com> wrote:

On 2024-04-03, Alan Bawden <alan@csail.mit.edu> wrote:

Kaz Kylheku <643-408-1753@kylheku.com> writes:
   If you think about it, it's actually kind of ignorant to invent a
   programming language with imperative if statements, but in which where
   the math conditional is missing.
>
If you think like a historian, you don't describe this as "ignorant".
It's just not something that was above the horizon in the mind set of
the time.  After all, that mathematical notation you are referring to
isn't something that mathematicians get very formal about.

>
That is a fair observation; roughly speaking, higher languages first
evolved from that of the machine.  Why we have an if /statement/ is that
the machine has testing and branching in its instruction set, which are
also statements. The imperative language that works by jumping around
and shuffling mainly word-sized quantities inside a Von Neumann machine
is an abstraction of machine language, not an abstraction of functions.
>
The abstraction of machine language isn't ignorant, it's just different.

>
But, right, okay; I lost a thoguht I had some hours earlier about this.
By the time we have a higher level language inspired by math formulas in
which you can do A * B + C, and define math-like functions, you would
think that the right synapse would fire between the right two brain
cells, so that a value-yielding conditional would be supplied.  When you
have translation of arithmetic formulas to machine language, the scene
is ripe for such an operator. So maybe ignorance is a strong word, but
there is a margin for disappointment.

But it's not the same disappointment as in having to use JIRA, right? :-)

  ``Writing bug reports on napkins and keeping them crumpled in a large
  black garbage bag is better than this fucking piece of crap called
  JIRA.'' -- Kaz Kylheku, 2016.

(*) Full source

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From: Kaz Kylheku <221-50...@kylheku.com>
Newsgroups: alt.comp.os.linux,comp.programming,comp.software-eng
Subject: Re: Favourite Software Development Tools for Teams?
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["Followup-To:" header set to comp.programming.]
On 2016-09-19, Triscal Islington <trust.your...@mail.ru> wrote:

I'm finally heading my own software engineering project at work and,
since I call the shots, it's up to me to decide on what collaboration
and review tools we utilize on the project.
>
I'm pretty well decided on git for source code management but what are
your favourite linux tool for bug tracking, code review, collaboration, etc?

Writing bug reports on napkins and keeping them crumpled in a large
black garbage bag is better than this fucking piece of crap called JIRA.
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