Re: Why Python When There Is Perl?

On Mon, 25 Mar 2024 18:41:37 -0500, Physfitfreak wrote:

What did Greece have?... Did they sit and play with their balls and this
led them to take the next step and devise Euclidean Geometry? Do you see
the picture? Written history aside (which is always full of partiality
and bullshit), the need for math must've arisen elsewhere, either in
Egypt, or in Iran, or in India.

Written history and historical fiction would overlap on a Venn diagram.
Was the Pythagorean Theorem really his? Did he really have a dim view of
beans? Was he an Ionian?

And in the other corner we have Zeno, another one who exists mostly in
hearsay. His paradoxes fascinated me as a kid. Much later I found
parallels in Nagarjuna:

Motion does not begin in what has moved,
Nor does it begin in what has not moved,
Nor does it begin in what is moving.
In what, then, does motion begin?

So much guesswork and invention by later authors. Yesterday my wandering
mind took me to the Amber Road. Several sources concluded Tutankhamen's
bling contained amber from the Baltics. That would be about 1300 BCE. The
Nordic Bronze Age lasted from c. 2000 to 500 BCE and engaged in a brisk
import/export trade. No written records but physical evidence in the amber
artifacts found in Greece and adjoining areas that didn't walk there
themselves. Cultural similarities with the people of the Rigveda have been
suggested but then you're getting into the whole Indo-European thing.

Yeah, it might have been the damn farmers. If the DNA fairy tales are to
be believed I'm descended from hunter-gatherers who were doing just fine
before the farmers arrived.