Re: "Misunderstanding of the lambda calculus"

[Alan Mackenzie]

Hi, David!

On Tue, 31 Jan 2006, David Kastrup wrote:

>"Richard M. Stallman" <address@hidden> writes:

>>     As you can see, practically all meanings involve surviving into
>>     the present time.  So I stand by my point that "archaic" and
>>     "dead" are not synonymous.

>> Archaic does not imply "dead", but it does imply "not very much
>> alive".  Anyway, the relevant point is "archaic" is a smear term.

>"Archaic life forms" are those that have survived basically unchanged
>for millions of years, that were so well-adapted to their ecological
>niche that natural selection has not weeded them out or made them
>undergo significant changes.  That's not really a "smear term".

David, "archaic" _is_ a smear term in this context.  There are ways of
expressing things in English (and in German) where what is said is
literally true, yet at the same time has strong derogatory overtones.

For example, "workmanlike" is complimentary if you so describe your new
fitted kitchen.  But if you call a musical performance "workmanlike",
you're saying "they played all the right notes", implying that deeper
musical finesse was lacking.

"Archaic" is like this.  "More archaic Lisps, such as Emacs Lisp, ...."
is saying "Emacs Lisp is a relic of history, caught in a time warp.  It
is so old, that it's utterly lacking in efficient modern language
features, and the people who use it are old crusty hackers who are unable
to adapt to slick new practices.".

>It does imply "strange to behold as holding its own in modern times
>where lots of things have changed utterly in comparison".  But that is
>indeed something that I don't consider an unfitting sentiment when
>confronted with Emacs.  Though TeX fits the bill even better.

Of course, the real truth is that it's taken other commonly used
languages (like C++, Java, ....) decades to catch up with Lisp.  :-)

>David Kastrup

-- 
Alan Mackenzie (Munich, Germany)