Motor generator

Liam Proven lproven at gmail.com
Thu May 6 10:36:00 CDT 2021


On Thu, 6 May 2021 at 16:13, Paul Koning <paulkoning at comcast.net> wrote:

> > I suppose APL might come closest, but it's hardly mainstream.
>
> No reason why it couldn't be.  It's the same age as C, so why not?  :-)

I think because for lesser minds, such as mine, it's line noise.

A friend of mine, a Perl guru, studied A-Plus for a while. (Morgan
Stanley's in-house APL dialect.) He said to me that "when I came back
to Perl, I found it irritatingly verbose..." and then was immediately
deeply shocked at the thought.

I seriously think this is why Lisp didn't go mainstream. For a certain
type of human mind, it's wonderful and clear and expressive, but for
most of us, it's just a step too far.

Ditto Forth, ditto Postscript, etc.

Plain old algebraic infix notation has thrived for half a millennium
because it's easily assimilated and comprehended, and many arguably
better notations just are not.

The importance of being easy, as opposed to being clear, or
unambiguous, or expressive, etc., is widely underestimated.


> My favorite "radically different" processing concept is by Martin Rem, in his thesis "Associons and the closure statement" from 1976 (http://alexandria.tue.nl/extra1/PRF2B/7606837.pdf).  I'd love to see that implemented.  He certainly gave no clue on how that could be done, and I haven't reached any clue either.
>
> Then there's Pinatubo (2016: https://cseweb.ucsd.edu/~jzhao/files/Pinatubo-dac2016.pdf) which seems related to William Shooman's "orthogonal computer (from 1961; it was sold by Sanders Associates for a while).

Ooh, great. Thank you, I will read up on these.

-- 
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