Arthur Fuller
fuller.artful at gmail.com
Tue Nov 27 11:09:13 CST 2012
Reminds me of a very old joke or three, and before you reply to this, let's start a new thread on the subject. The old joke (or more accurately, T-shirt or license-plate sticker, is this: *Real programmers don't use compilers; they write compilers.* Which excludes me and most of the people on this list, I suspect. But come next U of T semester, now that I have discovered that U of T allows senior citizens free tuition, I plan to enroll in a course in compiler construction. I have a bold old concept for a programming language. Tentatively it's called Chomsky, and it does what you meant, not what you wrote. Tough nut to crack, I admit, but as I grow Older I also grow Bolder, just like a waving flag! (A song by a Canadian called K'naan, which became the last World Cup (football) song; see https://www.google.ca/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&ion=1&ie=UTF-8#hl=en&tbo=d&q=k%27naan+wavin%27+flag&stick=H4sIAAAAAAAAAGOovnz8BQMDgw4HsxCnfq6-gVmRkUmlEheImZZtYWKYqyXoW1qcmexYVJJZXBKSH5yfl_5eM8j0pObbpfcbNhtxWcw-9pNpzwEAdRfLXUkAAAA&sa=X&ei=lfG0UI_kHKaFywGehoDACQ&sqi=2&ved=0CMMBEMQNMBU&bav=on.2,or.r_gc.r_pw.r_cp.r_qf.&fp=6048e1ecd4849dfb&bpcl=38897761&ion=1&biw=1007&bih=834to hear it. For those unacquainted with Noam Chomsky, at the tender age of 26 he revolutionized the study of linguistics, and a part of that project was to issue the death-blow to Sknnerism. Historically, J.P. Sartre did it first, on a different level, in The Phenomenology of Mind, but his proof was widely ignored due primarily to its imprecision, and it remained for the young Chomsky to utterly demolish and leave devastated a philosophy/psychology that ruled for decades, but was a stack of cards erected upon falsehood after falsehood after falsehood. I think that in the current situation, virtually no one gives even the slightest credence to Behaviorism, but occasionally I do stumble upon vestiges of this arcane dogma. The feeling is rather akin to stumbling upon someone who actually subscribes to Scientology or Astrology. The baffling thing is that now and then these people otherwise exhibit a modicum of intelligence. Go figure. A.