On Sun, May 23, 2010 at 10:38 PM, Mathieu Bouchard
<matju@artengine.ca> wrote:
On Sun, 23 May 2010, Pedro Lopes wrote:
Its just definitions that get caught up in "trends". There's a perfect portuguese idiomatic expression for that, that would loosely translate into "mouth-to-mouth definitions" - whereas a concept gets standardized without any formal foundations or efforts but because of heavy community use
That's an important concept and I am glad that you wrote it down.
It can explain a lot of things... especially the big mess made with words like "technology" and "art".
As for pseudo-code, when in first years of college that really striked me. The definition of it was supposed to strive for a language-free syntax, but it always looked C to me - so I guess that's true for your argument as "political bargain".
Well, to be more complete, there are other varieties of pseudo-code with different syntaxes, which led an undergrad student to tell me that Python is executable pseudo-code. AFAIR, the indentation syntax of Python comes from a certain variety of pseudo-code that already existed. In general, pseudo-code also has an aim of being more abstract and concise than actual C/PASCAL code, which is often the goal of "scripting languages".
That was a few years after a fellow undergrad student (at a different university) told me, very lucidly : « Now I understand what is pseudo-code. It's code that doesn't work » (loosely translated from French). That's because pseudo-code is designed to be non-runnable.
The article I quote was not showing a correct view but more like "where does this "trend" comes from"... (and by trend I mean the segmentation/naive classification of scripting langs vs. others).
ah ok.
>LISP is a traditional language that is interpreted, yet became quite compiled as an option. It's quite
Of course, I use compiled LISP on a regular basis :)
But I mean that LISP was interpreted in its original implementation. (this postdates the original LISP spec by a few years, which was designed as a spec for a special-purpose pseudo-code. against the will of the author, his students turned LISP into a runnable language and made it possibly the first interpreted language ever...)
LISP is also quite hard to classify in one bucket of languages. You can use it as a test of adequacy of a language classification : where do you put LISP in it, and why ? Thus it's also a great way to destroy unnecessary distinctions in how we call the languages, which is why I mention it.
its nice nice to share some feelings/opinions on this subject, I strongly feel that it has become a "buzz" word, rather than something people have strongly defined
the concept of buzzword isn't opposed to strongly-defined concepts, but the process of "buzzing" does add a layer of connotations and myth around the core concept, in a way that can be quite misleading. with great popularisation of a concept, comes a great misunderstanding of the concept. It isn't as bad a hype, though, because mouth-to-mouth definitions are still more accurate than anything designed by a salesman with the only goal of making a product (or service) look good.
I was saying (and thinking): "When you are scripting you are programming, and vice versa" - so where's the line separating scripting/programming languages? Is there any need for a line? Do we gain to have such differentiation? Define them... and so on.
ah, alright.
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| Mathieu Bouchard, Montréal, Québec. téléphone: +1.514.383.3801