Post #563500
2026-03-07 02:41 UTC
Replies (2)
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@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net 2026-03-07 02:46
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca And, to be fair, by then, he had changed jobs/companies, moved up to the bottom tier of management, wasn't using The Computer anymore, so maybe the interest had waned. But it struck me that I was never able to get past showing him the factorial function and, "That can't possibly work." He had basically accepted the FORTRAN model of things and that was that. Later, when he retired he got one of the early PC clones and then spent vast amounts of time messing with spreadsheets. 9/11
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@wrog@mastodon.murkworks.net 2026-03-07 02:47
@dougmerritt@mathstodon.xyz @kentpitman@climatejustice.social @ramin_hal9001@fe.disroot.org @screwlisp@gamerplus.org @cdegroot@mstdn.ca You may say that untyped lambda calculus and SKI combinatory calculus and so on) are all *dreadful* in terms of expressiveness, and I will probably agree, ... but it also seems to me that Barendregt got pretty good at it. I'm also guessing TECO wouldn't have existed without there being people who managed to wrap their brains around it and found it to be expressive and concise. I myself never got there (also never really tried TBH), ... but at the same time, it's *still* the case that if I need to write a one-liner to do something, chances are, I'll be doing it in Perl, and I've heard people complain about *that* language being essentially write-only line-noise. 10/11