Re: My take on ARC

From: Erann Gat (myfirstname.mylastname_at_jpl.nasa.gov)
Date: 10/20/03 

Date: Mon, 20 Oct 2003 13:27:58 -0700

In article <aSWkb.32424$os2.470426@news2.e.nsc.no>, Espen Vestre
<espen@*do-not-spam-me*.vestre.net> wrote:

> myfirstname.mylastname@jpl.nasa.gov (Erann Gat) writes:
>
> > My personal take on all this is that the quest for minimalism is a
> > quixotic one because it invariably leads you to the lambda calculus.
>
> I'm not sure it does.

Well, not necessraily the lambda calculus, but it leads you one of a
myriad equivalent formulations of what little you need to be
Turing-complete. The lambda calculus is one such formulation, and
arguably the most likely one to end up with if you start with a Lispy
mindset.

Actually, if you really pursue minimalism with determination what you get
is unlambda. Fortunately for all concerned, the designers of unlambda
don't seem to take themselves all that seriously.

The point is that minimalism in the core is not a good thing. What Paul
really wants (I'm guessing) is to find the sweet spot where by some metric
the combination of the complexity of the core and the complexity of the
stuff you build on top of it is minimal. (For example, most people would
agree that adding "define" to the lambda calculus is a net win.) But the
problem is that to some extent judging complexity is subjective and
therefore imprecise, and it is not clear even among such two apparently
diverse choices as Scheme and Common Lisp which one really wins in that
regard. I predict that Paul's quest to find "the sweet spot" will fail
because there is no one sweet spot. There's a family of sweet spots --
and they're all called Lisp :-)

E.