Re: Beyond CL?

Pascal Costanza wrote:
> Tron3k wrote:
> > Marcus Breiing wrote:
> >
> >>* Tron3k
> >>
> >>>I think Lisp-1 is objectively better because it looks better.
> >>
> >>The human aesthetic sense evolved in an environment marked by a
> >>peculiar shortage of programming language design work.
> >
> > Did you ever stop to think about why aesthetics is so important in
> > mathematics?
> >
> > Read this: http://www.paulgraham.com/taste.html
> >
> > I copied the following from that article:
> >
> > "...Copernicus' aesthetic objections to [equants] provided one
> > essential motive for his rejection of the Ptolemaic system...."
> >
> > - Thomas Kuhn, The Copernican Revolution
> >
> > "All of us had been trained by Kelly Johnson and believed fanatically
> > in his insistence that an airplane that looked beautiful would fly the
> > same way."
> >
> > - Ben Rich, Skunk Works
> >
> > "Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in this world
> > for ugly mathematics."
> >
> > - G. H. Hardy, A Mathematician's Apology
>
> "In Dead Ringers, the character of Elliot says, 'There should be a
> beauty contest for the inside of the body.' As human beings, our sense
> of what´s beautiful or repulsive is only skin deep, even when it comes
> to our own bodies. I´m always interested in taking something which seems
> repulsive at the beginning of the film and making it appear beautiful
> and inevitable by the end. I can´t achieve that with every viewer, but
> with some people I succeed." - David Cronenberg

It's interesting that you post this. As something of an amateur
biologist, I find the human body sometimes to be the epitome of elegant
design. Consider the human heart: a miraculous pump that works every
second of our entire lives.

Your quote actually brings up something I've been thinking about:
syntax. At times, I've considered the syntax I'm creating to be ugly,
even though it's shorter. I wondered if that was a warning sign, but
decided to go ahead with it and see how it feels over time. Indeed, it
seems to get more beautiful as I play around with it and get accustomed
to it: an interesting parallel to your quote.

And yet the sharp-quote notation of CL continues to grate on me. Thus I
believe your quote does not apply in this case, because I have been
using it for quite a while.

More from Paul Graham:
In math, every proof is timeless unless it contains a mistake. So what
does Hardy mean when he says there is no permanent place for ugly
mathematics? He means the same thing Kelly Johnson did: if something is
ugly, it can't be the best solution. There must be a better one, and
eventually someone will discover it.

That, I think, goes to the heart of the matter.

.

Relevant Pages

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