On Nov 26, 4:57 pm, Kaz Kylheku <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > On 2008-11-26, Xah Lee <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > > > Can you see, how you latched your personal beef about anti software > > crisis philosophy into this no namespace thread? > > I did no such thing. My post was about explaining the decision process > that causes humans to either adopt some technical solution or not.
Yes, you did that by following a moronic pop theory. The purpose of this message is to tell you, that you should have decades of study of multiple deciplines in history, economics, psychology, sociology, to be immune to the lots of pop theories that float about especially today with the internet. let me explain why the pop theory you fell for breaks apart with respect to the namespace issue here in this thread. lacking namespace is not due to some ratio of perceived benefit divided by perceived pain. The benefit is huge, practical, and undeniable, the pain to adopt the namespace fix is almost non-existant, because any such solution will obvious be done in a backward compatible way. If the solution is provided, the pain at max is just like a version upgrade. Java, Perl, and all langs goes thru major upgrade every few years. there are social reasions and technical reasons why langs lacking much needed namespace took so long to fix. Social reason being, as others has said in this thread, for examples: compatibilities issues in the case of javascript's browser/server situation. In the case of Scheme lisp, there's the issue of committee consensus and the RnRS standard. You can't just have someone created a namespace implementation and have every other Scheme lisp adopt it. As far as i know, namespace has been in lots of Scheme implementations for long. The problem is getting it into RnRs. The situation in Emacs lisp, at least partly have to do with lack of developers, and partly have to do with Richard Stallman. First, you need someone capable enough to actually implement it as some sort of proof of concept, then you have to pass thru Stallman himself, else you get XEmacs fork situation, which significantly hurled GNU Emacs forward for the past about 15 years. In the case of PHP, i suppose the primary reason is that it works without namespace so far. PHP lang is mostly hack. The lang is so messy that namespace is not just one thing that needs to be fixed. All the above reasons, are of social one. There are undoubtly some technical reasons too. I don't have compiler knowledge so i can't say what, but to say the least, that creating a namespace in a existing lang that is widely used in the industry is not something a average computer science graduate can do. The above are ugly, perhaps complex, real world facts. It's not some pop fucking book about some pop pereciveness of some ratios. one can go on analyze the perceived benefit and pain about the namespace issue on each language specifically. You can see how it doesn't apply. But going in detail on this'd be waste of time. If you spend your time to debunk pop theories, play their game, the scientific establishment would go no where. There are quite a lot pop books on the market, they usually sells. Their audience is the mass market. They have little scientific value. They are not valued by any expert in any field. Most of them cannot be invalidated in any way. This does not mean pop theory, pop psychology, wisdoms, or anything not dry science, are all bullshit. Ultimately, there's no magic rule that can tell you which is which. The degree and quality of you or the masses's judgement, ultimately depends on your education level. That is why, general education is so important, in every nation and culture, while it's little talked about only because its so obvious, so plain. here's another pop book you might like: • Book Review: Patterns of Software http://xahlee.org/PageTwo_dir/Personal_dir/bookReviewRichardGabriel.html this one is published a decade ago by a lisp dignitary. Its theory of programing and software engineering is poetry and taoism. It suggests that C will be the last lang. Xah ∑ http://xahlee.org/ ☄ -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
