[PRL] McCarthy's "pornographic programming"?

[Galen Williamson]

Maybe he means programming with your skivvies showing, i.e., relying on
exposed implementation details like (eq '() NIL) => t.

--Galen.

On Mon, 5 Dec 2005, Doug Orleans wrote:

> I've been reading John McCarthy's "History of LISP" pages.
> http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp.html
>
> This paragraph is amusing/sad:
>
>    The unexpected appearance of an interpreter tended to freeze the
>    form of the language, and some of the decisions made rather
>    lightheartedly for the ``Recursive functions ...'' paper later
>    proved unfortunate. These included the COND notation for
>    conditional expressions which leads to an unnecessary depth of
>    parentheses, and the use of the number zero to denote the empty
>    list NIL and the truth value false. Besides encouraging
>    pornographic programming, giving a special interpretation to the
>    address 0 has caused difficulties in all subsequent
>    implementations.
>
> My question is, what exactly does he mean by "pornographic
> programming"?  Is this a recognized term for some particular bad
> practice?  Or was he making some sort of pun that I don't get?
>
> --Doug