[PRL] Interesting article in LtU

[Matthias Felleisen]

On Dec 2, 2005, at 1:48 PM, Mitchell Wand wrote:

> Misc Links
>  A couple of small items that caught my attention.
>
> 	• 	Fritz Kunze (President of Franz Inc.) reveals the secrets to 
> successful programming language business.
> 	• 	An interview about reddit which includes the ultimate question: 
> Why Lisp?
> 	• 	Tim Bray on abstracting the Web using continuations (well, sort 
> of).

Here is an excerpt:

> Bruce claims that the “continuation” facility, commonly found in 
> dynamic languages, snaps neatly onto the problem of making the Web 
> look like a linear dialogue. Clearly, continuations are kind of hard 
> to understand and not for casual or novice programmers. No problemo, 
> says Bruce, frameworks like Seaside (layered over Smalltalk) hide the 
> weirdness and let you just carry on an orderly dialogue with a user 
> via a Web browser.
> In my mind I was screaming “No! No! No!” because I’ve generally felt 
> that the pain and complexity involved in object-relational and 
> object-XML and object-messaging mapping  outweigh the benefits; that 
> if your application is based on exchanging messages, then the message 
> exchange has to be visible to the application programmer. I’m not 
> alone in having this kind of reflex.
> Well, it seems that both Ruby on Rails and Seaside would tend to 
> disagree, and the evidence is building up on their side.

This reminds me of a recent book review in the Business part of WSJ. 
The book is a Harvard psycho-sociological dissertation on people who 
have been abducted by UFOs. The conclusion is that the vast majority of 
people can't follow logical conversations and arguments about 
scientific connections.

Last night, Anita Jones mentioned a similar story about nuclear 
reactors and people. Somebody interviewed people in CAL on nuclear 
reactors. A dominant reaction was "I don't want the emission in my 
neighborhood." When they were told that a nuclear facility wouldn't 
cause more emission than a walk down the street, they said "oh yes." 
They followed the explanation with interest. And then the interviewer 
would ask again: What do you think about nuclear facilities around 
here. The answer was almost invariably "But I don't want emission."

-- Matthias, who wants continuations