[PRL] Interesting article in LtU

[John Clements]

On Dec 2, 2005, at 12:46 PM, Matthias Felleisen wrote:

>
> 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."

Hence the representative democracy.  The problem (apparently) is that  
people no longer believe that they can elect people that are smarter  
or better informed than they themselves are.

John

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