[PRL] McCarthy's "pornographic programming"?

[Richard Cobbe]

On Mon, Dec 05, 2005 at 04:43:19PM -0500, 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?

And what, if anything, does this have to do with Mitch's use of the term
"dirty pictures" to refer to the dense figures that you find in any
given POPL paper?

More seriously, I've only encountered the term "pornographic
programming" a few times.  I don't think it's all that widespread, nor
do I think there's an underlying pun; I think McCarthy is just making a
value judgment on the practices in question.

(Unfortunately, Google let me down.  While a search on "pornographic
programming" was safe for work, it mostly turned up a bunch of people
whinging about all the sex on TV, and then the paragraph quoted above.
Oddly enough, searching for "pornographic programming" and "computer"
didn't really narrow the field that much, and I got bored with trying
additional search terms at that point.)

Richard