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Wildly misrepresented Tony Morris 22nd July, 2007 09:41 (UTC)

First, please don't misrepresent me. You're free to post your own objections, but please do not misrepresent what I have said. I assume this misrepresentation is not intentional, but a result of a failure of understanding of the topic at hand, so please don't think I am accusing you of conscious intellectual fraud.

Here are some misrepresentations.

  • Tony is complaining…

Tony is not complaining

  • Tony is taking a swipe at Blub programmers

The term “Blub programmer” is relative. A “Blub language” is relative to another language. To suggest that I am not a “Blub programmer” and you (metaphorical you) are not means that I believe I have found a pinnacle. This is untrue. Therefore, not only was I not swiping at anything, the term “Blub” has been taken *way* out of the context that was originally proposed by Paul Graham.

  • The problem with this comes when we want to write some code that requires both i() and j().

This is certainly not a problem that I have described. It seems that you have digressed into a different problem(s).

The intention of my post (like many posts) is to invoke critical thought on behalf of the reader. Whether or not you think I have achieved this goal is something I am willing to hear, but to make unfounded assumptions and misrepresentations is really uninteresting - at least to me.

Wildly misrepresented Kirit Sælensminde 22nd July, 2007 12:09 (UTC)

Tony, thanks for taking the time to respond.

Tony Morris said

First, please don't misrepresent me.

It was never my intention to misrepresent you. If I have done so it's because I've failed to understand what you were saying or the way you were saying it.

You're free to post your own objections, but please do not misrepresent what I have said. I assume this misrepresentation is not intentional, but a result of a failure of understanding of the topic at hand, so please don't think I am accusing you of conscious intellectual fraud.

Here are some misrepresentations.

  • Tony is complaining…

Tony is not complaining

By my reading of your opening paragraph it does indeed sound like a complaint, and throughout it does come across as if you are complaining (maybe “lamenting” is a better term?) the lack of knowledge all to prevalent in our field.

  • The problem with this comes when we want to write some code that requires both i() and j().

This is certainly not a problem that I have described. It seems that you have digressed into a different problem(s).

In that case I've clearly not understood what your point was at all. You do seem to be talking about the difficulty imposed by having to represent the type “I with J” as either K or L.

On re-reading what you've posted I still can't shake the feeling that the difficulty of expressing the type “I with J” is a major part of what you were discussing.

The intention of my post (like many posts) is to invoke critical thought on behalf of the reader.

And indeed they do that for me which is one of the reasons that I read them when you post. I do however often find them extremely difficult to follow, and unfortunately often condescending in tone — which is not to say you intend them to sound that way, but that is often my perception of them.

They start off easily enough (as does this one), but then there is often a leap to the conclusion which doesn't feel very well supported. On this one it occurs between the paragraph starting “In my hypothetical language” and the one starting “Now, is my hypothetical language really hypothetical”. I'm afraid I couldn't discern any meaning from the final two paragraphs.

What I wanted to do was to build on your post by adding an example to show three things, firstly why dynamic languages aren't the right answer, secondly to show what the sort of type check you're talking about might look like in a syntax familiar to the people you seemed to be targeting with your explanation and finally, through that one of the benefits of it.

Anyway, having thought about what you've said I've made a small change to the opening sentence of my post which I hope better expresses what I'm actually doing.

And I do want to say thank you for taking the time to write your posts. I've learned a lot from them.


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Wildly misrepresented Kirit Sælensminde 23rd July, 2007 03:56 (UTC)
Tony Morris said

I not swiping at anything

Having thought about this overnight I figured you're right. I've changed the post accordingly. Hope that's better.

Looking forward to your next post, and I'd still be interested in a good explanation of higher order type systems — what is/are the defining characteristics?


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