Subject: Re: invert-string revisited From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Thu, 06 Jun 2002 02:02:16 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3232317732020859@naggum.net> * [christopher browne] | <that would be pretty wild..> <[i] think the distance from what we have today and we would have had today had some serious changes been made long ago tend to be a lot larger than most people are casually able to appreciate> <to rethink and change a fundamental property of written language is not like some third-rate time-traveling science fiction movie/joke where going back in time and changing something, then "returning" ends up with only trivial changes> <sometimes, you can retrace the development of a person's life and character to individual events> <if you change or undo these events, there is no telling what other event would be equally decisive> | <presumably this would mean you'd throw data in and get something vaguely | resembling:> <[i] find such trivializing presumption to be quite insulting> <at least be willing to consider that our current situation is based on a large number of completely arbitrary decisions and accidents that could very easily have been different with dramatically different outcomes> <a thought experiment with different arbitrary decisions and accidents would then have to produce different results on a scale similar to that of the consequences of the arbitrary decisions and accidents that have shaped our current state> <"what if?"-analyses are generally difficult only because it is hard to understand just how interrelated and dependent what we take for granted really is> | "This was all about T.S. Eliott." <this was all about [t(homas) s(tearns) eliot]> | I'm not sure that this would have been _so_ much better as to set the | world on fire, but maybe I've not thought about it enough... <suppose you did not get admitted to the college you got admitted to, or you got a much different {gpa} or even individual grade -- would you be in the same place you are today?> <suppose telephony was made publicly available in the [united states] without free local calls -- would we still have had [usenet]?> <suppose [goldfarb] never met [mosher] and [lorie] -- would we still have {xml}?> <suppose advertising was taboo -- would the [internet] experiment still drown huge {isp}s like [{kpn}qwest] in unmanageable debt?> <please note that this is /not/ about syntax, but about the concepts we choose to give notation and the methods with which we choose to give them their specific notations> <please also note that most of these things are not chosen -- someone just does something useful and other people just adopt it without consideration for any alternatives because sometimes, to find the next solution requires even more effort than the first> -- <in a fight against something, the fight has value, victory has none> <in a fight for something, the fight is a loss, victory merely relief> <70 percent of [American] adults do not understand the scientific process>