gongador

Lots of misunderstandings in these comments, something that in itself shows of difficult communication is.

What Witkowski is saying is that communication, as we think about the concept, between species likely won't be recognizable as communication. We (and/or they) will literally not perceive the attempt at communication as communication.

As he has thought about this, he has tried to reduce the concept of communication to something approaching universality, and ended up (for now) with the realization that since (probably) all living things wish to continue living, an attempt to take a living things life will be seen as communication (with the message being: I want to kill you).

In other words, he is not at all (as far as the article is concerned) concerned with the question "What is a good, practical way of making contact with an alien species such that it leads to a positive outcome for us?" What he is concerned with is the question: "How will different species in our universe even realize that someone is trying to communicate?"

(Note: I don't know whether he's correct or not, but it would be nice if people read and understood the content instead of constructing straw men to argue with.)

To clarify: sure, I'm wrong in the sense that there is a normal way if we by 'normal' mean 'most people do it like this'. Unfortunately, 'normal' almost always also carries a meaning of 'the proper way'.

Also, something that's normal (in the sense of 'most common') in, say, the US is not necessarily normal in, say Norway or Thailand or Zambia.

> Your questions instead sound like you are doubting him.

Respectfully, I disagree: _to you_, the "questions instead sound like you are doubting him".

Maybe it even sounds that way to most people. It doesn't to me.

I have been in very similar situations, and having experienced the frustration of communications failure, I've tried to take other approaches.

A few times I've prefaced my questions with something along the lines of: "In order to answer your question I'm going to have to ask some questions; a few of them may not make sense to you, but it's just the way I function".

It has not helped. One time it was met with a kind of "gee, here you go again, giving a lecture on how special you are."

The crux of the matter is that I _need_ to do that if I am going to give a helpful answer to the question that I was asked. Either the manager's question is important and warrants a thoughtful reply, or it's unimportant, in which case almost any kind of reply is ok.

I think the problem, in a nutshell, is neurotypical people's absolute refusal to acknowledge when they're wrong -- for example about what a normal way for an employee to respond to the question: "should we switch to React?" is.

There _is_ no normal way. But neurotypical people, stereotypically, labor under the incorrect assupmtion that there is one. And the discussion in this thread has, in my opionion, made that extremely evident.

In my opinion, it is Common Lisp that is famous for carefully chosen design decisions and nerdy attention to details, given the situation and the constraints (Darpa saying 'fix the situation or we cut funding', and lots of implementors anxious to push /their/ way.) Sure, everything isn't "just right" (e.g. READ-FROM-STRING, no 'parse-number'), but that's a universal problem.

As far as I can remember, that's a relatively recent trend though (dubbing childrens' programmes), at least in Sweden. I can't remember any being dubbed until possibly in the late 1990s, more likely the early 2000s.

Indeed.

"The dominant file systems at the time the design was done were TOPS-10, TENEX, TOPS-20, VAX VMS, AT&T Unix, MIT Multics, MIT ITS, not to mention a bunch of mainframe OS's. Some were uppercase only, some mixed, some were case-sensitive but case-translating (like CL). Some had dirs as files, some not. Some had quote chars for funny file chars, some not. Some had wildcards, some didn't. Some had :up in relative pathnames, some didn't. Some had namable root dirs, some didn't. There were file systems with no directories, file systems with non-hierarchical directories, file systems with no file types, file systems with no versions, file systems with no devices, and so on. People often critique the design now because Unix and Mac and DOS are so comparatively similar (compared to some of those others)..."

-- Kent Pitman in comp.lang.lisp, https://groups.google.com/forum/#!original/comp.lang.lisp/Pl...

The plan for Common Lisp originally was to have a "core" and a standard library. From Daniel Weinreb's blog post "Complaints I’m Seeing About Common Lisp":

    It’s just too big. Actually, the real problem is that the core of the language is not cleanly separated from the built-in libraries.  The Common Lisp designers had originally intended to do this separation, but there wasn’t time enough.

https://web.archive.org/web/20100706204555/http://danweinreb...

(Daniel Weinreb was, among other things, one the designers of Common Lisp.)

Zach Beane has some more information on this at https://xach.livejournal.com/319717.html

EDIT: "time enough", in the quote, may seem strange; after all, work began in 1984 and the standard was finalized in 1994. But remember that many stakeholders were companies with jobs to do, and they had to assign employees to the design/standardization work at real costs for said companies.

Because PRINT also exists, and doesn't do the same thing PRINC does.

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw61/CLHS/Body/f_wr_p...

> ... which of course has no equivalent in Clojure, Scheme, or really any other language I can think of.

Python, for example: def cross(xs, ys): return [[x, y] for y in ys for x in xs]

LOOP in disguise :) (at least to my (very possibly faulty) understanding.)

Actually at least Sweden was involved in slave trading, out of a slave fort in Ghana called Carolusborg. I'm pretty sure there was one or a few short lived attempts at colonies as well, somewhere in the Carribean.

Here's a link to a Swedish newspaper discussing Carolusborg (in Swedish). http://www.dn.se/resor/sveriges-morka-slavhistoria

I agree, it's hardly representative of the whole country, which is why I referred to the photo essay as a viewpoint rather than claiming that (the whole of) Afghanistan was a modern progressive country in the 1960s.

I have no knowledge of what life in Afghanistan was like in the 1960s, I just remembered reading this essay and looking at the photos some time ago.

If I recall history lessons from school correctly, customs and habits formed by a country's elite (most often in the country's capital) tend to spread and be mimicked around said country. I wonder what life in rural Afghanistan would have been like today had not the USSR and the USA got involved.

EDIT: Sigh, this should have been an edit in my previous comment of course.

Here's one viewpoint:

http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2010/05/27/once_upon_a...