Re: Offensive language in Prolog code

Dear Wouter,

Thank you very much for your enlightening remarks; be sure I will study them (as I do not grasp their full deep meaning yet).

However I find even pure Prolog already esoteric enough (my co-developers would never touch it). The reason why I am trying to teach my nephews is simple: it is better suited to their attention span. Go teach js prototypes to the newer generation; Prolog is just intuitive. You never think twice about what has to be unified with what nor about recursion, which are humanly intuitive.

If you are a C# (procedural, oo) or an F# (functional) person, you won't touch prolog; it requires a different kind of mind-set. Same way, if you are a prolog person, you won't touch F# (in prolog, everything is global in the fact-base). But using prolog is more productive than C# for some tasks. Hence the need to switch between different approaches (procedural, oo, functional, logic), which is not evident.

I think the prolog community should be more inventive in teaching it to people like me, regarding e.g. difference lists; there are thousands of examples about them on the web, all of them about "append". I do not feel comfortable implementing DCGs from scratch, albeit it is just about an operator and difference lists..

By the way, I do not know what "Pack" means (in your post-scriptums(a?)); I especially did not understand PS2. But I understand your first post-scriptum a little bit more: I do not get evil so I serve its purpose.

Cheers,
Dincer



________________________________
 From: Wouter Beek <[email protected]>
To: Dincer Uyav <[email protected]> 
Cc: "[email protected]" <[email protected]> 
Sent: Sunday, July 28, 2013 10:54 AM
Subject: Re: [SWIPL] Offensive language in Prolog code
 


Hi Dincer,

As I understand it, the EVIL package is a form of "esoteric programming". As with other examples of esoteric programming, parts of the EVIL codebase should be interpreted as satire on the normal use of Prolog or programming in general.  This means that the use of strong language should be assessed relative to this context. The comment that you quote is clearly a pun on the standard way of stating the license of a piece of code. It seems that you have missed this literary or 'aesthetic' context a bit. The use of strong language has historically been part of the genre (as it has been part of other genres of comedy as well), for instance http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brainfuck.


I think that EVIL is a cunning piece of code that is probably best appreciated by people who are well-versed in Prolog. Its purpose will probably not be understood by your nephews, as they are starting to learn Prolog. One has to know the standard/default way of doing things in order to understand the twists and puns that EVIL consists of. By the time your nephews become better at writing Prolog code, they will probably start to like EVIL for the above stated reasons. Keep us posted by the time they do!


PS1: Two anonymous posters on the Pack's site haven't understood this context either, judging by their lack of understanding that speaks from the comments they left (e.g., 
"Serious waste of time"). It's too bad that people leave comments without understanding the thing they are commenting on properly, although in this case the critique that EVIL is a waste of time is -- in a satirical sense -- exactly one of its purposes.


PS2: The Pack's site says: "Failed to process pack" This probably points at an issue on the server-side?



---
Cheers!,
Wouter.

E-mail: [email protected]
WWW: www.wouterbeek.com
Tel.: 0647674624


On Sun, Jul 28, 2013 at 7:03 AM, Dincer Uyav <[email protected]> wrote:

A certain michael richter published his (properly named) EVIL.PL with the following license:
>
>:- multifile license:license/3. license:license(wtfpl, lgpl,  [ comment('Do What The Fuck You Want To Public License'),  url('http://www.wtfpl.net/txt/copying')]). :- license(wtfpl).
>
>Do we need such offensive language in Prolog code?
>
>I am currently trying to teach Prolog to my nephews and prefer not to show them this piece of P-code.
>
>I don't know what this guy was smoking at the time but I am deeply offended and expect SWI-Prolog not to host such illicit material; I am sure your membership agreement considers this as grounds for immediate termination.
>
>Dincer
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