in reply to Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: don't { use Perl }
in thread don't { use Perl }

When another programmer looks at it, he as looking at it as another speaker of the language, but not as its target.

Oh please. Have you never debugged your own or another's code? Have you ever stepped through the code, simulating the machine's behavior either mentally or on paper? Of course you have, at the level of the higher level code (not at the level of the machine language I would expect). How else could you write an algorithm in Perl without being able to mentally simulate how the code gets executed? How is that not both speaker and audience of the high level code? You can only be a meaningful speaker of a language that you are also capable of being a meaningful listener of.

  • Comment on Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: don't { use Perl }

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Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: Re: don't { use Perl }
by ignatz (Vicar) on Jun 10, 2002 at 19:01 UTC
    The speaker/listener construct that you are trying to force upon us bring into this discussion just doesn't fit with what is happening when someone programs a computer. The fact that Pascal and French are both called "languages" is a flaw in how we label things and shouldn't force us to treat them as one and the same theoretically. The mental/symantic hoops that we are jumping through to debate this makes my point.
    ()-()
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      The speaker/listener dichotomy is something you first brought into this discussion in this node, and continued to focus upon in this one. You can't have it both ways. Your intial forays into this discussion were all about programmer as speaker and machine as listener, something I not only disagreed very strongly with, but I think is a fundamental, categorical flaw in your reasoning on this particular topic. Please reread my earlier response to your introduction of the speaker/listener dichotomy.
        Look anonymous dude, the moment that saying to you
        $you->dump(); sub dump { $person = Mammal::new("Anonymous Monk"); $person->defecate(); }
        causes you to crap your pants is the moment when I'll by your computer languages are meant for humans and not machines stuff. If it does, you let me know, and I'll admit defeat in this debate.
        ()-()
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          `