Lambda the Ultimate

Really, shouldn't we acknowledge that Jesus is the Ultimate Imperative?

Speaking as a pure functionalist... why not? Seriously, though, what I admire most about Knuth's religion is that he keeps it out of his professional life. For example, a cursory reading of his homepage gives no hints unless you count the pipe organ link.

sean: For example, a cursory reading of his homepage gives no hints unless you count the pipe organ link.

Which, if you're Lutheran like Knuth, you do. ;-) Obviously, other denominations have pipe organs, too, but it's a staple in Lutheranism—Bach was Lutheran (to put this at least nominally back on topic, so was Leibniz). The town that I grew up in, Columbus, Indiana, is world-famous for its architecture, and has dozens of churches with world-class pipe organs.

It's also an hour's drive from Bloomington, Indiana, home of Indiana University, which is home to Dan Friedman, Douglas Hofstadter, Raymond Smullyan, and no doubt others whom I'm forgetting at the moment.

Please pardon the nostalgia—it just occurs to me that having been born and raised a Lutheran computer scientist in southern Indiana was magical in a way.

So do you think Friedman roots for the Cutters?

Great move, Sam. Now you're going to start sports fandom wars.

Freeze! Step AWAY from the thread.... ;-)

Let's make a website devoted to Christianity in computer science - jesus-the-ultimate.org

Just like the papers list, we could have a bunch of explanations of how Jesus is the ultimate X for X in {savior, friend, doctor, parent, lover, teacher}.

There are many binding constructs (lambda, pi, mu), but there is only one god - God!

There are many binding constructs (lambda, pi, mu), but there is only one god - God!

What makes you think that? There seem to be a number of quite actively competing religions, if their ongoing flamewars, which get quite biblical at times, are anything to go by. It's not at all clear that the deity being fought over is the same one, in any meaningful sense of the word "same".

Of course, in recent times the major religions pay lip service to a sort of theistic equivalent of the Church/Turing thesis, in which a vague isomorphism between their respective deities is postulated. However, this certainly doesn't cover all religions, and we're still waiting for a formalization that can withstand peer review.

Regrettably a good point, although I would point out that in moderate Judaism/Christianity/Islam, at least, there's a recognition that we are "People of the Book," and that Yahweh/God/Allah are just various names for the One True God. Within that conception are various mysteries: the sefirot of the kaballah; the trinity of Christianity; no doubt similar Muslim mysteries that I'm not familiar with...

Once we include the various faiths' mystery traditions, the drive to unity becomes even more profound. Such traditions might be considered analogous to the drives to foundational calculi in computer science, concentrating on the aspects of divinity that are atomic and fundamental. And like such efforts in CS, these religious traditions often draw more heat from their brothers and sisters within the tradition than from members of other traditions!

There's a problem with the idea of unity in this area as having some deeper meaning. One of the major means for the achievement of this unity, historically, has been conquest of one sort or another. The belief systems of entire societies have been destroyed, suppressed, or sometimes assimilated, to help create the relative homogeneity you referred to.

There are multiple possible interpretations of the meaning of this. The popular one ultimately rests on the idea that conquest validates the beliefs of the conquerors, but this is both the most convenient for the conquerors, and the least likely to be true in any external sense. After all, if that were the case, then ultimate truth would be the belief system of whichever crazy cult finally succeeds in nuking the rest of us from orbit.

From this I conclude that there's good reason for a little humility here. Political correctness in these matters is actually a long-term strategy for avoiding being nuked from orbit. ;)

Of which is exactly one the path to salvation, and all the others lead to hell! And there is no way at all to know which one is the right one! You can't figure it out, God can't quite manage to get His message across in a manner clear enough to be heard above Satan's din, so you've just got to gamble!

The joys of monotheism...

Of which is exactly one the path to salvation
I call your logical fallacy.
:)

so that when you find yourself at the gate of hell, you can backtrack..

If we care about programming language design, can we really admire the inventor of TeX? I suppose a reductio-ad-absurdum of the folly of using Stracheyesque macro systems to write large pieces of software has some value (a lesson relearnt by the autoconf folk), but even so, atrocities are atrocities...

Does this refer to http://www3.oup.co.uk/computer_journal/hdb/Volume_08/Issue_03/080225.sgm.abs.html ?

I didn't know it was online. Unfortunately the TIFFs give my ailing laptop a swap seizure and I can't read the texts. Any image gurus know how to turn the TIFFs into a manageable PDF format?

I do this kind of thing regularly with ImageMagick. I used ImageMagick to view a couple of the Computer Journal pages, but with much tedious swapping. That took away my stomach for carrying out the entire job. The resolution is 800dpi, 1 bit per pixel, compressed with LZW.

Here's what should work:

    convert 225.tif 226.tif ... -density 800 filename.ps
    ps2pdf filename.ps

Never really delved into TeX, so I am not qualified to judge it from the standpoint of PL design. I know that it is quite flexible though and seems to be the way to go when you need to have exacting control for printing purposes.

As a general purpose language, probably not.

As a domain-specific language, TeX has succeeded in all counts--including the important metric of widespread use.

There are lots of things to pick apart about Tex. Macros (and it's reliance on them) are one (though the Tex macro system has been put to some tremendous uses, i.e. LaTeX and BibTeX). If I were Knuth, I would have avoided a whole slew of parsing ambiguities (which often show up as surprises to the user) by putting ALL backslash directives in braces-- \{foo} instead of \foo. And so forth.

However, to withhold admiration for something which has so profoundly benefited academic publishing because a system which has existed for over 20 years doesn't conform to the latest practices in software design is folly.

I admire Knuth's humbleness in the subjects he approaches, be it text layout, algorithms, or pipe organs. Knuth would probably be the last to engage in a "religious" war on any subject.

Sorry Chris, didn't mean your original post, but rather some of the sub-threads. (You know who you are. ;-) )

Sorry, guys. I just wanted to mention another dimension of my appreciation of Knuth's work, not start a totally off-topic debate. I appreciate everyone's insights and forebearance.

I was trolling. I thought calling Jesus the ultimate would give it away.