OT: Crazy Programming

[Donn Cave]

Quoth "James J. Besemer" <jb at cascade-sys.com>:
| Donn Cave wrote:
|> What does "subjective" mean?  Applicable only to the individual self
|> and without relevance to anyone else?
|
| 1. existing in a person's mind and not produced by things outside it, not
| objective.
| 2. depending on personal taste or views, etc.

1. Arguably the empty set, unless your person has some supernatural
   power to generate something ab nihilo.  (Mine doesn't.)

2. OK then, I take "personal" to my question in the affirmative.

|> If so, then I think I'm hearing
|> that a lot of what we call subjective, isn't.  Presumably because we
|> aren't all so different after all, and though we don't fully understand
|> the basis for our reactions to things, that basis is still shared by
|> any being like us.
|
| I agree that many things often regarded subjective are not subjective at all.
|
| E.g., beauty.  People say beauty is in the mind of the beholder but I would
| counter argue [... much speculation omitted.]

Actually I believe they say "beauty is in the eye of the beholder", but
whatever.

| ... I read somewhere that there's been a fair amount of study on this and with
| computer models of faces there is surprising human consensus about what is
| beautiful and regarding relative degrees of attractiveness.

I.e., we are not all so different after all.

|> In this analysis, we don't just happen to think Python code looks
|> better because of some inexplicable individual quirk.  That seems
|> reasonable to me.
|
| This is harder because judging the 'beauty' of code is much harder to extract
| from your training and background, and what you're used to.  Unlike human beauty
| you don't have any genetic predisposition one way or the other.

I don't think your genetic predisposition model for this is really very
useful, and moreover I don't think any model is necessary.  I'm not trying
to establish a particular mechanical basis for beauty of code.  The point
is that there surely is a basis for it, and almost as surely it applies
to everyone.  We can throw the light and heavy objects off the tower and
observe that gravity has the same effect on them, and infer that this is
a general rule, without needing to understand gravitation.

| ...  Similarly the omission of the several other extremely
| common and useful C idioms that are glorified in Perl is viewed as a glaring
| defect in Python.  All the rationale why they're not needed and how there are
| work arounds sound (to these listeners) like so much crap.  I agree it's a min
| issue but it's hard to build an objective case that Perl didn't make the bette
| choice in this regard (being one of the few places where Perl did NOT try to b
| 'inventive').  Note how often these topics come up and the answer is that "you
| have no choice, eventually you'll get used to it, once you're properly
| Pythonized it won't seem so bad..."  Sounds like the epitome of  SUBJECTIVE to
| me.

Yes, but here "subjective" is really about development.  You can develop
in a variety of directions depending on the influences of environment,
there's no arguing that.  Is there also a non-subjective factor, i.e.,
objective beauty?  If we are all the same in some ways, then yes.  These
two can be in conflict, hence rap music, and list comprehensions.

	Donn Cave, donn at u.washington.edu