From: Francis Cianfrocca <garbagecat10@...>
Date: 2006-08-09T04:20:45+09:00
Subject: Re: Language chatter

Chad Perrin wrote:
> On Wed, Aug 09, 2006 at 02:47:12AM +0900, Francis Cianfrocca wrote:
>> 
 > I don't know what Steven meant, but I know what I'd mean if I said 
that:
> 
> Turing machines and Lisp machines are equivalently fundamental.  After
> all, I can work with mathematical functions with pencil and paper, too.


You may be right, but my guess is that Steve was trying to say something 
like this:

It's fundamentally more natural for people to approach many computations 
by imagining a working set of discrete values and constructing recipes 
for manipulating them in discrete ways. It's fundamentally less natural 
to construct what amounts to a mathematical field to do the same thing. 
A perhaps poor analogy: most people have an easier time with arithmetic 
on natural numbers than they do with group theory (even though they are 
mathematically unified).

The contentious word in that paragraph is "natural," and it gets to what 
I care about the most (writing all the software that needs to get 
written with measurably high quality at a reasonable cost in dollars and 
time). Is the Turing approach more "natural" or just more "familiar" 
than the Church approach (even though they are mathematically unified)?

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