Comment by gpderetta

Comment by gpderetta 8 months ago

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"Church’s lambda calculus and the Turing machine are equally powerful but differ in the fact that Turing machines use mutable state. To this day, there is a rift between functional and imperative programming languages, because of the separation of Church and state."

[I have known the above quote forever, but I can't find an original source]

edit: might be from Guy Steele: "And some people prefer not to commingle the functional, lambda-calculus part of a language with the parts that do side effects. It seems they believe in the separation of Church and state"

fuzztester 8 months ago

>seems they believe in the separation of Church and state"

ha, good one.

remind me of the joke about niklaus wirth's name.

[ Quotes about Niklaus Wirth

    Whereas Europeans generally pronounce his name the right way ('Nick-louse Veert'), Americans invariably mangle it into 'Nickel's Worth.' This is to say that Europeans call him by name, but Americans call him by value.
        Introduction by Adriaan van Wijngaarden at the IFIP Congress (1965). ]
from:

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth

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drcwpl 8 months ago

That is such a great quote - classic programming humor, but no idea of the original

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  • rbonvall 8 months ago

    Just like Niklaus Wirth's quote about how people used to call him, or the joke about there being 10 kinds of people.

    Those are the ones that make me wish people knew just enough Computer Science to get them :)

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    • tialaramex 8 months ago

      "There's two hard problems in computer science: we only have one joke and it's not funny" which I've seen credited to Phillip Scott Bowden

      Which is a reference to the "two hard problems" jokes, the most used is "There are two hard problems in Computer Science: Cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors"

      But there is also "Two hard problems in distributed systems: Exactly-once delivery, guaranteed order of messages, and exactly-once delivery".

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      • Swannie 8 months ago

        > Which is a reference to the "two hard problems" jokes, the most used is "There are two hard problems in Computer Science: Cache invalidation, naming things, and off-by-one errors"

        It's just as funny today as when I first heard it in 2002/2003... to which my professor at the time would add:

        "But really, naming things is colouring. And cache invalidation is colouring. So really there's only one problem in computer science, colouring and counting... which doesn't sound so hard after all".

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      • fuzztester 8 months ago

        I made a UDP joke once.

        You may get it.

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    • fuzztester 8 months ago

      I didn't see your comment before I posted mine, because I was reading the thread linearly, but anyway, I'll expand upon yours:

      1: >Niklaus Wirth's quote

      https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42054371

      2: >the joke about there being 10 kinds of people.

      those who understand binary and those who don't.

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f1shy 8 months ago

I think it is from Peter Norvig, look the sister comment.

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