DEEn Dictionary De - En
DeEs De - Es
DePt De - Pt
 Vocabulary trainer

Spec. subjects Grammar Abbreviations Random search Preferences
Search in Sprachauswahl
lisp
Search for:
Mini search box
 
Proverbs, aphorisms, quotations (English) by Linux fortune

A famous Lisp Hacker noticed an Undergraduate sitting in front of a Xerox
1108, trying to edit a complex Klone network via a browser. Wanting to
help, the Hacker clicked one of the nodes in the network with the mouse,
and asked "what do you see?" Very earnestly, the Undergraduate replied "I
see a cursor." The Hacker then quickly pressed the boot toggle at the back
of the keyboard, while simultaneously hitting the Undergraduate over the head
with a thick Interlisp Manual.  The Undergraduate was then Enlightened.
A LISP programmer knows the value of everything, but the cost of nothing.
                -- Alan Perlis
        A novice was trying to fix a broken lisp machine by turning the
power off and on.  Knight, seeing what the student was doing spoke sternly,
"You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding
of what is going wrong."  Knight turned the machine off and on.  The
machine worked.
A student, in hopes of understanding the Lambda-nature, came to Greenblatt.
As they spoke a Multics system hacker walked by.  "Is it true", asked the
student, "that PL-1 has many of the same data types as Lisp?"  Almost before
the student had finished his question, Greenblatt shouted, "FOO!", and hit
the student with a stick.
===  ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE  ========================

A new system, the CIRCULATORY system, has been added.

The long-experimental CIRCULATORY system has been released to users.  The
Lisp Machine uses Type B fluid, the L machine uses Type A fluid.  When the
switch to Common Lisp occurs both machines will, of course, be Type O.
Please check fluid level by using the DIP stick which is located in the
back of VMI monitors.  Unchecked low fluid levels can cause poor paging
performance.
===  ALL USERS PLEASE NOTE  ========================

JCL support as alternative to system menu.

In our continuing effort to support languages other than LISP on the CADDR,
we have developed an OS/360-compatible JCL.  This can be used as an
alternative to the standard system menu.  Type System J to get to a JCL
interactive read-execute-diagnose loop window.  [Note that for 360
compatibility, all input lines are truncated to 80 characters.]  This
window also maintains a mouse-sensitive display of critical job parameters
such as dataset allocation, core allocation, channels, etc.  When a JCL
syntax error is detected or your job ABENDs, the window-oriented JCL
debugger is entered.  The JCL debugger displays appropriate OS/360 error
messages (such as IEC703, "disk error") and allows you to dequeue your job.
Giving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden:  Languages
whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful.  The LISP machine now permits
LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf.
                -- Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
I'm a Lisp variable -- bind me!
Lisp Users:
Due to the holiday next Monday, there will be no garbage collection.
You know you've been sitting in front of your Lisp machine too long
when you go out to the junk food machine and start wondering how to
make it give you the CADR of Item H so you can get that yummie
chocolate cupcake that's stuck behind the disgusting vanilla one.
People are very flexible and learn to adjust to strange
surroundings -- they can become accustomed to read Lisp and
Fortran programs, for example.
- Leon Sterling and Ehud Shapiro, Art of Prolog, MIT Press
lisp, v.:
        To call a spade a thpade.
And now your toner's toney,                Disk blocks aplenty
And your paper near pure white,                Await your laser drawn lines,
The smudges on your soul are gone        Your intricate fonts,
And your output's clean as light..        Your pictures and signs.

We've labored with your father,                Your amputative absence
The venerable XGP,                        Has made the Ten dumb,
But his slow artistic hand,                Without you, Dover,
Lacks your clean velocity.                We're system untounged-

Theses and papers                         DRAW Plots and TEXage
And code in a queue                        Have been biding their time,
Dover, oh Dover,                        With LISP code and programs,
We've been waiting for you.                And this crufty rhyme.

Dover, oh Dover,                Dover, oh Dover, arisen from dead.
We welcome you back,                Dover, oh Dover, awoken from bed.
Though still you may jam,        Dover, oh Dover, welcome back to the Lab.
You're on the right track.        Dover, oh Dover, we've missed your clean
                                        hand...
God rest ye CS students now,                The bearings on the drum are gone,
Let nothing you dismay.                        The disk is wobbling, too.
The VAX is down and won't be up,        We've found a bug in Lisp, and Algol
Until the first of May.                        Can't tell false from true.
The program that was due this morn,        And now we find that we can't get
Won't be postponed, they say.                At Berkeley's 4.2.
(chorus)                                (chorus)

We've just received a call from DEC,        And now some cheery news for you,
They'll send without delay                The network's also dead,
A monitor called RSuX                        We'll have to print your files on
It takes nine hundred K.                The line printer instead.
The staff committed suicide,                The turnaround time's nineteen weeks.
We'll bury them today.                        And only cards are read.
(chorus)                                (chorus)

And now we'd like to say to you                CHORUS:        Oh, tidings of comfort and joy,
Before we go away,                                Comfort and joy,
We hope the news we've brought to you                Oh, tidings of comfort and joy.
Won't ruin your whole day.
You've got another program due, tomorrow, by the way.
(chorus)
                -- to God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Lisp, Lisp, Lisp Machine,
Lisp Machine is Fun.
Lisp, Lisp, Lisp Machine,
Fun for everyone.
We don't need no indirection                We don't need no compilation
We don't need no flow control                We don't need no load control
No data typing or declarations                No link edit for external bindings
Hey! did you leave the lists alone?        Hey! did you leave that source alone?
Chorus:                                        (Chorus)
        Oh No. It's just a pure LISP function call.

We don't need no side-effecting                We don't need no allocation
We don't need no flow control                We don't need no special-nodes
No global variables for execution        No dark bit-flipping for debugging
Hey! did you leave the args alone?        Hey! did you leave those bits alone?
(Chorus)                                (Chorus)
                -- "Another Glitch in the Call", a la Pink Floyd
What pains others pleasures me,
At home am I in Lisp or C;
There i couch in ecstasy,
'Til debugger's poke i flee,
Into kernel memory.
In system space, system space, there shall i fare--
Inside of a VAX on a silicon square.
While Europe's eye is fix'd on mighty things,
The fate of empires and the fall of kings;
While quacks of State must each produce his plan,
And even children lisp the Rights of Man;
Amid this mighty fuss just let me mention,
The Rights of Woman merit some attention.
                -- Robert Burns, Address on "The Rights of Woman", 26/10 1792
Brief History Of Linux (#22)

RMS had a horrible, terrible dream set in 2020 in which all of society was
held captive by copyright law. In particular, everyone's brain waves were
monitored by the US Dept. of Copyrights. If your thoughts referenced a
copyrighted idea, you had to pay a royalty. To make it worse, a handful of
corporations held fully 99.9% of all intellectual property rights.

Coincidentally, Bill Gates experienced a similar dream that same night. To
him, however, it was not a horrible, terrible nightmare, but a wonderful
utopian vision. The thought of lemmings... er, customers paying a royalty
everytime they hummed a copyrighted song in their head or remembered a
passage in a book was simply too marvelous for the budding monopolist.

RMS, waking up from his nightmare, vowed to fight the oncoming Copyright
Nightmare. The GNU Project was born. His plan called for a kernel,
compiler, editor, and other tools. Unfortunately, RMS became bogged down
with Emacs that the kernel, HURD, was shoved on the back burner. Built
with LISP (Lots of Incomprehensible Statements with Parentheses), Emacs
became bloated in a way no non-Microsoft program ever has. Indeed, for a
short while RMS pretended that Emacs really was the GNU OS kernel.
"... and don't ask me about the extraneous parenthesis. I bet some LISP
programmer felt alone and decided to make it a bit more homey."

        - Linus Torvalds
"If I need to put content identification in, well guess what - thats a list
   ((my_name "Hello") (his_name "Foo"))
and XML is simply lisp done wrong."

        - Alan Cox
Please use an explicit test - I know gcc suggest just an extra set of
parenthesis, but I'm personally convinced that is just because some gcc
people have been damaged by too much LISP.

        - Linus Torvalds discussing gcc requirements on linux-kernel
Having your own personal custom language dialect might be tempting but it is
normally something only the lisp community do.

        - Alan Cox on the linux-kernel mailing list
No guarantee of accuracy or completeness!
©TU Chemnitz, 2006-2024
Your feedback:
Ad partners