Why the software industry is morally bankrupt, volume #0xDEADBEEF

[tim]

A blog comment in response to an argument that writing a parser for Perl is Turing-complete:

"That's some mighty fine left brain thinking there( especially for a Monday morning ), but does it in anyway affect any practical aspect of Perl? Like can it be used to show that Perl is more or less reliable/secure? This isn't a criticism of your node, but I left college 35 years ago, and this sort of analysis seems very ivory-tower-ish to me now. It's sort of like saying 'one cannot prove self-existence'. Is the fact that Perl cannot parse itself a good or bad thing, or can other languages do it? Does that make them superior?"

Computer science is an intellectual and pragmatic failure. Kids, if you're looking for a good career, major in English.

Comments

[wkfauna.livejournal.com]

Heh, that's an amusing proof. Anyway, I don't think the commenter could be called a computer scientist -- after all, they reject computer *science*. It's possible to be a computer user without being a computer scientist, but I wish more users-not-scientists would stop feeling insecure about it and manifesting their insecurity whenever they can.

[tim]

I should have been clearer. Certainly, the commenter is no computer scientist. But if we as computer scientists haven't managed to convince (a) our students (though I don't know if the commenter ever got a CS degree) or even (b) the software industry as a whole that it matters whether your programming language's grammar is context-free, than we have failed. Miserably.

[wkfauna.livejournal.com]

Iunno. The commenter uses Perl and doesn't care whether it's parseable. They have no use for a static analyzer or other niftiness that would be made possible otherwise. I don't think it's a failure to not have convinced them of the usefulness of these things they don't need.

[tim]

Do people who code in Perl really not care whether it's possible to write a compiler for their language (even if they use an interpreter for most daily work)?

[wkfauna.livejournal.com]

I work in Perl, and I don't really care in a practical sense. It's a consideration in whether to use the language or not, I guess, but it's not going to stop me. I don't know about other people.

Besides, there's always XS... *shudder*

[tim]

Let me put it differently: if you were interviewing candidates for a Perl programming job, and Candidate A could look at the proof in the blog post and say "well, that's interesting, I guess that means you can't write a compiler for Perl, and we could talk about whether you need one or not," whereas Candidate B's response is "that's a bunch of useless academic ivory tower nonsense, who cares?", would that affect your decision about who to hire?

[wkfauna.livejournal.com]

Oh well yeah. Candidate B would have to work very hard to make up the points they lost for that comment. But if there were a candidate C that said "Oh, that proof is nifty, but I guess I don't really care on a day-to-day basis", that would be a neutral statement unless it was delivered in a snarky way.

[tim]

I guess I see a difference between "it doesn't directly affect how I do my job on a day-to-day basis" and "I don't care". Does the halting problem affect how an average programmer does their job on a day-to-day basis? Well, no, but I would still hope that any such programmer understood what computability means.

[wkfauna.livejournal.com]

Yeah, exactly. Somebody with no curiosity and a disdain for the "high falutin' ivory tower mumbo jumbo" is probably going to be annoying to work with and probably not as good at their job as they could otherwise be (where do you get if you refuse to ever read any papers?).

[wkfauna.livejournal.com]

Also, I think many people who like Perl like it for its expressiveness, which is (at least part of) what makes it unparseable.