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

[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?).