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I accidentally a scheme

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Re: I accidentally a scheme

#81

Post by pohl »

benj111 wrote: post #63
grncdr wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No chance, "lol" has been in usage for at least 25 years, possibly more than 30.

Well this was in real life, so you aren't going to get records. Wikipedia suggests lol is more like 40 years old, but you actually have a written record to back that up. All I have is my own experience, I wasn't really on the internet until the 2000s so I wouldn't have come across lol until mobile phones and texting became widespread (around 1999/2000). "I accidentally a" would have been in the 1995 - 2000 time frame…

I’ll stand as witness to the fact that ordinary people playfully tortured the language towards humorously cute long, long before one TRS-80 could call another over the phone. The tech just helped these people find and feed off of each other.

Re: I accidentally a scheme

#82

Post by moron4hire »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #30
vore wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The verb is "accidentally", actually!

Proper verbing would be "accidented", I believe (and I love English for how you can just verb or noun anything - it's like Lisp of natural languages!), but I guess "accidentally" can be chalked up to artistic license.

That's verbing a noun, but I don't think that's what is going on here. I think the title is trying to verb an adverb.

If the "correct" sentence is "I accidentally created a scheme", then I think it would be "accidentallied". In excising the verb, shouldn't one carry its tense over to the adverb?

If the "correct" sentence is "I created an accidental scheme", then it would be "acidentalled".

But verbing the adjective doesn't have the same rhythm as verbing the adverb, in this case. And rhythm is the most important rule of English. The indefinite article needs to fall on a low note, and the adverb form is flexible enough to end on a high note to give a lilting affirmation, whereas the adjective form is not.

Re: I accidentally a scheme

#83

Post by junon »

pohl wrote: post #70
ezekiel68 wrote: post #69

The odd lack of verbs (in the title and the text) made me immediately suspect this was an unfortunate AI submission. Is omitting verbs part of the inside joke of Lisp communities?

It’s a pretty common thing all over the internet to deliberately butcher the language for humorous effect. The LOLcat (“I can has cheeseburger “) translation of the Bible is hilarious.

I bought that book after first reading about "ceiling cat" and "basement cat".

Re: I accidentally a scheme

#84

Post by spit2wind »

michaelteter wrote: post #3

There doesn't seem to be a lot of fun valid English writing today. Certainly it seems the opposite is the norm, even at the highest levels of government. But I found joy very early in this essay. "Tonight's missive is an apology: not quite in the sense of expiation, though not quite not that, either; rather, apology in the sense of explanation, of exegesis: apologia." When an introduction provides such a concise but…

Great for a blog, terrible for documentation.

Re: I accidentally a scheme

#85

Post by MereInterest »

Izmaki wrote: post #37

As somebody with English as a second language, I hate it when "accidentally" is used as a verb.

Would it help to still consider "accidentally" as an adverb, but modifying an omitted verb? As a native English-speaker, that's how I tend to parse it.

Up until the end of the sentence, the reader doesn't know whether a verb is going to occur. English usually arranges a sentence with subject-verb-object ordering ("I ate my meal."), and not subject-object-verb ordering ("I my meal ate."), so this is unlikely. However, variations occur, such as "Neither a borrower nor a lender be." in Macbeth, or "Frankincense to offer have I" from We Three Kings. These tend to be somewhat archaic usage, and so an author may deliberately use this tone for a sense of formality.

This is similar to a garden-path sentence [0], where the sentence cannot be easily parsed in order. Up until the title ends, we don't know if the title will so formal that it changes up the word ordering (e.g. "I accidentally a scheme brought forth.") or so informal that it omitted a word without realizing it. This contrast between extreme formality and extreme informality becomes a source of humor when resolved.

(And by dissecting a joke, I have made it that much funnier. I'm great at parties.)

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden-path_sentence

Re: I accidentally a scheme

#86

Post by vindarel »

cfiggers wrote: post #18
__MatrixMan__ wrote: post #16

Note to self: learn a lisp. Lisp people appear to be having more fun than the rest of us.

There's literally dozens of us! If you're serious about learning a Lisp but motivated more by, as you say, "having more fun" rather than, say, landing a six-figure job writing it professionally... then may I recommend Janet[0] for your consideration. Janet is an embeddably-small, yet surprisingly batteries-included Lisp implemented in pure C. In terms of syntax and core library it borrows more directly from Clojure t…

But is Janet as interactive as Common Lisp? (REPL, image-based development, debugger, restarts…) The fun is there!

Re: I accidentally a scheme

#87

Post by brainbag »

farmdve wrote: post #42
m3kw9 wrote: post #40

Hurts my head reading the title

I had to login to HN which I have not done in many months just to say this to the young generation. The title is from a meme. Like before the memes of today, when a meme was an image around a black frame with white text. It usually goes "I accidentally a ".

Until I read all the way down here to the bottom of the comment thread, I was thinking about the older people who didn't get this reference since I've been hearing it for decades. But now I see, thanks to your comment, that it is I that is the old one, and it's the youngsters that don't know it.

Re: I accidentally a scheme

#88

Post by gpderetta »

brainbag wrote: post #87
farmdve wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had to login to HN which I have not done in many months just to say this to the young generation. The title is from a meme. Like before the memes of today, when a meme was an image around a black frame with white text. It usually goes "I accidentally a ".

Until I read all the way down here to the bottom of the comment thread, I was thinking about the older people who didn't get this reference since I've been hearing it for decades. But now I see, thanks to your comment, that it is I that is the old one, and it's the youngsters that don't know it.

Yes, it is an older meme, but it checks out.

Re: I accidentally a scheme

#89

Post by teddyh »

fanf2 wrote: post #78
frognumber wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Neither. * I meant s-types. * There is no such thing. The problem, as Clinton: "It depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is." S-types WERE a thing, but never a major one. I ran across them as a high school student on a random research project at a university as a summer internship of some kind. They were used by a handful of research groups for some data interchange format. Literally the only person who would…

Sounds a bit like the S-expression syntax that was developed for SPKI/SDSI in the 1990s. I am surprised to find that the old spec has been revived after over 25 years https://datatracker.ietf.org/doc/draft-rivest-sexp/

> I am surprised to find that the old spec has been revived after over 25 years

The thread at https://www.spinics.net/lists/ietf/thrd4.html#115999> seems to be relevant. Especially https://www.spinics.net/lists/ietf/msg116441.html>.

Re: I accidentally a scheme

#90

Post by bitslayer »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #62
frognumber wrote: post #2

People accidentally a scheme all the time. I first accidentalled a scheme in high school. I learned about S-types, which were to Lisp what JSON is to JavaScript. I made a language around then. Oops. Some would argue Brendan Eich of Netscape accidentalled a scheme in JavaScript, but others would argue that he didn't. Most accidental schemes are pretty bad, and the original JavaScript fits the bill, or it doesn't, depe…

What is a Scheme and what is not a Scheme is actually pretty well defined in terms of language concepts and features. The JavaScript of back then is not that. Some Scheme may have served as something that Eich took hints from, but he did not create a new Scheme.

Took hints from, ergo "an ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation"
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