On 4/1/07, Daniel R. Tobias <dan(a)tobias.name> wrote:
On 1 Apr 2007 at 15:41, Phil Sandifer
<Snowspinner(a)gmail.com> wrote:
There is nothing even remotely potentially
libelous about the
statement that Hofstadter, who writes about artificial intelligence,
had influence in computing. It's not something that should be deleted
wholesale except to disruptively prove a point.
In fact, he even created a couple of programming languages... to
illustrate a point in a book rather than for actual use on computers,
but he still did it:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BlooP_and_FlooP
That doesn't seem particularly relevant to anything currently in the
article, but I wouldn't object to it being mentioned somewhere.
Trivia section, maybe?
Though he personally identifies more with the
arts-and-literature
crowd than the techie-geek one, he's certainly expressed plenty of
ideas that are relevant to tech topics, and have influenced them.
That's pretty indisputable, though the second half of it is rather
bland. Sure, he's influenced techies - he's a professor of cognitive
science after all! And sure, he's expressed ideas relevant to
technology, but unless you're going to describe this in more detail
and give examples (which would presumably involve citing sources), it
just leaves the reader thinking "yeah, I knew that" or wondering what
you're talking about.
The first half, that he personally identifies more with the
arts-and-literature crowd, is more interesting and would probably make
a good intro to the paragraph I added about how he' says he's
"uncomfortable with the nerd culture that centers on computers"
(please feel free to add it, I won't because mailing list posts aren't
automatically GFDL), but only if it's followed up with some details
with, you know, sources.
Anthony