On 1 Apr 2007 at 15:41, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@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
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.
On 4/1/07, Daniel R. Tobias dan@tobias.name wrote:
On 1 Apr 2007 at 15:41, Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@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:
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