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.