

Execution in the Kingdom of Nouns (2006) - bloke_zero
http://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2006/03/execution-in-kingdom-of-nouns.html

======
danso
Does anyone know what Yegge has been up to? I thought maybe he moved his
blogging over to Google+ or something, but that hasn't been updated since 2012
either.

After his effusive praise for pre-Rails-fever Ruby in his initial foray with
it, I've been extremely interested in what he thinks of it now, or how long he
stuck with it.

edit: The link for convenience: [http://steve-
yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/bloggers-block-4-rub...](http://steve-
yegge.blogspot.com/2006/09/bloggers-block-4-ruby-and-java-and.html)

I have to highly agree with Jeff Atwood's sentiment, in his explanation of why
he was OK with using Ruby for Discourse:

[http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-ruby/](http://blog.codinghorror.com/why-
ruby/)

Quoting Yegge:

 _For the most part, Ruby took Perl 's string processing and Unix integration
as-is, meaning the syntax is identical, and so right there, before anything
else happens, you already have the Best of Perl. And that's a great start,
especially if you don't take the Rest of Perl._

 _But then Matz took the best of list processing from Lisp, and the best of OO
from Smalltalk and other languages, and the best of iterators from CLU, and
pretty much the best of everything from everyone._

 _And he somehow made it all work together so well that you don 't even notice
that it has all that stuff. I learned Ruby faster than any other language, out
of maybe 30 or 40 total; it took me about 3 days before I was more comfortable
using Ruby than I was in Perl, after eight years of Perl hacking. It's so
consistent that you start being able to guess how things will work, and you're
right most of the time. It's beautiful. And fun. And practical._

~~~
kyllo
He's been active on Twitter lately:
[https://twitter.com/Steve_Yegge](https://twitter.com/Steve_Yegge)

~~~
mdemare
3 tweets this year is not what I would call active...

~~~
kyllo
By that I meant, he has posted on Twitter in the last month, so at least
that's a sign that he's probably still alive...

------
chollida1
Great, now I have to go back and spend 3 hours re-reading all his blog
posts...... wait its steve yegge, make that 30 hours;)

Other good posts on that blog:

\- [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2006/03/math-for-
programmers....](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2006/03/math-for-
programmers.html)

\- [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2009/04/have-you-ever-
legaliz...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2009/04/have-you-ever-legalized-
marijuana.html)

\- [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2008/06/done-and-gets-
things-...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2008/06/done-and-gets-things-
smart.html)

\- [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2008/05/dynamic-languages-
str...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2008/05/dynamic-languages-strike-
back.html)

\- [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2008/03/get-that-job-at-
googl...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2008/03/get-that-job-at-google.html)

\- [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2008/01/emergency-elisp.html](http://steve-
yegge.blogspot.ca/2008/01/emergency-elisp.html)

The abstract, long reads with a good message:

\- [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2007/06/rich-programmer-
food....](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2007/06/rich-programmer-food.html)

\- [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2007/06/that-old-
marshmallow-...](http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2007/06/that-old-marshmallow-
maze-spell.html)

\- [http://steve-yegge.blogspot.ca/2006/12/parabola.html](http://steve-
yegge.blogspot.ca/2006/12/parabola.html)

------
zos
I miss Steve Yegge! Please come back!

~~~
swah
Me too - I wish I could read his internal rants at Google. I can't find
something to replace the kind of blogging he did.

And I think I'm not alone in this: [http://blog.fogus.me/2011/03/27/the-long-
lost-art-of-thought...](http://blog.fogus.me/2011/03/27/the-long-lost-art-of-
thoughtfulness-in-blogging/)

------
bloke_zero
I'm still laughing over: 'The number zero is simply lambda(), and 1 is
lambda(lambda()), 2 is lambda(lambda(lambda())), and so on. Every single Thing
in this legendary region, be it noun, verb or otherwise, is constructed from
the primal verb "lambda".'

~~~
probably_wrong
Yeah, well, I wasn't precisely laughing when I saw it on my Formal Languages
and Computability course...

Check Church numerals:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_encoding)

~~~
bloke_zero
The reason I was laughing was because I could imagine it happening - know I
know it's true I'm not sure how I feel about it.

~~~
jerf
It's a mathematical formalism for minimizing the number of distinct entities
in minimalistic theories of numbers, and providing definitions of "number"
that are as well-defined as possible, which turns out to be harder than it
appears at first blush. In practice, it isn't generally directly used, except
in places where proper facilities for using integers haven't yet been created
(C++ templates at a certain point, some older Haskell type code before ints
become promotable to the type level, etc). (And just to be clear, I'm not
saying they've never been used in real code, but that it's a serious code
smell to _need_ to use them in real code. They get inefficient, fast; given
that they're often showing up in type checking algorithms they can get
inefficient superlinearly in their size.)

~~~
srean
I vaguely remember that church numerals (or was it some other encoding ?) have
been used to minimize conditional jumps in code. If someone is familiar with
how that works, would love to hear.

------
platz
Don't think its this is just limited to java

(Stop writing classes - python)
[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0](http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o9pEzgHorH0)

------
matt__rose
Steve Yegge. Classic.

------
talles
That is one of my favourite articles. Ever.

------
pushplay
> This story... is neither a story for the faint of heart nor for the critical
> of mouth. If you're easily offended, or prone to being a disagreeable knave
> in blog comments, please stop reading now.

That's a neat trick, limiting your blog post to people who won't be critical
of it.

~~~
mikeash
You ignored the most important word in the message when crafting your reply.
Which, amusingly, means you're exactly the target of that message.

~~~
pushplay
I'm honestly not sure which word you're referring to.

~~~
mikeash
"Knave." In other words, he said "if you're just a combative jerk, stay away"
but you managed to read it as "if you disagree, stay away".

~~~
pushplay
Knave doesn't mean combative, it means deceitful (or servant/worker which I
doubt he means here). The most important phrase in my reading is "critical of
mouth."

Also, reading a paragraph wrong doesn't make a person a combative jerk. Nor
does being critical.

~~~
mikeash
No, but going out of your way to be offended certainly qualifies.

