Re: Latin, Shakespeare, and other irrelevant topics

[Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com>]

I'll quickly reply here, but since the number of objectors to this thread
is rising I suggest that my interlocutors continue by e-mail. Thanks to 
Robert's cunning mind though, we manage to drift back to Ada (the
programming language Ada that is ;-) by the end of the mail. 

On Mon, 29 Jan 2001, Robert Dewar wrote:
> In article
>   Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote:
> > Are you a country and western music fan?
> 
> Yes, so snip the "if not"
> 
> > If you do like that loathsome stuff
> 
> Boy, we certainly have some strong negative feelings on things
> don't we? :-)

It's a joke. Obviously many people like C&W, and that's OK with me. 
The difference is that I wasn't forced to listen to a long stream of 
C&W in high school, with some pompous blowhard (or snaggletoothed 
trailer-park redneck :) extolling its virtues to me, as was the case 
with Shakespeare. I did take one of those general "music appreciation" 
classes and sure enough there are musical forms I don't like.  

> > please  find something you don't like and try the same
> > thought experiment.
> 
> Actually I can't really think of a parellel -- something that
> is very widely acknowledged to be a worth while art form that
> I don't like ... hard to do -- and certainly not with the
> vehemence that you trot out :-)

You should realize that what seems like vehemence to you may simply 
be playfulness to me. 

> > Possibly, but it seems you're back to making sweeping
> > statements again, which is unfortunate.
> 
> Well I think they are statements with which many would agree.

Argumentum ad populum. 

> > I suppose if I am shallow, then you shouldn't
> > even bother continuing.
> 
> Please read posts carefully, no one said you were shallow ...

There is no need to get legalistic, the insinuation was clear. If you want
to get legalistic, I didn't say you said I was shallow, read the quoted 
statement again. 

> > Now consider your beloved Bard
> 
> Sorry, he is not my "beloved Bard", please don't assume that
> the rest of the world reacts with the vehemence you do in
> either direction.

I wouldn't be vehement if I hadn't been forced to study, read, and perform 
a fair amount of that stuff. One representative work from the author would 
have been enough. 

> > I haven't owned a TV
> > for a year and a half, and am not likely to get one either,
> > so I don't imagine I'll ever see it.
> 
> and that's even more of a shame, oh well ..

That I don't own a TV? Best move I've made in recent memory, I'd advise 
everyone to try it. :-)

> In article <952hmb$niq$1@nnrp1.deja.com>,
>   Robert Dewar <robert_dewar@my-deja.com> wrote:
> > In article
> >
> <Pine.BSF.4.21.0101271915410.28283-100000@shell5.ba.best.com>,
> >   Brian Rogoff <bpr@shell5.ba.best.com> wrote:
> >
> > > The Shakespeare worship
> 
> I have a question, and it even has a (slender) relevance to
> Ada. Have you ever seen a Shakespeare play done by a really
> good company? 

I don't know, since you haven't defined "a really good company". I do
remember seeing (on TV) a performance of Hamlet with Derek Jacobi as 
Hamlet, if that means anything to you. 

> Perhaps not ... if not, then perhaps you are
> making the same error that some people make when it comes
> to Ada, dismissing it without really knowing much about it.

How much does one need to study Ada before deciding that it isn't for
them? The analogy you're making is difficult, but let's go with it. 
In the case of Ada, I parroted the commonly held beliefs about Ada 
(incidentally, held by *many* well known computer scientists at prominent
universities like MIT and Stanford) until I actually used Ada for some 
smallish tasks and found I liked it much better than C, C++, or Java, or 
really, that I was able to accomplish tasks faster and more reliably
using Ada than these other languages (which I knew far better BTW). 

So my current opinion of Ada is from usage, and entirely on tasks
that would be considered small or medium-small. I didn't read the entire 
RM and Rationale and design documents before I decided that I liked 
Ada, and had a good idea of what kind of language it is. That seems to be
what you'd have me do before I accepting my opinion on Shakespeare as
acceptable.

(BTW, good segue back to Ada ;-)

> Going back to your question, about how I would react to an
> art form I dislike, I can think of one, which is Heavy Metal
> Rock (I don't dislike all Rock), but that means I don't listen
> to it, which means I know nothing about it,

Actually, you know you don't like it, which *is* something. Heavy metal 
doesn't appeal to you as a listener. Thank goodness, for a minute I
thought you were going to tell me you like everything, even the sound of
fingernails on a chalkboard, or white noise. (FWIW, I actually like 
heavy metal, and Baroque music, and jazz... :)

> which means that I would not give any judgment on its worth.

I suspect that if your music teachers in school had focused a large
fraction of their time on heavy metal, you might like it even less, and 
be willing to comment a bit more harshly :-)

> When it comes to programming languages, it is amazing how
> many people dismiss programming languages they know absolutely
> nothing about. How many people do you know who in some sense
> are experts in the PL field who don't know COBOL or VB, but
> are quite sure that both these languages are junk.

How about Ada? I could name names, but I've heard profound mistatements 
about our beloved Ada (it's a joke!) from professors who should know
better. 

> Back to Shakespeare. It is one thing to say: "I really don't
> appreciate Shakespeare, or understand what people see in him",

Fair enough. I really don't appreciate Shakespeare, or understand what
people see in him, and I resent having my time squandered studying his
works to the exclusion of other potentially interesting works. That is 
how we got here from Latin, since some people consider that many hours
spent on the study of Latin is suboptimal, seeing as time is limited and 
a language like Spanish or French (with a large living population of
native speakers) is arguably more worthy of study. 

> Back to Programming Languages. It is one thing to say "I don't
> really know language XXX, so I can't really make a judgment on
> what it is good for", and quite another to say "language XXX
> is a piece of junk" [without really knowing language XXX].

I've also heard people who knew less Shakespeare than I did tell me how 
great Shakespeare is, and how wrong I am to hold my opinion, just like
I've heard people who know less about C++ or Ada than I do tell me that 
C++ is better than Ada! I have no doubt that someone can like C++ better 
than Ada (for example, I like automatic instantiation of template
functions and wish Ada had a similar feature :) and that I can find 
something I like about Shakespeare (or country and western) but at 
some point you just have to be able to accept that intelligent people can 
disagree on some topics (well, not on Ada vs C++, that's where your 
analogy breaks down :-)

-- Brian