SOWA@IBM.COM (John Sowa) (05/03/88)
I agree with the following comment by Thomas Maddox: > ...anyone in such an inherently weak field > should be rather careful in his criticism: he's in the position of a > man throwing bricks at passers-by through his own front window. But I wish he would apply that remark to himself. Just scan through back issues of AI List to see the controversies, polemics, fads, and fallacies. The arguments between connectionists and representationalists convey just as much heat and as little light as any argument between Marxists and Freudians. The dialog between LISPers and Prologers is no more meaningful than the dialog between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland. My position: Every field has good people, dummies, charlatans, and religious fanatics. AI certainly has its share of all four types (and sometimes the same person shifts position from one type to another). The sociologist who was bashing AI was wrong, and so are the AI people who bash the social scientists. The human mind is the most difficult subject of all, and we'll all learn more by approaching each other's disciplines with a little sympathy than with a lot of loud polemics. John Sowa
ok@quintus.UUCP (Richard A. O'Keefe) (05/06/88)
In article <050388.124141.sowa@ibm.com>, SOWA@IBM.COM (John Sowa) writes: > The dialog between LISPers and Prologers is no > more meaningful than the dialog between Catholics and Protestants in > Northern Ireland. > John Sowa Er, just what dialogue between LISPers and Prologers are you talking about? Here at Quintus (makers of the finest Prolog system in the known Universe) our attitude to Lisp is "what good ideas can we steal". I refer to my copy of CLtL about once a day. ZYX like Lisp so much they've even imitated its syntax. Sussex (makers of PopLog) think the great thing about their product is _very_ close coupling between Lisp, Prolog, and Pop. I suspect that someone who argues for (Lisp|Prolog) on the grounds that (Prolog|Lisp) is bad doesn't understand either.