Comments on: Wikimedia Proves Greenspun’s Tenth Law

By: Jared

Jared — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 05:11:18 +0000

My main beef with TeX is that it’s not consistent.

On the other hand, I’m not sure whether Haskell or Scheme are expressive enough to make a comfortable definitional interpreter for a domain-specific language.

My current hope is that Haskell becomes rich enough that every document can have its own XML Schema and I throw together a few short scripts to typeset it.

By: Toby

Toby — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 03:32:34 +0000

I sympathise deeply with Frank. I've strenuously avoided learning new Wiki markups but despite this I realise now that I've had to become moderately competent in FOUR: c2.com (of course), Wikipedia, TWiki (still my favourite) and Trac. Then there are the documentation markups I've been faced with: Doxygen and JavaDoc (inferior to Doxygen). That is not to mention the typesetting markups I've used... from JustText to TeX (the king of them all): As to markup turing completeness, Iâ€™ve wondered if it might not be possible to design from the other direction - start from a programming language, say, Haskell or Scheme, implement combinators for markup that look very wiki-like, add a layer of syntactic sugar I think you end up with TeX; those who forget the lessons of... yadda yadda.

By: The Irvken Experience » Things I’ve noticed

The Irvken Experience » Things I’ve noticed — Sat, 02 Dec 2006 19:31:31 +0000

[...] …. and in the style I nicked off NTK. Programming languages evolving out of markup extension another small step to emergent AI? More crap from Mexico Jamies Newtonmas present (if I had the money ). More time lapse fun. The economics of poverty seems currently fashionable, interesting new book follow up to Freakanomics, by the guy who contributed the “Economics of the Crack gang” research in that book. [...]

By: Manuel Simoni

Manuel Simoni — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 13:32:24 +0000

Please, this can only be the Weak interpretation of Greenspun’s Tenth.

I’m quite sure that Greenspun actually had a lot of Common Lisp’s advanced features like macros, reader macros, CLOS, etc in mind when he defined his rule.

By: darkness

darkness — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:48:31 +0000

For simple things, a wiki markup is typically much faster: typing foo for the twentieth time gets to be hard on the fingers, compared to (in Markdown syntax) **foo**. Also, I find reading well-designed wiki markups easier than reading HTML (see above example).

Now, as one reader commented, when you get down to doing more complex formatting tasks, a wiki should really let you revert back to HTML.

By: Julian Morrison

Julian Morrison — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 19:46:18 +0000

There’s two main reasons for wiki text when you leave aside the spurious “easier”. One, HTML has no visual resemblance to its result. Wiki text always aims to get this resemblance. Two, HTML lets you waste time and play silly buggers choosing your own look-and-feel where wiki text almost forces you to play by the site’s layout rules. Without it, Wikipedia would look like MySpace.

As to markup turing completeness, I’ve wondered if it might not be possible to design from the other direction – start from a programming language, say, Haskell or Scheme, implement combinators for markup that look very wiki-like, add a layer of syntactic sugar (treat barewords as strings, etc). It wouldn’t just be Turing complete, it would be a powerful programming language. Layout combinators could replace templates, for example.

By: Labnotes » Rounded Corners - 46

Labnotes » Rounded Corners - 46 — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 18:53:02 +0000

[...] Wikimedia Proves Greenspunâ€™s Tenth Law. How long before it proves Zawinski’s Law? [...]

By: Ashibaka

Ashibaka — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 15:39:08 +0000

Wikipedia actually does let you use HTML for most things.

By: MentalPolyphonics :: Milestone

MentalPolyphonics :: Milestone — Fri, 08 Sep 2006 17:59:43 +0000

[...] Remember that time Jared got on BoingBoing? [...]

By: dd

dd — Tue, 15 Aug 2006 18:24:42 +0000

This entry led me to hypothesize that small system as wikipedia and del.icio.us emarging language had becoming Turing complete thus become full-tarm language. and then eventually to be sufficient to be called functional language. Hence, Wikimedia and del.icio.us proves the Strong interpretation of Greenspunâ€™s Tenth Rule: any sufficiently advanced system will contain a functional (programming) language.

http://eirepreneur.blogs.com/eirepreneur/2006/03/how_social_book.html

It seems that intelligence, natural or artificial, is an emergent property of collective communication. Human con-sciousness itself may be an epiphenomenon of extraordinary processing power.