A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009) | Hacker News Reader

A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Programming Languages (2009)

james-iry.blogspot.com

110 pointsmkr-hn31 comments

This was posted several times recently without anyone noting that it was the origin of "A monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors, what's the problem?", which often seems to be quoted as if it wasn't attributed to Wadler satirically.

Without the 'what's the problem', It's in 'categories for the working mathematician' by Saunders Mac Lane. Of course, it's entirely seriously in that book.

And a perfectly fine turn of phrase in that context, too.

And burritos are just tacoids in the category of enchiladafunctors.

https://twitter.com/rickasaurus/status/705134684427128833

For anyone looking for an explanation, this StackOverflow question [1] is worth a read.

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3870088/a-monad-is-just-...

The funny part is that it's completely true, albeit not very useful if one doesn't know how monoid constructions work categorically (good explanation at [0]).

Algebra: Chapter 0 has a similar overly technical definition for groups (which they elaborate of course). Also see[1]

  Joke 1.1. Definition: A group is a groupoid with a single object.

[0] https://old.reddit.com/r/math/comments/ap25mr/a_monad_is_a_m...

[1] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/e3/b6/23/e3b62382a9eb1021ff30...

It means monad is a thing that sequentially combines computations on the same type. Of course there is more to it but i believe this definition is useful as a starting point

I don't think anyone doubts the technical fact, or it wouldn't be a decent joke. The problem is if people think Wadler (might have) said it as such, and that it reflects a community attitude. It's trotted out often enough in a disparaging way. As far as I remember, Milewski left it to the end as something he just felt obliged to show.

Shame the history ends in 1965.

What you mean? It extends til 2003

I'm pretty sure that's a GOTO joke.

Way funnier than I expected. Only defect is failure to mention APL.

I haven’t read this for a while. I personally find it very funny, so thanks for posting it.

What is the Grace Hopper/Ruby quip referencing?

I believe the ruby side of that is a 2009 talk given by Matt Aimonetti that contained an image of a scantily clad woman's rear end with the text: "CouchDB: Perform Like A Pr0n Star."

https://martinfowler.com/bliki/SmutOnRails.html

>...there was a Ruby conference in San Francisco called GoGaRuCo (Golden Gate Ruby Conference). This conference has grabbed attention due to a talk at which the presenter illustrated a discussion of CouchDB by using sexually suggestive pictures of women

There's a lot of rules on comedy this breaks. It could be much better with half of it removed

I kinda miss these amateur non-meme not very funny joke essays on programming. Think Murphy's law kind of joke lists.

Has the genre died to memes or does Google search just not present them anymore?

probably the latter. It's the same low effort style. Here's the most succinct crash course in comedy I know of https://misterandyriley.com/2016/10/31/how-to-talk-comedy-wr...

In this article the biggest sin is this one:

"Bananas on Bananas – similar to Jazz Trumpetry. Trying to top a punchline with another punchline right after it, and another, and another. Sometimes this might be great – but when it’s not, and the result is just tiring to watch/read/listen to, then you’ve got Bananas on Bananas. [via James Bachman and Simon Blackwell]" and its relative: "Hat On A Hat – this is in very common use in the USA, and has a similar yet subtly different meaning to ‘Two Sock.’ A Hat On A Hat is an occasion where two funny things are happening at the same moment in the script, or immediately adjacent moments, and those two comic ideas are each distracting from the other. The solution is normally simple: remove one of them."

People like to think that comedy is a matter of opinion. That's totally false - it's the originator of audience testing and a/b testing.

Starting in vaudeville performers would carefully study slight modifications to their routine and the audience reaction to them. Every comedian with a repeatable act learns what works and what doesn't. They cut/add/tweak/rearrange.

You can clearly see this in early versus later work of your favorite standup. The maturation of everyone's routine follow the same general comedy rules of what stays and goes. It's a describable teachable learnable repeatable skill. It's the reason that lots of successful comedians come out of the groundlings and ucb.

It's not a matter of opinion, there's decades of quantified research on this stuff. The OP article if it just followed basic comedy rules and structure would become immensely better.

Blog posts != standup.

There may be structure to comedy, but that does not mean that there are dogmatic rules that apply to all mediums and all audiences. Expecting anyone to study and follow the techniques that have been developed for a successful standup routine, and then use them when writing up a blog post is somewhat absurd.

It's not just for standup. It's also true for sitcoms, same rules.

Live performances are the ones where measurable data exists.

People do room reads for written content to test it. It's not all arbitrary

You know how if you have to explain the joke it's not funny? If you have to explain why it's not funny ...

"It's not a matter of opinion" really? Says the joke crime commission? Oh wait, there isn't one, because humour is always a matter of opinion.

And so is taste in food, fashion, photography, interior design, music, writing.

Some things are generally agreed on though. Food shouldn't be poisonous, interior design shouldn't block doorways, music shouldn't damage hearing, comedy shouldn't make people run to the car to get their gun. There's rules for everything.

If the perceived problem is stacking too many gags on each other, how would that help? The joke density would be unchanged.

Because weaker jokes follow better ones.

Comedy is not cumulative, it's a function of minimums

The weakest joke is the weight that brings things down. Remove it

Narrow the theme, focus on the flow

How many times have you read something and there was a bad joke sandwiched between good ones and you remember that?

It's better without it. The comedy performs better in all metrics.

Think Rodney Dangerfield's rapid tight style. He was a master of this. The theme bounds the humor but the jokes are tight executions

He didn't always do that. Took him years to "discover it". Here's a 15 year difference

1968 - https://youtu.be/PiNDirvqSUY

1983 - https://youtu.be/cQLv7CG10B4

His style changes follows the rules I linked to in the other reply. Listen to the laugh density and duration of the two. It's really dramatically different.

Another comparison, same process, Emo Phillips

1983 - https://youtu.be/lRp_r-EHmfs

2010 - https://youtu.be/xywEDvBTzM0

Joan Rivers had a large library of her performances that she studied all the time trying to improve the technique in the same way.

I don't really get what your main criticism is. In your other comment, you said the biggest sin committed was that of stacking punchlines on punchlines (which is a problem of flow, not joke quality), but now you're saying that some of the jokes are too bad and should have been cut?

More importantly, though, the standards of live comedy can't be directly applied to something that's intended for reading. Live comedy concerns itself a lot with timing your delivery to the (vocal) audience response. I agree that the linked material would need rework before it could be used as a stand-up routine, but that's not the goal.

For what it's worth, I think the blog post is funny. Most of the jokes are funny. Some jokes are less funny, but aren't dwelled on, and by the end of the page I've forgotten the bad ones.

This is clearly not the place to talk about this.

I'm being fought by people who want to claim there is no study of comedy or that it's an invalid pursuit.

Arguing the baseline tenants of whether the discipline even exists.

I'm sorry but no thanks.

Of course the study is valid. I've done stage comedy too, and I agree with everything in the Andy Riley link you posted. But different rules apply for spoken versus read material.

He's a software developer, not a professional comedian.

I found it funny. Am I just wrong somehow?

Am I wrong to like Vaughan Williams' music even though there are parallel fifths all over the place?

No. Not at all. You can enjoy a story where chekhov's gun doesn't fire.

I didn't mean for this thing to be a big discussion

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