It is a shame that there aren't more worthwhile uses for violence.

[Bear]

Today Bear is a happy bear, for he is bone-tired from the use of therapeutic and cathartic violence.

I was given permission - nay, a mandate - by my beloved wife to remove an old, rusty, decripit metal shed, which has been a longstanding eyesore, from our property.  This I proceeded to do, using a pickaxe, a sledgehammer, a mattock, and a grinder.  It now lies in a tangled heap, its supporting frame members ground off smooth and level with the concrete pad into which they were set.  Tomorrow I call the junk haulers and we will be rid of it.

There were other tools that could have made the job easier.  But they wouldn't have been as satisfying, because they lack the essential element of physical violence.  It is so important, after all, not just to get things done, but to get them done in ways one can enjoy doing.

As I survey the wreckage outside my study window, I feel the delicious aches and pains in my muscles, and feel great satisfaction, but also a pang of regret that there seem to be so few mainstream, socially acceptable outlets for satisfying physical violence.

Perhaps it is this same regret that inspires folk to develop these games - but merely considering violence, in the structured context of a game, isn't nearly as satisfying as actually hefting the BFH with one's own muscles and swinging it and witnessing firsthand the destruction thereby wrought.

Bear

[Krice]

Well I guess some people are violent deep inside. Weren't you swedish? Your anger might have something to do with 6-1.

6-1.

[Bear]

Nope.  I wasn't Swedish.  I'm Russo-Germanic by extraction, American by birth.

I just find that there is a kind of zen spirituality in this kind of action - aiming blows, flexing muscles, feeling the impact.  It's not (or doesn't seem to be) an anger thing; just a sheer physical joy, the same kind of rush I get from ocean swimming in rough water.

Bear

[Krice]

Nope.  I wasn't Swedish.

Someone was. 6-1.

[Skeletor]

I agree with you Bear, nowaday there are only surrogates of violence like
- sports
- stock market
- driving
- movies
- videogames (and ROGUELIKES of course!)

[Mvblvb]

1. Find axe.
2. Wield it.
3. Find wood.
4. Chop it.

Fun and relaxing, but dont try dual wielding axes.

[Darren Grey]

Heavy duty gardening is also fun.

[Krice]

Heavy duty gardening is also fun.

The most fun. It's hard to keep garden in good condition. Always something to do.

[Hi]

I've always enjoyed taking things apart without breaking any part of them and then taking the neatly sorted piles to the dump.

But I know what you mean, when I was 3 years old I saw my dad pound in some posts with a sledge hammer and for days afterward I dragged it around after me hoping that I could lift it to pound something.

By the way Bear, I read John Shutt's papers on Kernel and I wondered what your thoughts on fexprs are.

[Bear]

By the way Bear, I read John Shutt's papers on Kernel and I wondered what your thoughts on fexprs are.

(1) fexprs are particularly bad when mixed with dynamic scope and lack of name hygiene.  Because early Lisps
     had dynamic scope and lacked name hygiene, people concluded that fexprs were a bad idea.  This conclusion
     needs to be revisited, because.... 
(2) With lexical scope (which mainstream Lisps today have) and name hygiene (which at least one mainstream
     Lisp has today), they are a better means of syntactic abstraction than macros.
(3) Yes, even Lisp macros (!!)
(4) They make 'quote' as we have known it unnecessary (!!), and make the semantics of 'quasiquote' actively buggy.
(5) They do kinda screw compilation or optimization when implemented in a straightforward way.
(6) Shutt's language 'Kernel' retains an unnecessary separation of syntax abstraction from function definition, probably
     in order to offset the compilation or optimization penalties. So, although more versatile than existing Lisps(!!) it
     isn't as clean as I think it could be.
(7) IMO it is better to allow (and enforce) immutable definitions, and do the work of using immutability as an
    optimization constraint - this would permit the vast majority of fexprs to be compiled/optimized as though they
    were macros, saving the optimization costs of dynamic fexprs for the rare cases that need it.
( That said, Shutt is doing it right and Kernel is in fact, semantically, a better Lisp than either Scheme or
     Common Lisp.
(9) Unfortunately it's still a 'toy language', and in order to become practically a better Lisp than Scheme or
     CL, somebody will have to do a hell of a lot of work building libraries and interfaces and optimizing it for
     performance.
(10) Shutt is a researcher whose interest is in semantics, not a vendor whose interest is in practical uptake, so I sort of
     doubt that Shutt will do the development grunt-work of building those interfaces and libraries and doing that
     optimization.