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Re: Pork addicts are pathetic losers

I have "taken" money from the government for over 20 years, mostly
through competitive grants from the National Science Foundation.
I have also referreed many proposals to that agency.  The people
at NSF are sincere and intelligent, with a few exceptions, and care
about science and scientific research.  We have worked hard to channel
money to productive people with important/interesting ideas.  

For the last 15 years, most of my research, on diagram understanding
and natural language processing for scientific corpora, has used lisp
as its basic tool.  It is an excellent language for such purposes as
I don't have to tell anyone in these groups.

Yes, the Code Warrior environment for C++ that I use for my teaching
is slicker than MCL's.  But this does not in any way dampen my
overwhelming vote for Lisp for my work.  For "real" applications I may
want massive version control and code migration systems and the
ability to strip applications down to minimal size (like MS Word 6 and
7, right?).

But a lot of us don't do "real" applications.  We develop and test
new ideas that might or might not pan out and that would be virtually
impossible to explore in a commercial environment, where "pure" research
labs seem to have vanished, if they ever really existed.  

Steve, who started this thread/flame spent many years at an
institution, MIT, that has been supported for decades by huge federal
grants and contracts, many of them from the defense department.  As a
matter of personal choice, I have never (if my memory serves me right)
taken research funds from DoD or Arpa, just NSF, DOE, and NIH.  I
could have omitted this last statement to avoid the appearance of
self-righteousness, but I think it had to be said -- the government
has many sides, and sometimes you can choose.

To my mind, a computer language can hardly be sullied by the associations
of its users or the identity of its supporters.  A computer language
has a certain character and existence that transcends this, just as
English or other languages are not sullied by the utterances of killers
or elevated by proclamations of the Pope.

To go to the extreme, I might even use something like Lisp for my work
even if it wasn't implemented to run on a computer.

If marketing is to be the measure of success, then every major
university should start a Department of Astrology to reflect the
importance of that field in the modern world.

I was born and raised in the District of Columbia and have great empathy
for the horrid way it's been treated over the years, neglecting education
and facilities for its citizens.  Without education or hope, people have
become desparate and crime is ascendent.  I don't care what computer
language they teach in schools.  I'd just like them to fix the plumbing,
buy books, educate and pay their teachers, etc.  If this committee,
and some money and Al Gore, or whomever can help that poor city, more
power to them.

   Bob Futrelle
_______________________________________________________________
Prof. Robert P. Futrelle  |  Biological Knowledge Laboratory
                          |  College of Computer Science  161CN
Office: (617)-373-2076    |  Northeastern University
Fax:    (617)-373-5121    |  360 Huntington Ave.
futrelle@ccs.neu.edu      |  Boston, MA 02115
__________________________|____________________________________
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