This seems to be the Haskell equivalent

Nick Sabalausky a at a.a
Tue Dec 22 02:38:04 PST 2009


"Walter Bright" <newshound1 at digitalmars.com> wrote in message 
news:hgphli$juf$1 at digitalmars.com...
> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>> That definition is what was discussed in this thread and alleged to be 
>> anything but beautiful.
>
> I've been in museums in europe where they proudly display ornate swords 
> and armor as "beautiful". I always kinda thought otherwise, because all 
> that decoration and encrustation was not what the weapon was for. More 
> interesting were the weapons with a single minded deadliness to them. I 
> suppose it's the engineer in me <g>.

My take on that:

"Beauty" usually refers to something being appealing to the senses, 
particularly sight. With something like code, though (as opposed to a 
physical object) it makes a little bit more sense than it normally would to 
use the term "beauty" metaphorically (ex: "functional qsort is/isn't 
beautiful"), because applying the traditional concept of "beauty" to code 
would amount to little more than an assessment of the formatting (font, 
spacing, etc.) and would not carry much, if any, relation to the actual 
content of the code. That content, of course, being the very thing that 
makes code code in the first place.

I suppose a similar thing could be argued for swords (because one could 
define "sword" in terms of its intended function, just like "code"), but I 
think the argument there would be weaker because it's much easier to define 
something like "sword" in terms of its structure (shape, material, etc) than 
to define "code" in terms of its structure (one would probably have to start 
with a definition of certain glyphs and then find a structurally-oriented 
way to distinguish sequences of glyphs that do or don't qualify as "code").

So the criteria you're using to determine suitability of the label 
"beautiful sword/armor" is something I'd prefer to attach to a label more 
along the lines of "good sword/armor" or "well-designed/engineered 
sword/armor" (which, of course, IMO, is every bit as worthy of admiration as 
a pretty-looking one).






More information about the Digitalmars-d mailing list