>>9True story: The Sussman sat on his wizard throne, still donning his standard wizard hat and robe, which was still dripping from the shower in which he put them on. As he stroked his neckbeard he pondered the things which the Satori ponder. Beneath his feet lay the broken fragments of the python, the foul demon summoned by the Sussman’s nemesis and anticudder Abelson, then slain by the worthy and brave Haskell nomads.
The nomads were not there on this dark day, however. There had been a rumors of Guido in the forests of the north, who was suspected to be developing a new, even more woesome and fail snake to do battle with the almighty Satori. They had pursued the Guido over 9000 times in the past, only to turn up nothing in each adventure. That fucking Guido was sneaky like a fucking snake.
The Sussman stroked his wizard beard as he hummed the tune to SICP… today would be a well-balanced parenthesis.
Cons turned to Cudder, “Report?” Cudder was dressed in the standard garb of the Haskell nomads - relatively light armor gilded with the holy symbols of Haskell. The Nomads didn’t need much armor - they traveled fast and they traveled hard, almost as hard as the Sussman rides your sister’s ass every night when you’re alone in your room whacking off to the sacred tomes. And they were armed to the teeth. They provided a deterministic and constant effect to the battle, such that their arrival could almost be curried to optimize the battle’s execution speed and bring it to a quick close.
“Nothing sir, the eastern quadrant appears to be empty. Not a thing could be found.”
Cons, without even having to ponder this responded, “Excellent. check the other three quadrants; if anything is found recursively subdivide and search until we’ve harrowed the location down to a single square inch.”
“Yessir!”
Discipline was tight in the Haskell nomads. If a given expression did not behave deterministically he had to be wrapped up in the shroud of the monad and returned to the homelands after a ritualistic suicide - they couldn’t afford to have monads in their tight-knit battle group. It just wasn’t acceptable.
They had had to perform a ceremony just the previous week. One of their dear comrades, Reed, had begun to perform differently from usual. A cursory inspection revealed that he had was indeed infected with the deadly disease and dispatched accordingly. Cons stoked his neckbeard. Reed was gone, celebrating the afterlife with the Lambda of Plenty.
His thoughts were interrupted suddenly by a bang!
**“THE CAMLS!”**, someone shouted.
“Damn,” Cons thought, “those fucking Camls and their fucking imperative features polluting the noble concept of functionality.” The Caml may have once been a noble race, but no one remembered such a time. Their syntactical swords were riddled with a chaotic mix of operators, a cacophony with few peers (Perl is among them).
Cons drew his two beautifully forged parenthesizes from their sheathes, the air filling with a glorious ring. Normally a weapon not wielded by the nomads, he had been gifted the pair by the Sussman himself and learned to use them well.
An Ocaml warrior suddenly jumped out and threw a malformed interrobang in an attempt to corrupt Con’s deterministic purity by destructively assigning his state with referential transparency (a black magic considered one of the darker evils from the depths of hell). Cons took up his parenthesis and swiped at the Caml with a quickly-crafted lambda function, but the Caml inferred the type of attack and was successfully able to evade any side effects. He didn’t notice, however, that Cons’ intention was not to slay him with the lambda but rather to incorporate the lambda into a foldl incantation to collapse the Ocaml’s state into a single return value. The Ocaml let out a scream as the tail-recursive function produced a single value from his state without any side-effects: -3.
Quite a weak Ocaml, Cons thought to himself. He glanced around at his comrades; for the most part they handled themselves well. The attack, though sudden was fairly small, most of the remaining Ocamls not dead were either dying or attempting to exit the current execution context. His subordinates hadn’t taken much damage though, one had been expanded into an array and then operated on in-place. Cons shook his head; it was a terrible torturous way to die, but honorable nonetheless.
Back at MIT, the Sussman was eating a tuna fish sandwich, something reserved for the aristocracy. The catchphrase on the can read, “You cannot tune a filesystem, but you can eat a tunafish sandwich!” It wasn’t very well-received, of course, but it was well-enough known at this point to remain.
The Sussman munched on the delicious, moist tuna thoughtfully when all of a sudden he sensed behind hi a list comprehension. THE ABELSON! The Sussman leaped out of his seat, his wizard hat almost flying off his head (it was kept on by a quick (def (f x y) (f y x))).
And just in time - the Abelson’s blow, intended to truncate the Sussman’s tuna-filled spleen his the wooden wizard chair, which shattered into a thousand pieces.
“Well, well Sussman, I see you’ve maintained some of your skills from 6.001. You may have dodged that expression, but how long do you think you can hold out against my Python3000?”
“THREE THOUSAND?!” the Sussman shouted in response, cackling. “You never understood, __Hal__; you couldn’t defeat me with PythonOver9000.”
“What are you talking about Gerry. I’ve seen your powe–” he stopped, mouth agape as the sudden realization dawned over him. “NO, IT CANNOT BE!”
“YES. YOUR SUSPICIONS ARE CORRECT, HAL. I’VE BEEN SUPPRESSING MY POWER LEVEL.”
“HOW IS THAT POSSIBLE??!” Hal shouted. In desperation, the Abelson hurled a fury of list comprehensions, dictionaries and exceptions at the Sussman, but Gerry easily knocked aside the feeble incantations.
“You never understood, Hal,” he chastised as he prepared his final attack, “it was always as simple as EVAL-APPLY!!!!!!!” he shouted as he unleashed the ultimate spell at the Abelson.
The world froze.
Few people have ever seen a spell of such power; few people could even wield it and even fewer were willing to use it. In this terrible, suspenseful moment, the world froze. Completely. This isn’t just a literary artifact, something had segfaulted.
Sepples took a look at the screen. “Motherfucker!” he swore. Somebody had been running a fucking Ruby interpreter, which has exhausted not only the machine’s physical memory, but also used up all the allocated swap space. He’d have to reboot the system from the last savestate and re-run the computation another day.
Shit.