Jump to content

Wikipedia talk:99 Bottles of Beer test

Page contents not supported in other languages.
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Seems flawed

[edit]

This seems like a flawed indicator, being unnecessary and incomplete by not holding to the definitions of respectively 'notability' and 'programming language'. -- Firstly, it seems useless as the existing means of notability could and should be applied. There seems no reason forcing a separate test and it could conflict or confuse with what uniformity of meaning 'notabilty' has or fragment it into disjoint meanings. If a language passes notability by having textbooks, writeups in technical press, presence in online code repositories but does not have a '99 bottles' sample it should be included and if it has none of these but has a '99 bottles' sample it should not, so the '99 bottles' test is of no value in the discussion. -- Second, it seems incomplete or uneven. In the area of programming language, the language as a way to instruct the computer can and has occasionally explored a focus other than text output or do loops, or may have gone for 'Hello World' and 'FizzBuzz' or other coding examples by chance or other reason. So I think some would have many 'bottles' and some would have few or none based on how bottle-ish the language is rather than whether it is a language. For example, less likely to have 'bottles' example shown in text on the topic might include

  • low level language like assembly or machine language coding as below any screen orientation;
  • dialect languages (like Clojure and Jython) where the basic examples are skipped as

covered in root language textbooks;

  • non-text focus languages like mathematical APL, gaming Lua, clouds Hadoop or X-windows

motif extensions that cast such things as to be done by call to external program

  • a new language that has not yet gotten to extensive training examples about 'beer'

I would suggest absence of proof is not proof of absence here. One can take presence on http://www.99-bottles-of-beer.net/ as a third-party RS reason to add a language, but it factually is not a listing stating things as not a language. Markbassett (talk) 17:38, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]