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It will never cease to amaze me that he is the creator of Chomsky heirarchy of Grammars that I learned in university, and I can go to youtube to find him talkin
by mon22 2y ago
It will never cease to amaze me that he is the creator of Chomsky heirarchy of Grammars that I learned in university, and I can go to youtube to find him talking about how each American president would be guilty of violating the Geneva Convention.
- rectang 2y agoThe contribution of the Chomsky hierarchy to computer science is highly significant. It had a big personal impact when I was learning about compilers and parsing. Any remembrance is going to keep getting flagged off of HN because of his other activities, though.
- mjn 2y agoI think the flags have more been because of the poor sourcing of the actual death. It seems various people and groups heard that he died and are posting their obituaries and remembrances, but there's no real factual confirmation or details (e.g. one thing that was briefly on the front page here [1] was a link to an unsourced, now-deleted tweet from Momentum UK). [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40721271 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40721271
- nottrobin 2y agoWhich activities did you have in mind?
- feraloink 2y agoEndorsing Pol Pot and Khmer Rouge for one
- philsnow 2y agoI learned only much later, years after earning a B.A. in linguistics, that Chomsky was much more renowned for being a political pundit and philosopher than he was for conceiving of X-bar theory and so forth. I had thought at first that it was just a coincidence that this fellow talking about politics had the same name as the famous linguist.. but it's not that common a name.