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by pron 450 days ago
> These fine-grained attempts at parsing the words to mean things other than how they are commonly used doesn't serve any purpose.

Except we're talking about a talk title. Lamport explains what he means in the talk. What I responded to was a comment on the content based entirely on the title.

> It's trivial and it doesn't matter, and specifically using language to highlight that difference is pointless.

Sure, and that is precisely Lamport's point. You really need to watch the talk. He shows how abstract algorithms cannot be fully described in any language that is intended to be executed by a computer.

> Similarly, it's annoying and pointless to pedantically argue that "well actually that's not programming, that's coding".

And Lamport is not doing that. You're arguing over a pithy title to a rather deep talk.