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Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time

patrickdomanico.com

21–30 of 32 posts

Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time

#21
I wasn’t familiar with the term “Residential programming,” but it reminds me of the talk “Stop Writing Dead Programs” (https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/)

Increasingly, I think that an agent (and I) would work much better in a malleable, notebook-like, inspectable program, than it would with its current file-based “edit and re-run” primitives.

“Marimo pair” (built into their notebook-like primitive) is an attempt at this. And they have program introspection tools built in.

I also think that Glamorous Toolkit (https://gtoolkit.com/) might be a similar live environment, but I haven’t investigated it too much other than reading about it.

Is anyone else familiar with “modern” attempts at this?

Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time

#22

Rory Sutherland [0] has a great quote: "If you really want to great phenomenal items here is the plan: - enter a market - become a monopoly - use those monopoly profits to fund R&D/building items of incredible quality" A recent example of that is Apple TV. Apple makes so much money that they can fund the creation of incredibly high quality shows with basically minimal advertising. 0 - https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysuth…

> Apple makes so much money that they can fund the creation of incredibly high quality shows with basically minimal advertising. But Apple has not created any high quality shows. Simply throwing money at something does not automatically make it good.

Crazy take. Severance, Silo, Pluribus just off the top of my head. You don’t think they are high quality shows?

Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time

#23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Interlisp manual defines residential programming like this: «The "residential" style, where you stay inside the environment throughout the development, is essential for these tools to operate.» https://interlisp.org/documentation/IRM.pdf#page=17

Does this need anything beyond interactive REPL? If so: what?

An image-based execution model.

In Common Lisp, the compiled code and data are both saved as a memory snapshot, kind of like an OS image (think an ISO you can boot into). This means you can hot-swap the code part, while keeping the data and run-time configuration, on a running system.

A REPL is part of it, but it's not the whole picture.

Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time

#24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple makes so much money that they can fund the creation of incredibly high quality shows with basically minimal advertising. But Apple has not created any high quality shows. Simply throwing money at something does not automatically make it good.

Crazy take. Severance, Silo, Pluribus just off the top of my head. You don’t think they are high quality shows?

No they are not. They are bland and unoriginal.

Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time

#25

I wasn’t familiar with the term “Residential programming,” but it reminds me of the talk “Stop Writing Dead Programs” ( https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/ ) Increasingly, I think that an agent (and I) would work much better in a malleable, notebook-like, inspectable program, than it would with its current file-based “edit and re-run” primitives. “Marimo pair” (built into their notebook-like primitive) is an at…

> Is anyone else familiar with “modern” attempts at this?

Glamorous Toolkit is the main one I have found, yah.

The TruffleSqueak demos are pretty cool: https://github.com/hpi-swa/trufflesqueak

Enso Analytics also runs on GraalVM: https://ensoanalytics.com/

Love the "Stop Writing Dead Programs" talk - and of course "Inventing on Principle" by Bret Victor is required viewing for anyone that hasn't seen it yet. https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII

Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time

#26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Apple makes so much money that they can fund the creation of incredibly high quality shows with basically minimal advertising. But Apple has not created any high quality shows. Simply throwing money at something does not automatically make it good.

Crazy take. Severance, Silo, Pluribus just off the top of my head. You don’t think they are high quality shows?

First two seasons of For All Mankind deserve to be on your list.

Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time

#27
post #2

If you find PARC interesting, and especially if you're interested in symbolic computation, I can highly recommend digging as deep as you can possibly stomach into the FGCS: https://www.airc.aist.go.jp/aitec-icot/ICOT/HomePage.html As a public research initiative, pretty much everything was published when the initiative was completed. PIMs are absolute engineering marvels. The ICOT had command of an army of the absolu…

More Japanese excesses from the '80s: the Tron computing project.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project

Re: Inventing the Future, One Lisp Machine at a Time

#29
post #27
post #2

If you find PARC interesting, and especially if you're interested in symbolic computation, I can highly recommend digging as deep as you can possibly stomach into the FGCS: https://www.airc.aist.go.jp/aitec-icot/ICOT/HomePage.html As a public research initiative, pretty much everything was published when the initiative was completed. PIMs are absolute engineering marvels. The ICOT had command of an army of the absolu…

More Japanese excesses from the '80s: the Tron computing project. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TRON_project

> According to a report from The Wall Street Journal, in 1989 US officials feared that TRON could undercut American dominance in computers, but that in the end PC software and chips based on the TRON technology proved no match for Windows and Intel's processors as a global standard.

“Excess” implies irrationality, but I wonder how could something irrational be a threat to ‘American dominance in computers’?

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