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Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)

michaelnielsen.org

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Re: Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)

#121

Post by weland »

crististm wrote: post #120
weland wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... basically not even wrong. Lisp implementations that run well on, and take advantage of, architectures with caches, branch prediction and complex memory hierarchies are well-known, and have been well-known for, literally, decades. http://pt.withy.org/publications/VLM.html is an example from 1994. More importantly though, even the earlier Lisp machines (at least since 1983!) implemented a form of instruction…

I've been looking for some time for the whole paper but could not find anything but the abstract. Is it anywhere to be found?

I have no idea. I think I read it a long time ago, but I'm sure I was in university back then so it may have been in the library or something.

Re: Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)

#122

Post by 4ad »

4ad wrote: post #18
cousin_it wrote: post #13

I admit that I don't completely understand Lisp's claim to fame. Yes, programs in the language are represented by a built-in data type, and you can write a self-interpreter quite easily. But the same is true for a simple assembly language, if you know the instruction encoding! You can represent a program as a code pointer, and it's easy to write an analog of "eval" by hand, using just a handful of arithmetic instruct…

Sure, assembly is also homoiconic. However, there's more to lisp than homoiconicity.

Wow, downvotes, amazing.

Re: Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)

#123

Post by vinceguidry »

nights192 wrote: post #109
vinceguidry wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pythagoras did not discover the theorem, it's just named after him. He may have been the first to record a proof of it. It's conceivable that the very first peoples to become seriously interested in geometrical calculation would have discovered it as a matter of course. It does meet the definition of timelessness whereas Lisp does not. As Wikipedia notes: "Mesopotamian, Indian and Chinese mathematicians are all known…

... which is irrelevant. The point posed was that the ephemeral form heralds the so-called 'revolutionary' concepts, and stating that a prolonged delivery of the concepts invalidates their usefulness is the result of an overly literal interpretation of a common phrase.

Usefulness? When did I say Lisp wasn't useful?

Re: Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)

#124

Post by hga »

crististm wrote: post #119
hga wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One of the biggest issues is that a FPGA design running at 50-100 MHz (compare to the contemporaneous Cray-1 80MHz), with little memory that can be used as cache, gets blown out of the water by a +3GHz CPU with megabytes of on die cache. In terms of just being a "Lisp Machine", it only makes sense as retro-computing. Even a CADR, 3600 etc. simulator running on a fast x86-64 CPU would be (a lot) faster. See more in my…

Aren't we loosing the focus by looking at the Lisp Machines only from "HW" point of view? They were "ported" on Alpha, and I can run them today on a x86-64 VM. I think we're overwhelmed by nostalgia and this stops us from looking at what's important: software. We are missing the software pieces that made the Lisp Machines. We don't have those and this is more important than not having a CL CPU. I would hate to have a…

Well, we do have a rather early fully legal 1981 copy of the system, and one or more illicit but no one seems to care copies of much later Symbolics systems (don't know if those included source, though). So that in part an issue of software archaeology, when we can also ask most if not all of the people involved about details.

And I fully agree the focus should be on the software, as I hope I made clear in other comments in this topic.

Re: Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)

#125

Post by hga »

Blackthorn wrote: post #113
mjburgess wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The "claim to fame" has more to do with homoiconicity, ie. that the language is its own syntax tree. This allows you to extend the language in arbitrarily complex ways in the language itself - a consequence of this is the simplicity of writing a self-interpreter. Languages involve a lot of apparent mystification, in part because the syntax tree and the semantics of the syntax tree are not the program you are writing.…

Where this argument loses me is that I have yet to see a single Lisp person going around extolling the virtues of Prolog, a language that is also homoiconic and has macros. (If Lisp people want to start doing that though, I'd be happy. Prolog is great.)

A lot of Lispers are interested in logic programming, if not Prolog. It's in SICP, it's the topic of The Reasoned Schemer (www.amazon.com/Reasoned-Schemer-Daniel-P-Friedman/dp/0262562146/), Shen includes a Prolog and you can use its syntax: http://www.shenlanguage.org/learn-shen/prolog.html

So you'll have to modify your statement at minimum to "a single person other than Mark Tarver" ^_^.

Re: Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)

#126

Post by coldtea »

yogthos wrote: post #107
coldtea wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Modern Lisps are substantially different in syntax and semantics from these earliest ideas; we're just still calling them Lisp. An interesting take on "modern", meaning "the last 3 decades or so", which is like millenia in the IT industry...

I'm not sure what you're talking about here. The latest language in Lisp family is Clojure and it came out in 2007. The syntax that it uses is quite a bit different from Lisps from 30 years go.

Clojure is not that different, but besides that, parent implied changes from Lisp circa '60s that were already in CommonLisp and Scheme 30 years ago...

Re: Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)

#127

Post by iak8god »

crististm wrote: post #120
weland wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's... basically not even wrong. Lisp implementations that run well on, and take advantage of, architectures with caches, branch prediction and complex memory hierarchies are well-known, and have been well-known for, literally, decades. http://pt.withy.org/publications/VLM.html is an example from 1994. More importantly though, even the earlier Lisp machines (at least since 1983!) implemented a form of instruction…

I've been looking for some time for the whole paper but could not find anything but the abstract. Is it anywhere to be found?

An extended abstract is basically just a short paper, and not usually the abstract to anything [1]. So that might be everything the authors wrote on the topic. It's reasonable to assume that any full paper by P.T. Withington would be posted on his personal site[2] alongside the abstract.

[1] http://academia.stackexchange.com/a/1352 [2] http://pt.withy.org/

Re: Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)

#128

Post by crististm »

iak8god wrote: post #127
crististm wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've been looking for some time for the whole paper but could not find anything but the abstract. Is it anywhere to be found?

An extended abstract is basically just a short paper, and not usually the abstract to anything [1]. So that might be everything the authors wrote on the topic. It's reasonable to assume that any full paper by P.T. Withington would be posted on his personal site[2] alongside the abstract. [1] http://academia.stackexchange.com/a/1352 [2] http://pt.withy.org/

pt.withy.org does not have the full paper[1] readily available.

[1] The extended abstract itself mentioned " The full paper also discusses other aspects...".

Re: Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)

#129

Post by iak8god »

crististm wrote: post #128
iak8god wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

An extended abstract is basically just a short paper, and not usually the abstract to anything [1]. So that might be everything the authors wrote on the topic. It's reasonable to assume that any full paper by P.T. Withington would be posted on his personal site[2] alongside the abstract. [1] http://academia.stackexchange.com/a/1352 [2] http://pt.withy.org/

pt.withy.org does not have the full paper[1] readily available. [1] The extended abstract itself mentioned " The full paper also discusses other aspects...".

Interesting. Thanks for pointing out that the abstract mentions "the full paper." It is possible though that the paper was never completed / published: note that though this abstract was "Submitted to PLDI '94," it doesn't appear in the proceedings for that event [1]. If the abstract was rejected the authors may have never finished the paper.

[1] http://dblp1.uni-trier.de/db/conf/pldi/pldi94.html

Re: Lisp as the Maxwell Equations of Software (2012)

#130

Post by pjmlp »

wz1000 wrote: post #114
quarterwave wrote: post #15

Any chance of a resurgence in Lisp machines? Especially in view of the changes in CPU architecture due to semiconductor scaling challenges.

I think emacs is as close we are going to get to a Lisp Machine today.

Emacs is a very tiny piece of the whole experience of using a Lisp Machine.
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