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John McCarthy Has Died

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Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#211

Post by scott_s »

bad_user wrote: post #207
scott_s wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it's worth noting that git did not replace tarballs and patches. Git replaced Bitkeeper. Bitkeeper, as far as I know, replaced tarballs and patches. And as far as I know, git did not start as a bunch of scripts for dealing with tarballs and patches. The design was inspired by his knowledge of and experience with Bitkeeper.

The workflow was indeed inspired by Bitkeeper, nothing is truly revolutionary, but Bitkeeper itself was not the status quo in a world dominated by CVS, SVN and Perforce. On "tarballs and patches", I was referring to this famous quote from http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=111288700902396 ... So I'm writing some scripts to try to track things a whole lot faster. Initial indications are that I should be able to do it…

Bitkeeper was not the status quo, but I don't think that's important in the overall point. The original point was that git was inspired by previous software. The original software pointed at, cvs, was wrong, but I don't think the original point changes when we put the correct software, Bitkeeper, in its place in the sentence.

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#212

Post by pnathan »

agavin wrote: post #208

For nearly two decades I was a diehard LISP advocate. I even forced all my programers to code three Crash Bandicoot and four Jak & Daxter games in custom LISP dialects that I wrote the compilers for (an article on one here http://all-things-andy-gavin.com/2011/03/12/making-crash-ban... ). But by the mid 2000s I started doing the kind of programming I used to do in LISP in Ruby. It's not that Ruby is a better language…

With respect to the Library Problem -

Have you investigated Quicklisp[1] using SBCL? I have found Quicklisp generally a better experience than CPAN, pip, Cabal, and the other package managers I've used.

SBCL (A fork of CMUCL) is maintained monthly and recently had a very successful crowdfunding campaign.

Of course, if you find CL itself to be weaker in areas important to you than (say) Ruby, none of the above matters. But I thought you might like to know. :-)

http://www.quicklisp.org/beta/

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#213

Post by bad_user »

scott_s wrote: post #211
bad_user wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The workflow was indeed inspired by Bitkeeper, nothing is truly revolutionary, but Bitkeeper itself was not the status quo in a world dominated by CVS, SVN and Perforce. On "tarballs and patches", I was referring to this famous quote from http://marc.info/?l=linux-kernel&m=111288700902396 ... So I'm writing some scripts to try to track things a whole lot faster. Initial indications are that I should be able to do it…

Bitkeeper was not the status quo, but I don't think that's important in the overall point. The original point was that git was inspired by previous software. The original software pointed at, cvs, was wrong, but I don't think the original point changes when we put the correct software, Bitkeeper, in its place in the sentence.

Yes, but I included a "not to diminish your point" right in the first sentence.

This was just a facts correction because I find the story of Git being fascinating.

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#214

Post by thebigshane »

bad_user wrote: post #180
wisty wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I hate to sound negative, but things won't get better. OK, this month has been a shocker, but next year might be just as bad. The real fundamentals of computing happened a long time ago. Hero of Alexandria, some Chinese and Islamic scholars, Albertus Magnus, Roger Bacon, Charles Babbage, Ada Lovelace, Joseph Marie Jacquard, Turing, non Neumann. But progress was linear, not exponential - the tools they made were so im…

It's easier to write git if you have a CVS repo to store your work in Not to diminish your point or anything, but regarding Git, I'll just quote Linus Tolvards: For the first 10 years of kernel maintenance, we literally used tarballs and patches, which is a much superior source control management system than CVS is Basically Git started as a bunch of scripts written by Linux for dealing with "tarballs and patches" an…

I think Alan Kay would disagree with you: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/432922/significant-new-in...

   The basic idea here is not to bash the current state 
   of things but to try to understand something about the 
   progress of coming up with fundamental new ideas and 
   principles. 
  
   I claim that we need really new ideas in most areas of 
   computing, and I would like to know of any important and 
   powerful ones that have been done recently. If we can't 
   really find them, then we should ask "Why?" and "What 
   should we be doing?"
Which sounds to me like "The real fundamentals of computing happened a long time ago."

Perhaps there will be a more significant revolution in our future but that doesn't contradict the above statement.

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#215

Post by scott_s »

bad_user wrote: post #213
scott_s wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bitkeeper was not the status quo, but I don't think that's important in the overall point. The original point was that git was inspired by previous software. The original software pointed at, cvs, was wrong, but I don't think the original point changes when we put the correct software, Bitkeeper, in its place in the sentence.

Yes, but I included a "not to diminish your point" right in the first sentence. This was just a facts correction because I find the story of Git being fascinating.

Then I suppose my comment was a correction to the correction.

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#216

Post by khafra »

arethuza wrote: post #196
ternaryoperator wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you're seeing is actually the death of the second generation of great comp sci minds, IMO. The first modern generation included von Neumann (b. 1903), Hopper (b. 1906), Turing (b. 1912), and others. McCarthy (1927), Knuth (1932), Hoare (1934) etc. are of the next generation. Obviously, you can cut generations on any arbitraty line and YMMV, but the 15-20 year gap seems a reasonable grouping, IMO.

Would that make Leibniz part of the zeroth generation? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gottfried_Leibniz#Computation

He's pre-generational, along with people like Ramon Llull and Hero of Alexandria (who, however, did not have such a heroically unusual distribution of letters in his last name).

Re: John McCarthy Has Died

#218

Post by alf »

TruthElixirX wrote: post #105
0x12 wrote: post #92

What a pity. I sense a black bar coming. The last few weeks have been terrible, one icon after another has fallen. What is different from other fields is that computing is still a young enough field that almost all of its luminaries except for the earliest ones are still alive. I fear the avalanche has only barely begun, and at some point the frequency of these will become high enough that either we will stop to noti…

Eventually, I think, there will cease to be icons within the industry. What we have now are the people who invented the internet/computers and the basic components. The people who are doing the inventing now are just as smart, but they aren't creating fundamental things, they are improving on an existing system. We don't say, "engineer team y invented the iCore series of processors." we sort of just say "Intel is com…

People have been about the same intelligence for a long time. Steve, Dennis, and John were no smarter than their predecessors, they were just applying their intelligence in an area other smart people weren't looking at. Woz was designing calculators before he designed the Apple II. So what's the next area a smart person can make a big difference in?
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