LISP Comes of Age (1980)microship.com
Submission about a follow up conference 20 years later:
Will Spiritual Robots Replace Humanity by 2100?https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=50039614
Related:
LISP Comes of Age - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28025136 - Aug 2021 (7 comments)
Lisp Comes of Age (1980) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22578824 - March 2020 (110 comments)
Thanks, dang. I meant to add that.
I'll always lament not grabbing a Xerox Alto for $50 from a SV thrift store at 15. I literally cried as we drove off. My dad turned around and it was already gone when we got back.
Have you forgiven your dad?
Yes. We were visiting the area, and it would have blown our gas budget for getting home. Plus we already had a pin hole leak develop in the radiator and needed cash for potential repairs on the pickup.
I appreciate that he did turn around and go back at least.
He did help me bring home a thrift store Lisa a year or two later and other finds, so that was some redemption.
He was great, actually. He came with me up the coast again when I started at Cal.
I was offered an LMI CADR for free. It didn't fit in my car.
Not as good, but similar story: I got a free Apple Lisa at Uni; kept it in our workroom (I was a postgrad) for a while - amazingly well built box, but really heavy, so had to give it up when I left. Somehow still feel pangs of regret, although realistically wouldn't be using it much...
It was fun to realize this is the personal site of the BEHEMOTH bike creator, as seen at the Computer History Museum.
Looks like only one thread so far?
BEHEMOTH – Big Electronic Human-Energized Machine, Only Too Heavy - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24440163 - Sept 2020 (48 comments)
(We should have a repost of this once enough time has gone after current thread.)
Reading about GOFAI is so weird now.
The HOPL 2 paper "The evolution of Lisp" https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/154766.155373 covers about 1963-1992.
>But if not, we’ve a number of years to survive yet before brainlike systems make their debut outside a handful of well-funded research labs.
Took 40 some years, as it turned out.
I had forgotten just how glorious John McCarthy's hair was.
Ah, finally real AI programming
Found some insightful bits within this in a general 'principle/discipline of programming' sense, since it's written by an "outsider" yet in the presence of "the OGs"
E.g.
>The task of writing a program ... is traditionally characterized by a specific set of disciplines.
>In essence, the programmer must define some sort of algorithm which will accomplish the objective, then map that algorithm onto the available resources of the computer using a specific set of tools — the programming language.
>Conversion of an idea from its conceptual form into its coded form involves the acceptance of *nearly brutal language restrictions* which result in strict formalization of the process.
>The programmer starts with an idea of WHAT he wants the system to do, then spends hours or months describing HOW it should be done.
>The generally-accepted complexity of this task has spawned some rather elaborate disciplines which reduce the probability of error.
I think the fact that LLMs are "eating up" so much of software development is that software development itself never properly matured. It remained in this form for decades longer than it should've (for various reasons)
Also, writing stories never matured, painting pictures never matured, swindling people out of money never matured, ...
By Steve | August 27, 1980
In August 1980, I flew from Ohio to attend the Artificial Intelligence conference (AAAI) held at Stanford University, leading to my Byte cover story about AI. It was a huge adventure, connecting me with some incredible people… I have fond memories of an evening with astounding brains at Xerox PARC after playing with the Dolphin and Dorado bitmapped machines that later inspired the Macintosh, hanging with computer-music geeks, a sparkling dinner with Doug Hofstadter and Scott Kim, meeting science fiction authors James Hogan and Vernor Vinge, stumbling into the FORTH subculture, diving into the wildly premature exuberance of the AI community, reconnecting with the gang at Godbout Electronics that had sparked my Cybertonics parts business 6 years earlier, and getting a heady glimpse of what life would have been like had I landed in Silicon Valley instead of languishing in the midwest. Gratuitous name-dropping and maudlin retrospective aside, it was an insane week, complete with a side adventure that involved catching a prowler breaking into Stanford dorm rooms and getting to know the campus cops (narrowly escaping a scary encounter, alone in a three-story dorm building, a few days before the conference began).
While the AI event was wrapping up, I found out that the first LISP conference was about to take place, so I urged my editor at Byte to extend my stay on campus. On a whim, they said to go for it, so I threw myself into the culture of the language as a newbie. (I also ran into the lead cop over at Tresidder Memorial Union and gave him the news. “Alright! Maybe we catch us another burglar!”)
Anyway, here is the resulting piece, which was never published (the editor wanted a detailed technical article on LISP programming, and this was more cultural-philosophical… though it informed my AI Programming section in the textbook I was writing). My thanks to Steve Orr for the 2018 scan/OCR of the manuscript I sent him in 1980, bringing it back to life after 38 years.