Call me an optimist, but I’m hopeful that this can do to progressive C++ shops what Clojure did to progressive Java shops. Lots of opportunities for a Lisp to be useful there, and C++ programmers won’t be philosophically opposed to using a huge/complex language.

Cleaning up some work code to parse written-out numbers (“one hundred and twenty-three”), then heading off to Strange Loop for the rest of the week.

I’m working on a few things.

$WORK is over for me. $SCHOOL is starting, so I’m figuring out my final schedule with labs and office hours and other things. No coursework besides reading yet.

I shipped Clojure code, though I’m sure it’s bad. I ported a Python and Scala library I’d seen before to Clojure. It’s my first shot at writing even really trivial Clojure code, so any code reviews or feedback would be really appreciated.

https://github.com/tropicalmug/teaser-clj

Work: Learning Ember.js, and looking lustfully at all the NLP-in-Clojure stories we have deep in the backlog.

Side work: Spinning up a prototype iPhone app that uses Bluetooth 4.0 to find things in your house.

Not-work: Learning Ember.js for a new app for music practicing. And practicing fiercely on period instruments for the 2014 National Scottish Fiddling Championship, which is on Saturday.

Work:

Refactoring our Clojure codebase to use…something sane. Currently still researching, but Prismatic Graph looks like the best fit so far.

Not work:

Swearing violently at CSS for my personal site (featuring tsm-the-musician, not tsm-the-programmer). I’m growing increasingly unsatisfied with the Octopress theme I have, so I should probably just nuke it and find a new one.

I think we’d all benefit from a lot more people having an opportunity to give Genera a try. So many things about it are just so different, fascinating, and work well together. Even what we think of as a command line interface today could be so much more than it is.

As a former Lisp user of five years, I profoundly disagree with the article’s thesis. That thesis is an attempt to explain the reason Lisp has not replicated its successes from before the “AI Winter” of the 1980s and 90s; specifically, the author takes the position that Lisp is so expressive that nobody can read code written in it.

This is a fairly extreme position to take against any programming language, so I hope my strongly-worded response won’t be viewed too harshly!

Briefly, I believe Lisp’s lack of 21st-century success has been due in large part to the existence of other functional languages out there, some of which even - as we know :) - have rich static type systems, and in that respect are actually superior to Lisp (gasp!). Recall that Lisp has existed in something resembling its current form since the 1960s, and at one time, it was the only game in town for functional programming - yes, Forth technically had higher-order functions, but it was very different in other ways and few people used it for general-purpose programming tasks! It’s unreasonable to expect it to fare as well in today’s landscape, which has far more competition from other excellent languages. I myself left Common Lisp for Haskell, for example. :)

Second, I would like to point out that many of the classic Lisp AI successes… let me get concrete. SHRDLU is my archetypical example. It was a wonderful piece of what today we would call natural-language processing, inventing multiple novel techniques… The PhD thesis describing it is titled Procedures as a representation for knowledge in computer programs for understanding natural language, which gives you some idea of the depth!

It provided a self-contained simulated world (modeling, in three dimensions, a robotic arm and some child’s toy blocks), which could be manipulated by directing the simulated robot in English! The robot understands complicated grammar for both commands and inquiries, which can be not only about the current state of the world, but also about its reasons for having taken particular actions. Google for some transcripts if you haven’t seen them.

NLP has moved on and can do similar things on behalf of private parties such as Google who, to my knowledge, have not really published their techniques… But there is no such simple end-to-end demonstration and testbed extant today.

So. I would like to point out that SHRDLU, then, not only no longer runs*, but its author (Terry Winograd) is no longer interested in the problem. And who can blame him? After seeing a seminal work like this ignored for decades, I would probably lose interest in ramming it down the world’s throat, too! The AI winter cut deeper and lasted longer than the more-recent 2000 tech crash, and the talent that was lost to it is in many cases simply no longer alive or not planning to return to the field. All the modern work in the fields which used to all be regarded as simply part of the single field of artificial intelligence… is essentially reinvention.

What does that have to do with the virtues of Lisp? Well, it was the preferred tool of the people who have moved on. There is no reason to expect that an entirely new generation of programmers not drawing on the techniques or codebases of the past will have any use for their forerunners' tools. The success of Lisp was the success of the programs that were written in it, and nobody is writing new artificial-intelligence research in Lisp anymore.

Okay - as you can probably tell, I have strong feelings about the language. For full disclosure, I hereby acknowledge that I consider Clojure in many respects a step backwards from Common Lisp, and my displeasure with the people currently programming in Lisp has therefore doubtless colored the views expressed above.

I would like to note also that what I am not doing here is trying to defend the language against the claim that it was “too expressive” - I am simply providing an alternate explanation as I see it. I don’t really understand how a language can be too expressive, but I suppose it might make sense to address the claim more thoroughly sometime. That would take a long time, though, and would not really be at the heart of the issue.

• (Actually, there was an effort circa 2002 to port SHRDLU to a modern dialect and operating system, run by a team of talented undergraduates on behalf of a philosophy professor of all things!, but I don’t believe it was fully successful. Please correct me if you know otherwise.)

Putting together a book of my own compositions (short fiddle tunes in the style of eighteenth century Scotland). It’s been very disorienting to be using vim and a compiler (an ASCII format -> postscript) without actually programming, but it’s still enormously satisfying to see the book take form.

I should be releasing it on Gumroad in a week or two.

Headdit: A revolutionary way to browse reddit. Control reddit by using gestures with your webcam. Except it’s not quite April Fools, since it actually works.

The conclusion under the “Is It Worth All of the Hype?” heading seems spot-on. However, due to the amount of time the average programmer spends inside their editor, the constant effort to optimize the whole process around editing code does make sense as long as it doesn’t turn into an obsession.