How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language

Re:How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language by kazinator on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @01:52AM (#18226923)

The problem is that you can't arrive at such a thing by ordinary exploratory coding without a strong conceptual framework guiding what you're doing.

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Re:How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language by joe_the_user on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @02:39AM (#18227159)

Indeed, Winograd wrote a short but serious book explaining the linguistic and other theories behind shrdlu.

However, I don't think even a complete understanding of the points of his book would be sufficient to understand shrdlu's code.

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Re:How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language by pjc50 on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @05:01AM (#18227824)

> I don't think even a complete understanding of the points of his book would be sufficient to understand shrdlu's code

That sounds like a point against the use of Lisp. There's certainly quite a lot of handwritten case-specific parsing code:

Perhaps the bit which looks most lispish is the dictionary: https://github.com/stuartpb/shrdlu/blob/master/dictio

(It also looks like this was written on one of those ancient systems that didn't support lowercase and only allowed 6-character filenames)

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Re:How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language by kbp on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @07:47PM (#18234287)

> (It also looks like this was written on one of those ancient systems that didn't support lowercase and only allowed 6-character filenames)

A limitation that also led to 'Schemer' dropping the R.

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Re:How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language by whytaka on Tuesday October 16, 2018 @04:15AM (#18227604)

Could you tell me which of his publications you refer to here?

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