Re:Symbolic Programming with Clojure [pdf]
by uonpopular_th on Saturday February 25, 2023 @04:49PM
(#34940813)
>Needs a timeframe and context. Back in the, say, 1990s or maybe even early 2000s, when the modern world was just forming and the only languages students would work in were C and C++, maybe with some Bash and Perl on the side, 25k lines is a reasonable estimate for a brand new symbolic engine- a thing that in imperative languages didn't exist- with some element of typical PhD edge case over-engineering.
The modern world was very much formed by the 90s. Mathematica, Axiom, Maple, etc were all mature software written a decade or more ago. What people were doing wasn't writing a CAS from scratch but writing one that could slot into whatever program they needed at the time, e.g. chaotic simulation of the solar system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_o...
Re:Symbolic Programming with Clojure [pdf]
by pjlegato on Saturday February 25, 2023 @10:05PM
(#34942652)
Mathematica is a comprehensive symbolic manipulation engine and functional programming language written by a physicist starting in the late 70s. It has been used to solve various real world physics problems since the early 80s. It has been commercially available since 1988.
25k lines in fact could be considered small for that sort of C++ engine.
But it would have been reasonable at the time to explore the type system around such a thing and produce a PhD (or a couple of PhDs) from it over a period of a few years.
Of course even at that time there was prior art in the Lisp world, but after the AI winter 1980s no students were going to work in Lisp. C++ was where the jobs were going to be.