[apologies if this has materialised in similar form or does so soon unbeknownst to me, but from where I sit it appears Google ate a similar report posted yesterday via google groups.]
Dr. McCarthy joined with Henry Baker, his predecessor at the microphone, in bemoaning the standardization of Common Lisp as stultifying if not mortifying, in that it ended innovation.
When rahul defended standardization as allowing his code to run ten years from now, McCarthy indicated that (paraphrasing) by the looks of Rahul it was unlikely he would produce code that anyone would want to run ten years from now.*
XML had the honor of having McCarthy stop in the middle of a meandering bit of reflection to mention how much he disliked XML.
And when your correspondent asked why he had chosen such a crappy name for such a great language and whether he regretted, in what is becoming an annual rite of humiliation, he pretty much ignored my question, but did mention that his preference had been FLPL, for Fortran List Processing Language, because he liked Fortran.
Intriguingly, there is a Fortran package with that exact name and acronym and function, created in 1960 as far as I can make out from some light googling.
* McCarthy actually meant that very little code lasts ten years.
"If you plan to enter text which our system might consider to be obscene, check here to certify that you are old enough to hear the resulting output." -- Bell Labs text-to-speech interactive Web page
Kenny Tilton wrote: > [apologies if this has materialised in similar form or does so soon > unbeknownst to me, but from where I sit it appears Google ate a similar > report posted yesterday via google groups.]
> Dr. McCarthy joined with Henry Baker, his predecessor at the microphone, > in bemoaning the standardization of Common Lisp as stultifying if not > mortifying, in that it ended innovation.
As much as I like Common Lisp, I think he has a point here.
> When rahul defended standardization as allowing his code to run ten > years from now, McCarthy indicated that (paraphrasing) by the looks of > Rahul it was unlikely he would produce code that anyone would want to > run ten years from now.*
This was one of the most bizarre moments I have experienced ever, that people tried to convince John McCarthy that standardization is actually a good thing. As if he would ever care.
It was clear from his talk that he cares about a long-term vision (namely how to achieve human-level artificial intelligence). Language standardization is worth zilch in that regard.
Pascal
-- 2nd European Lisp and Scheme Workshop July 26 - Glasgow, Scotland - co-located with ECOOP 2005 http://lisp-ecoop05.bknr.net/
Pascal Costanza <p...@p-cos.net> writes: > Kenny Tilton wrote: >> [apologies if this has materialised in similar form or does so soon >> unbeknownst to me, but from where I sit it appears Google ate a >> similar report posted yesterday via google groups.] >> Dr. McCarthy joined with Henry Baker, his predecessor at the >> microphone, in bemoaning the standardization of Common Lisp as >> stultifying if not mortifying, in that it ended innovation.
> As much as I like Common Lisp, I think he has a point here.
As did Baker, or rather a dozen or so good points--can't wait until his full slidedeck is available.
>> When rahul defended standardization as allowing his code to run ten >> years from now, McCarthy indicated that (paraphrasing) by the looks >> of Rahul it was unlikely he would produce code that anyone would >> want to run ten years from now.*
> This was one of the most bizarre moments I have experienced ever, > that people tried to convince John McCarthy that standardization is > actually a good thing. As if he would ever care.
While concuring with Pascal that that was a weird moment (and it wasn't just Rahul who tried to convince McCarthy that the standard was a good thing), I'd like to point out that I don't think McCarthy was insulting Rahul--merely misunderstanding him. From where I was sitting it sounded like Rahul started his comment by saying something along the lines of, "I don't care about standardization because it's going to ensure that code that was written 20 years ago still runs today ...". In that he was riffing off a previously comment from someone else in the audience. He went on to say that the reason he was glad there was a standard was because it meant there were multiple implementations *today* that could all run his code, each with different strengths and weaknesses. However McCarthy appeared to have heard him to say that he did care about having code from 20 years ago that ran today and said that based on Rahul's appearance, it didn't seem that he could have any code from 20 years ago that he'd need to run today, i.e. Rahul is too young. A slight dig, perhaps but not actually an insult. Just didn't want folks to think that McCarthy went out of his way to be rude to folks.
Peter Seibel wrote: > However McCarthy appeared to have > heard him to say that he did care about having code from 20 years ago > that ran today and said that based on Rahul's appearance, it didn't > seem that he could have any code from 20 years ago that he'd need to > run today, i.e. Rahul is too young. A slight dig, perhaps but not > actually an insult.
This is how I interpreted it as well.
The more general question -- Did standardization produce stultification? -- is quite provocative though. Really, there are two questions here:
(1) Has progress in Lisp slowed dramatically since CLtL1? (And this is really what Baker and McCarthy meant by standardization -- the ascension of Common Lisp.)
(2) Did CLtL1 *cause* this slowdown?
IMO, the answer to (1) is "yes" and the answer to (2) is "no." The *real* reason progress slowed -- again, IMO -- was the dramatic drop in both interest in and funding for Lisp following AI Winter, which began around........1984. If this is correct, then standardization was probably critical in keeping the dwindling community together.
This brings up an interesting question: Is the binding constraint of the standard, which was critical during the 1980s and 1990s, gonna choke the community now that it is again showing signs of growth?
It's a real question. One possibility is that as the community grows, so will a parallel movement to open, clean up, modify, and extend the standard. A harbinger of this is the CLRFI process, which is currently trying to bootstrap itself. Another possibility is that the community will split in a healthy way, with business users adhering closely to the standard in the interests of portability, and with academics again experimenting with new features and birthing new dialects.
Christopher C. Stacy wrote: > Kenny Tilton <ktil...@nyc.rr.com> writes:
>>* McCarthy actually meant that very little code lasts ten years.
> That would suggest a serious disconnect with reality; > it's a little hard to believe.
Oh. please. You have no knowledge or experience of production code. It /always/ gets thrown way when it needs changing. By the time the corpolopolis acknowledges change is needed, the old code is too rotten to refactor.
ie, No, I was just having fun, JMcC did not really slam Rahul, he just made an easy point: production code regularly gets tossed, because it is so much easier to rewrite than salvage. And if you are re-salvaging, tou may as well change syntax change here and there.
"If you plan to enter text which our system might consider to be obscene, check here to certify that you are old enough to hear the resulting output." -- Bell Labs text-to-speech interactive Web page
Christopher C. Stacy wrote: > "Sashank Varma" <sashankva...@yahoo.com> writes: > > (1) Has progress in Lisp slowed dramatically since CLtL1? > > (2) Did CLtL1 *cause* this slowdown?
> I think we need "better" basis for a useful > discussion about this, By which I mean: > Define "progress" and "slowdown".
> And do people think that those are mutually exclusive?
I'm not sure what you're getting at. Progress can slow down in the sense of decelerating, i.e., the second derivative is negative. There's no doubt there's been progress over the last 21 years (e.g., the MOP). Question (1) is about whether Lisp has declined from being a fecund source of programming language innovations, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
>>> * McCarthy actually meant that very little code lasts ten years.
>> That would suggest a serious disconnect with reality; >> it's a little hard to believe.
> I think he said 20 years, not 10,
Fantastic. We have a new entry for examples of "stupid quibble". Rahul said ten, OK? (As if it fucking matters.)
and I'm not sure he was
> entirely serious.
I think this is the difference between a yobbo and and an intellect.
While everyone was laughing at "you do not look old enough...", and Rahul was protesting that he meant "in the future", McCarthy slipped in the mumble making clear that his point was simply that very little code (from anyone!) lasts long enough to justify freezing a language. Your correspondent can confirm this from <gasp!> actual production dode experience.
Anyone with an iota of an experience in production code knows how fast systems get swapped out, and that was the trivial yet telling point McCarthy made in teasing Rahul and that particular defense of standardization.
"If you plan to enter text which our system might consider to be obscene, check here to certify that you are old enough to hear the resulting output." -- Bell Labs text-to-speech interactive Web page
>> [apologies if this has materialised in similar form or does so soon >> unbeknownst to me, but from where I sit it appears Google ate a >> similar report posted yesterday via google groups.]
>> Dr. McCarthy joined with Henry Baker, his predecessor at the >> microphone, in bemoaning the standardization of Common Lisp as >> stultifying if not mortifying, in that it ended innovation.
> As much as I like Common Lisp, I think he has a point here.
Please get back to us when you have some application functionality you cannot express in Common Lisp. As much as you think you like CL....
"If you plan to enter text which our system might consider to be obscene, check here to certify that you are old enough to hear the resulting output." -- Bell Labs text-to-speech interactive Web page
> >>* McCarthy actually meant that very little code lasts ten years. > > That would suggest a serious disconnect with reality; > > it's a little hard to believe.
> Oh. please. You have no knowledge or experience of production code.
I've been delivering production code since about 1976, so I guess if I haven't figured anything out by now, I'm not likely to ever figure it out. (So you should probably stop wasting time lecturing me about it.)
Peter Seibel wrote: > Pascal Costanza <p...@p-cos.net> writes:
>>Kenny Tilton wrote:
>>>[apologies if this has materialised in similar form or does so soon >>>unbeknownst to me, but from where I sit it appears Google ate a >>>similar report posted yesterday via google groups.] >>>Dr. McCarthy joined with Henry Baker, his predecessor at the >>>microphone, in bemoaning the standardization of Common Lisp as >>>stultifying if not mortifying, in that it ended innovation.
>>As much as I like Common Lisp, I think he has a point here.
> As did Baker, or rather a dozen or so good points--
As one who actually writes application Lisp code, no, Baker bid not have a good point at all. For one thing, he manifested utter ignorance of refactoring enhancements in other IDEs. For another, oh gimme a fucking break, I really need a refactoring tool when I decide to change a class name. (Hint: refactoring is all I do, this is not an issue.)
The incredibly sad thing is that baker's premise was "why is Lisp so unpopular?" As was his predecesssor's. When I said, get a grip, Lisp is taking off, audience members cried out, WTF are you talking about?
These dinosaurs are cute, but they do not follow cll and they have no clue about its recent upopularity upsurge.
"If you plan to enter text which our system might consider to be obscene, check here to certify that you are old enough to hear the resulting output." -- Bell Labs text-to-speech interactive Web page
"Sashank Varma" <sashankva...@yahoo.com> writes: > Christopher C. Stacy wrote:
> > "Sashank Varma" <sashankva...@yahoo.com> writes: > > > (1) Has progress in Lisp slowed dramatically since CLtL1? > > > (2) Did CLtL1 *cause* this slowdown?
> > I think we need "better" basis for a useful > > discussion about this, By which I mean: > > Define "progress" and "slowdown".
> > And do people think that those are mutually exclusive?
> I'm not sure what you're getting at. Progress can slow > down in the sense of decelerating, i.e., the second > derivative is negative.
I'm not sure what you're getting at. What is the definition of "progress"? New features? Is that desirable?
Is the complaint that there has been insufficient new features or new languages and that the fault lies in having developed a language which already suited the needs of its users?
Besides, I don't see anyone stopping anyone else from inventing their own versions of Lisp.
Also, one can play all kinds of guessing games about imaginary alternate universe histories, so I'm not even sure what the point of the discussion is.
> Question (1) is about whether Lisp has declined from > being a fecund source of programming language > innovations, as it was in the 1960s and 1970s.
Seems to me that most of the world haven't even caught up to the Lisp ideas from two decades ago.
Also seems to me that people have taken some ideas from other languages and applied them to Lisp. (For example, in the last few weeks I saw messages here from people taking ideas from functional programming and from distributed programming languages and trying to make dialects of Lisp.)
I can't imagine what the point is of whether Lisp has "declined", anyway. Perhaps nobody has had any super great ideas lately. That's somehow the fault of people who like to use Common Lisp?
If someone has their own great ideas and wants to stop working on Common Lisp and go invent their own language, they should feel free. It's not like if they come into close proximity with Lisp people that things are going dangerously Arc.
Kenny Tilton <ktil...@nyc.rr.com> writes: > While everyone was laughing at "you do not look old enough...", and > Rahul was protesting that he meant "in the future", McCarthy slipped > in the mumble making clear that his point was simply that very little > code (from anyone!) lasts long enough to justify freezing a > language.
Well exactly that is not the case. Why was there a year 2000 problem? Because nobody expected software to survice longer then a few years. How many billions of dollars were spend on fixing those "could-not-survive-so-long" software.
And every standard is just the snapshot in time. How many standards do exist for Fortran? How many for C?
Friedrich
-- Please remove just-for-news- to reply via e-mail.
Sashank Varma wrote: > The more general question -- Did standardization produce > stultification? -- is quite provocative though. Really, there are two > questions here:
> (1) Has progress in Lisp slowed dramatically since CLtL1? (And this is > really what Baker and McCarthy meant by standardization -- the > ascension of Common Lisp.)
> (2) Did CLtL1 *cause* this slowdown?
> IMO, the answer to (1) is "yes" and the answer to (2) is "no."
I think this is still oversimplified, but a good step closer to the truth.
> The > *real* reason progress slowed -- again, IMO -- was the dramatic drop in > both interest in and funding for Lisp following AI Winter, which began > around........1984. If this is correct, then standardization was > probably critical in keeping the dwindling community together.
> This brings up an interesting question: Is the binding constraint of > the standard, which was critical during the 1980s and 1990s, gonna > choke the community now that it is again showing signs of growth?
I don't think so. I see a difference between minor improvements of the language and fundamental improvements. Minor improvements are things like case sensitivity of symbols, better function names, improved collection frameworks, GUI APIs, database libraries, iterate, etc. pp. They are minor in the sense that the basic concepts are already there, they provably work, noone is hindered in making use of these things. It may or may not be useful to integrate them into the Common Lisp standard, but it doesn't cause serious problems that they are not in the standard. Common Lisp is flexible enough to make these things work anyway.
Major improvements would be new programming paradigms. Imagine something like OOP or neural networks didn't exist yet. Lisp has provably shown that it is again flexible enough to provide an excellent framework for developing new programming approaches.
I think the negative effect of standards is not a real one - noone hinders anyone to start even completely from scratch and build completely new languages - but a psychological one. Standards induce the belief that we have somehow reached a final stage in computer science and that we only need to fill a few gaps and fix some annoying details, and we're done. I think this is far from the truth.
In the industrial arena, companies like Sun and Microsoft and their pseudo-standards are much worse in making people belief that we are already "there", and in the acadamic realm, programming language theorists are stifling real progress. When real breakthroughs first appeared, they have always been useless in practice and unsound in theory, and only much later developed into something practical and well-understood.
In that regard, standards and standardization hurt.
Pascal
-- 2nd European Lisp and Scheme Workshop July 26 - Glasgow, Scotland - co-located with ECOOP 2005 http://lisp-ecoop05.bknr.net/
Pascal Costanza <p...@p-cos.net> writes: > In that regard, standards and standardization hurt.
What kind of bold iconoclastic geniuses are these, who would be conceiving and bringing to life their great new ideas for programming languages, but who will now never do anything, merely because someone pointed out that Common Lisp already exists?
>>> [apologies if this has materialised in similar form or does so soon >>> unbeknownst to me, but from where I sit it appears Google ate a >>> similar report posted yesterday via google groups.]
>>> Dr. McCarthy joined with Henry Baker, his predecessor at the >>> microphone, in bemoaning the standardization of Common Lisp as >>> stultifying if not mortifying, in that it ended innovation.
>> As much as I like Common Lisp, I think he has a point here.
> Please get back to us when you have some application functionality you > cannot express in Common Lisp.
...only after you have made sure that you're not implicitly using a Turing equivalence argument here. ;-P
Pascal
-- 2nd European Lisp and Scheme Workshop July 26 - Glasgow, Scotland - co-located with ECOOP 2005 http://lisp-ecoop05.bknr.net/
Christopher C. Stacy wrote: > Pascal Costanza <p...@p-cos.net> writes:
>>In that regard, standards and standardization hurt.
> What kind of bold iconoclastic geniuses are these, > who would be conceiving and bringing to life their > great new ideas for programming languages, but who > will now never do anything, merely because someone > pointed out that Common Lisp already exists?
That's not what I said.
Pascal
-- 2nd European Lisp and Scheme Workshop July 26 - Glasgow, Scotland - co-located with ECOOP 2005 http://lisp-ecoop05.bknr.net/
Friedrich Dominicus wrote: > Well exactly that is not the case. Why was there a year 2000 problem?
What problem ? I man, anybody saw the problem (aside from a couple of cobol prgrams) ?
> Because nobody expected software to survice longer then a few > years. How many billions of dollars were spend on fixing those > "could-not-survive-so-long" software.
Well, the money spent in solving the 2kY problem is known to be one of the biggest wastes on the IT market (has anyone evaluated upgradding-to-XP yet ?)
> And every standard is just the snapshot in time. How many standards do > exist for Fortran? How many for C?
personally I see lots of projects without a standard evolve faster than Common Lisp (Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP). I would be all on the side of dropping the standard (it doesn't help portability a lot because if you use multithreading or sockets or one of those things not standarized *yet*, you are screwed. But, I'm just a newbie. -- Pupeno <pup...@pupeno.com> (http://pupeno.com) Reading ? Science Fiction ? http://sfreaders.com.ar
Kenny Tilton <ktil...@nyc.rr.com> writes: > Please get back to us when you have some application functionality you > cannot express in Common Lisp.
Running two arbitrary threads of Lisp code concurrently can only be expressed by writing a concurrent Lisp interpreter in Lisp. This is a lot of work for someone who just wants to use threads.
Christopher C. Stacy wrote: > I'm not sure what you're getting at. > What is the definition of "progress"? > New features? > Is that desirable?
Not in and of itself.
I don't mean "new" features in the sense of "standardizing things that are not yet standardized in Common Lisp but that are standardized in other languages," like threads. I actually don't care about this stuff. I'm happy to use the extensions my particular implentation provides to interface to mundane services outside of Lisp.
> Besides, I don't see anyone stopping anyone else from > inventing their own versions of Lisp.
Agreed.
> Seems to me that most of the world haven't even > caught up to the Lisp ideas from two decades ago.
Agreed. But has Common Lisp the language progressed at all since the ANS appeared?
I guess this is the real pea under my mattress. Lisp was for the first three decades of its life a fecund source of new ideas about programming languages. During this time, the language splintered into different dialects -- MacLisp, Interlisp, Scheme, Lisp Machine Lisp, etc. -- but this did not slow the pace of innovation. In fact, it had the opposite effect.
The problem with many sufficiently diffferent dialects is that porting code is difficult, so Common Lisp came into being. Soon thereafter, innovation slowed. Sure, things like Connection Machine Lisp and the MOP came into existence, but CLtL2 and the ANS seem to have been about codifying ideas that already existed in one form or another by the mid 1980sw, but did not make it into CLtL1 for political or pragmatic reasons.
So the question is: Why is Lisp producing fewer programming language innovations now than it was 25 years ago? One "explanation" is standardization -- this is what Henry Baker and John McCarthy seemed to have been saying at the 2005 ILC. However, I think this is just a coincidence of history. As you say, the ANS does not stop someone from inventing a new Lisp variant.
> I can't imagine what the point is of whether Lisp > has "declined", anyway. Perhaps nobody has had > any super great ideas lately.
This is my great fear. In the Dynamic Language Wizards panel discussion of a year ago, someone lamented that the current ACM model computer science curriculum devotes on 5 hours to the study of programming language design. Guy Steele said maybe this wasn't a bad thing, that maybe computer science had passed beyond the time when new programming languages had to be invented on a weekly basis. Maybe we really are at some kind of language design plateau.
Another possibility is that some other force is holding us back. As Lispers, the invention of new programming language constructs is our particular forte. So what's stopping us? Not standardization. What then?
===
Here is another possible explanation for what I and some others feel: I was talking with a friend recently while visiting Pittsburgh. She's a Zen type. I told her that my visit was disorienting because normally I feel nostalgic when I return to the place where I did my undergraduate work, but this time was different. She told me that nostalgia is a distortion, a way of hiding from one's current reality in the myth of the past. The laments one hears about the slowdown in Lisp's progress might be just this -- nostalgia.
What's weird is that they are rarely spoken by those who actually lived through the halcyon days of MIT in the 1970s, Symbolics in the early 1980s, etc. More frequently, they are uttered by (relative) newbies like myself -- I discovered the language in the spring of 1988 -- who just missed the golden age of Lisp. It is a second-hand nostalgia we feel.
Kenny Tilton <ktil...@nyc.rr.com> writes: > These dinosaurs are cute, but they do not follow cll and they have no > clue about its recent upopularity upsurge.
I realised that this upsurge is real when I went to the lisp meeting in Amsterdam this spring and compared it to the ELUGM-99, also in Amsterdam. ELUGM-99 was a three-day event organized by Franz, ie., you would think, a much larger event than this years' one-day meeting. But if I remember right, it had only half the number of attendees (which we still thought was o.k.).
Pupeno <pup...@pupeno.com> writes: > Friedrich Dominicus wrote: >> Well exactly that is not the case. Why was there a year 2000 problem? > What problem ? I man, anybody saw the problem (aside from a couple of cobol > prgrams) ? >> Because nobody expected software to survice longer then a few >> years. How many billions of dollars were spend on fixing those >> "could-not-survive-so-long" software. > Well, the money spent in solving the 2kY problem is known to be one of the > biggest wastes on the IT market (has anyone evaluated upgradding-to-XP > yet ?)
Well this is statement which I doubt very much. What would have happened if the money would not have been spend? We don't know because nobody dared to ignore it. Now let us hope that securitiy gets at least that much attentoin....
>> And every standard is just the snapshot in time. How many standards do >> exist for Fortran? How many for C? > personally I see lots of projects without a standard evolve faster than > Common Lisp (Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP). I would be all on the side of > dropping the standard (it doesn't help portability a lot because if you use > multithreading or sockets or one of those things not standarized *yet*, you > are screwed. But, I'm just a newbie.
Well have you tried to run a Perl 3 program with Perl 5?
Have you read about the trouble going from perl 4 to Perl 5? Why do you think are those branches still in use? Because most of the people do not like to rewrite their coded over and over again because if changes in some implementations.
I have no problems to compile fifteen year old C programs. And the same is true for quite some Lisp Code out there which explicity was written to be portable.
Standards are IMHO on of the sharpest tools the "users" have against the "vendors". I have seen in at least one other programming language what happens if the users do not have something like a standard.
And you can see how happily the big ones ignore standards. Just check the MSVC documentation on the C language.
Of course that is just a problem if you have more then on implementation. But fortunatly we do have the choice. If you do think standards are good I suggest you check back to the thread "modern lisp" mode from Franz.
I would not care as much about standards if backward-compatiblity would be one on the highest priorites. I just can tell for C and Common Lisp that at least here I found this high priority. Guess what Franz even has some library to cope with Flavours!
In a language with such a long history as Lisp, standards are a blessing.
Friedrich
-- Please remove just-for-news- to reply via e-mail.
Pascal Costanza wrote: > Major improvements would be new programming paradigms. Imagine something > like OOP or neural networks didn't exist yet. Lisp has provably shown > that it is again flexible enough to provide an excellent framework for > developing new programming approaches.
> I think the negative effect of standards is not a real one - noone > hinders anyone to start even completely from scratch and build > completely new languages - but a psychological one. Standards induce the > belief that we have somehow reached a final stage in computer science > and that we only need to fill a few gaps and fix some annoying details, > and we're done. I think this is far from the truth.
> In the industrial arena, companies like Sun and Microsoft and their > pseudo-standards are much worse in making people belief that we are > already "there", and in the acadamic realm, programming language > theorists are stifling real progress. When real breakthroughs first > appeared, they have always been useless in practice and unsound in > theory, and only much later developed into something practical and > well-understood.
> In that regard, standards and standardization hurt.
I'm surprised because it seems almost obvious that standards are there to put a halt on certain kinds of innovation. One guy who helped out the standards claimed that CL standardization killed Interlisp:
"Common Lisp as a dialect arose because institutions with a large investment in Lisp (primarily ARPA, actually, but also some commercial entitites) were tired of the semantics of Lisp changing daily and they wanted to be able to invest in something which was both powerful and stable. My understanding is that they had proposed Interlisp because it appeared to have the largest installed base, and this caused the myriad Maclisp-variants to declare that they differed in only-gratuitous ways which if solidified would constitute a larger installed base than Interlisp. CL was the result, and Interlisp was killed." http://groups-beta.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b525c6d8367c3d...
Further, innovation motive can clearly conflict with the commercial motive, since some customers don't want to recompile and retest apps built on evolving platforms. And you almost get proof from Microsoft who endlessly repeats "innovation" because that's one of its weaknesses -- customers apparently want solutions far more than tech.
So based on what I read on this thread, it seems odd this would be controversial if there were old-timers there who could point out what actually happened. Everytime I hear about the CL standard effort, it sounds like a pretty violent thing.
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