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Why do they like Lisp so much?
it was the 90's
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>>4772
It's a mystery, Lainon-kun.
It's a mystery, Lainon-kun.
I can't speak for whatever other anime that is, but lisp is actually a core part of the serial experiments lain plot. "Knights of eastern calculus" = knights of lambda calculus, a reference to a secret order of programmers founded by GJS Jay Sussman at MIT. The Knights of Lambda Calculus blended occult practices and programming to craft mathematically specified demons. This is why the cover of SICP has a wizard, and where the motif of "conjure the spirits of the computer with your spells" comes from. The language used by the Knights in our reality and in Serial Experiments Lain is scheme, taught in SICP.
If you read every fib number page of SICP, it tells you the origin story of the Knights of Lambda Calculus, but only the first edition printing.
If you read every fib number page of SICP, it tells you the origin story of the Knights of Lambda Calculus, but only the first edition printing.
Common Lisp has a big Japanese community for some reason, a couple of the compilers and a bunch of packages are maintained by people from Japan. It is weird because Japan rejected using Lisp for AI and prefered logic languages like Prolog (same for Europe), which they were trying to invent a new computer generation with in the 80s.
>>5730
>The "debate" had an interlude, in which Costanza asked Sussman why MIT had switched away from Scheme for their introductory programming course, 6.001. This was a gem. He said that the reason that happened was because engineering in 1980 was not what it was in the mid-90s or in 2000. In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and then produced spare code that they thought should work. Code ran close to the metal, even Scheme -- it was understandable all the way down. Like a resistor, where you could read the bands and know the power rating and the tolerance and the resistance and V=IR and that's all there was to know. 6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want.
>But programming now isn't so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don't know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course.
>So the good thing about the new 6.001 was that it was robot-centered -- you had to program a little robot to move around. And robots are not like resistors, behaving according to ideal functions. Wheels slip, the environment changes, etc -- you have to build in robustness to the system, in a different way than the one SICP discusses.
>And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all.
https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/03/24/international-lisp-conference-day-two
>The "debate" had an interlude, in which Costanza asked Sussman why MIT had switched away from Scheme for their introductory programming course, 6.001. This was a gem. He said that the reason that happened was because engineering in 1980 was not what it was in the mid-90s or in 2000. In 1980, good programmers spent a lot of time thinking, and then produced spare code that they thought should work. Code ran close to the metal, even Scheme -- it was understandable all the way down. Like a resistor, where you could read the bands and know the power rating and the tolerance and the resistance and V=IR and that's all there was to know. 6.001 had been conceived to teach engineers how to take small parts that they understood entirely and use simple techniques to compose them into larger things that do what you want.
>But programming now isn't so much like that, said Sussman. Nowadays you muck around with incomprehensible or nonexistent man pages for software you don't know who wrote. You have to do basic science on your libraries to see how they work, trying out different inputs and seeing how the code reacts. This is a fundamentally different job, and it needed a different course.
>So the good thing about the new 6.001 was that it was robot-centered -- you had to program a little robot to move around. And robots are not like resistors, behaving according to ideal functions. Wheels slip, the environment changes, etc -- you have to build in robustness to the system, in a different way than the one SICP discusses.
>And why Python, then? Well, said Sussman, it probably just had a library already implemented for the robotics interface, that was all.
https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/03/24/international-lisp-conference-day-two