[HN Gopher] Conversation with Larry Masinter about standardizing...
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Conversation with Larry Masinter about standardizing Common Lisp
Author : djha-skin
Score : 73 points
Date : 2023-04-11 05:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (irclog.tymoon.eu)
(TXT) w3m dump (irclog.tymoon.eu)
| e40 wrote:
| The answer to the first question (is Duane Rettig still alive) is
| _yes_. I saw him yesterday. (And chatted today.)
| aidenn0 wrote:
| > 2:26:37 masinter i tell people that my greatest contribution to
| the Common Lisp standard was inventing the form you had to fill
| out to get a change to the language passed in the cleanup
| committee
|
| > 2:27:31 masinter where you had to list the problem you were
| solving without making reference to your solution
|
| That's really great. Decoupling problems from solutions is often
| the only way for discussion to move forward.
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| Very much in the same spirit is Kent Pitman reflecting on the
| value of the charter [2] for the X3J13 standardization
| committee [1]:
|
| _5.3 Charter: Susan Ennis (1986)
|
| Sitting in a room for a good part of a meeting coming up with
| words to write as part of our mission did not seem like a good
| use of time to me at that moment. But I went along with it
| because there seemed no stopping it. In retrospect, I consider
| this a major administrative contribution and I credit the
| committee chair, Susan Ennis, for getting us to do it.
|
| What I found later was that there were many times during work
| on the standard where people disagreed about what the right way
| to proceed was. In many of those cases, we might have been
| hopelessly deadlocked, each wanting to pursue a different
| agenda, but I was able instead to point to the charter and say,
| "No, we agreed that this is how we'd resolve things like this."
|
| ...
|
| The time spent writing the charter later paid for itself many
| times over and it's an exercise I recommend to any committee
| engaged in any large endeavor over a period of time._
|
| Edit: I just noticed that the very next section, 5.4 Cleanup:
| Larry Masinter, discusses this very point about forms
|
| [1] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html
|
| [2] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/x3j13-sd-05.html
| pmoriarty wrote:
| _" this is how we'd resolve things like this"_
|
| So how did they resolve them?
| EdwardCoffin wrote:
| The charter [1] is linked to in the references section of
| the _untold story_ article I linked to.
|
| [1] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/x3j13-sd-05.html
| tmtvl wrote:
| In accordance with how they agreed they would resolve them
| in the charter.
| koito17 wrote:
| The cool thing about the CL community is how by simply joining
| #commonlisp on libera.chat, you are in the same room as a bunch
| of compiler designers and even people who were involved at one
| point in the CL specification itself.
|
| I have some interesting IRC logs from Larry Masinter on reviving
| Interlisp, some regrets about including LOOP into Common Lisp,
| and so on.
| bitwize wrote:
| I found his remarks about how (modern, ML-based) AI _is_ the
| winter for Lisp interesting and congruent with how I see things
| currently. At the end of the day, many of the hardest problems in
| computing are solved best by simply throwing more compute (esp.
| matrix and array), memory, and data at them. Today 's Lisp
| machines are GPGPU.
| mepian wrote:
| In my view, GPGPU is much closer to contemporary Connection
| Machines, which used Lisp machines for their front-ends. Now
| the front-end is x86-64 machines running Python instead of
| Lisp.
|
| Guy Steele wrote the first edition of Common Lisp the Language,
| the original de facto standard, while working for the makers of
| Connection Machines.
| zackmorris wrote:
| I've been surviving a winter of my own since 1997 when video
| cards took over and Moore's Law for CPUs started slowing down,
| finally ending around 2007 when smartphones arrived and
| research dollars got redirected to cost and power reduction.
|
| We also got stuck with stopgap SIMD measures like SSE/AltiVec
| instead of a truly scalable multicore/multiprocessor MIMD
| architecture. Which made it much more difficult to experiment
| with stuff like genetic algorithms or any other machine
| learning algorithm that don't map well to vectors. Because a 10
| billion transistor GPU that reports thousands of shading units
| may only have 64 physical cores. Whereas something like a 1 GHz
| DEC Alpha with 15 million transistors would give us more on the
| order of 100-1000 cores on the same die, especially if the
| cache was removed and it used a distributed content-addressable
| memory for data locality and a near-linear bandwidth increase
| for workloads like map-reduce.
|
| Anyway, maybe something like MIMD could be built on GPGPU? I
| just want to get info on my system and see 1024+ threads and 10
| TB/sec memory bandwidth on a chip that costs no more than
| $1000. The fact that this doesn't exist today after all these
| years, and that people are perfectly happy to keep repurchasing
| the same desktop computer the same speed as ones from a decade
| ago, and on top of that go to the ends of the earth to get the
| simplest shader code working (rather than just coding directly
| in stuff like Rust/D/C#/Java/C++ and Docker and/or Lisp) just
| absolutely blows my mind.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_instruction,_multiple...
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer
|
| http://aggregate.org/MOG/
|
| https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/mimd-on-gpu/
| LargoLasskhyfv wrote:
| Have you heard of https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libre-SOC ?
|
| Would be nice if scaled up, I think. Give it a few years time
| :-)
| mepian wrote:
| >We also got stuck with stopgap SIMD measures like
| SSE/AltiVec instead of a truly scalable
| multicore/multiprocessor MIMD architecture.
|
| We did have the Xeon Phi until recently:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xeon_Phi
|
| It was a lot of simple (derived from the original Pentium)
| x86 cores on the same die, as you want.
| tjr wrote:
| I wonder, why single Lisp out for a winter? If solving
| computational problems moves away from writing programs and
| toward writing GPT prompts, then wouldn't that forecast a
| winter for every programming language?
| nikhizzle wrote:
| How strange, I met Larry about two decades ago at a research
| conference and we stayed in touch by email for a little while. I
| had no idea he was this prominent or influential, and he never
| mentioned anything other than his current work. Super good guy,
| very kind to a grad student who was a nobody in the world.
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