Notices by Weekend Editor (weekend_editor@mathstodon.xyz)

@amszmidt @kentpitman @runes @lispm @masinter @amoroso

To use that code directly, you'd need some 3600 microcode.

I think there's a CL version of it knocking around somewhere, though, if you're adventurous.

@kentpitman @runes @lispm @masinter @amoroso

It didn't *have* to be done that way, since there were other ways to do it. But we already had the microcode support for Prolog logic variables in place.

So that was the only time in my career when "microcode" and "straightforward path" were the same. :-)

@kentpitman @runes @lispm @masinter @amoroso

I keep thinking it would be a great retirement hobby project to make a successor to Joshua.

I'm thinking of embedding it as a domain-specific langauge extension of Haskell.

Partly that's just to get the project motto to be:

"Old-fashioned AI you don't need, in a language you don't know."

(Slightly seriously: every time in my adult life when I decided to learn a "radical" language, it led to major new opportunities opening up for me. Lisp and R being the 2 main examples.)

@larsbrinkhoff

But does it do CHAOS net? :-)

@amszmidt

Some of us have been using various Emacsen for a long time. (Since about 1978, for me.)

We're likely preserving old defaults that are too far down in finger memory to be worth changing.

@amszmidt

About half of us learned 40+ years ago, with Reagan.

The other half of us are incapable of learning, yet we must live with them.

@amszmidt

In the US right now, being happy is the incorrect response.

As we are all about to learn.

@amszmidt

Coulda been worse.

Frighteningly enough, we have other billionaires who are far worse.

@amszmidt

Or... perhaps we learned that Occupy Wall Street accomplished very little, and thus is not worth repeating?

@amszmidt

I think we have to invade ourselves?

I mean, if the Canadians want to take over the US government, I'm sure they'll be so polite about it we might not notice until we discover we all have health insurance.

@amszmidt

But if "nobody" agrees about software, then we all agree on *that* fact about software. And that's something about which we all agree, right?

Think ya got a Russell Paradox infestation, there.

@nuxi @amszmidt

If it's in Common Lisp, it can return a value, or return multiple values all at the same time, or even return no values.

@cutting @larsbrinkhoff @amszmidt @shapr

I had used a Dolphin in the early 80s, but never a Dorado.

My impression was they went crazy with ECL technology chips to implement it. But it still wasn't completely reliable because it was full of race conditions?

(Memory from the early 1980s, so not the most reliable memory. Also, I never liked Interlisp, so I may have some remaining prejudice in the matter.)

@amszmidt @gosha

Back in those days, bridges were often actual computers, like one of the smaller PDP-11s.

We were... learning. :-)

@gosha
@amszmidt
@splatt9990

Yes, that's more or less right. We used chaosnet at MIT, and that carried over to the lisp machines.

Chaosnet was a lot simpler to use, as I recall from the experince of writing network applications like 40 years ago.

IP-TCP was only just beginning to become popular in those days. We had chaosnet to IP-TCP bridges, basically routers that could speak either protocol. (And I have a hilarious story about an MIT network admin who didn't know the difference between a router & a bridge, and didn't know what a time-domain reflectometer was.)

Then around 1986 or so we had native IP-TCP on lisp machines.

Symbolics.com was in fact the first .com site on the internet.

@gosha

Does it help if you have an old bridge router from CHAOS to IP/TCP? :-)

@cstross

That one, to me, was one of the weaker SSR stories.

I very much _would_ like to read a story in which the SSR goes up against another con man, as skilled as he is, but evil.

The early stories in which he met Angelina in her sociopathic murderer stage are almost like that.

Being able to identify the good part of one's opponent, and cause them to cultivate that is almost a religious point with me. Slippery Jim could recognize and cultivate the good in Angelina, just as I the reader had to recognize the good in Slippery Jim. Handy symmetry, there.

@cstross

The Stainless Steel Rat Meets Donald Trump... that would surely work? One despicalble con man vs another largely admirable con man?

@amszmidt

I recall at the time estimating that Symbolics had a bit under half a million lines of code, maybe twice that if you include the "layered" products (Fortran, Pascal, C, Macsyma, Statice, Joshua, ...).

Doesn't seem like so much nowadays, when codebases that size are everywhere. (And less well debugged.)

@amszmidt

But if you call the dish "risotto", you've set up an expectation which is then violated.

As I said, I didn't think this one through properly.