Sunday, April 27, 2003

Great article about Erann Gat losing his faith in Lisp and finding it in Python. 12:33:38 PM    comment []

Here's an interesting little piece of Bill Venner's Feb. interview with Guido van Rossum. He talks about Strong vs. Weak Typing in languages. It presents the Java/C/C++ view with the dynamic typing view. I guess I still don't know where I stand. I see languages like Lisp and Python and recognize the power of not typing your variables. However, an optimization in Lisp is to go back and type your variables. So, I guess I can understand the performance argument. However it's hard to argue with the productivity of dynamically typed languages. The cool thing about Lisp is you get both. 11:59:08 AM    comment []

Daddy, Are We There Yet?. From Alan Kay's talk at the O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, the gist of which seems to be that the last twenty years of computing have been boring, and there's a lot of stuff from the 60s that's still beyond what we have today: John McCarthy invented PDP1 interactive LISP -- a metainvention, the Maxwell's Equations of programming. Today is the 40th aniversary of the first interactive implementation by a 16-year-old Peter Deutsch. It was the first time a programming language became an operating system. [lemonodor] 12:05:12 AM    comment []

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