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4:29:27
kakuhen
pjb: regarding the macro from yesterday, it seems that restart-case does not place forms on the top level, and the cl spec only guarantees types exist when you defclass on the top level; it seems you can have implementation-specific behavior when you defclass below the top level
7:30:25
pjb
kakuhen: note that restart case in foo could have only been invoked by the compiler, since it wraps only defclass and defmethod.
9:02:20
lotuseater
Hey does anyone know this Automated Mathematician system by Douglas Lenat? (from which Cycorp more or less evolved)
9:10:56
edgar-rft
lotuseater: wasn't that one of the predecessor ideas that later became known under the term "genetic programming" (automatically generating, modifying and testing computer source code)?
9:12:15
lotuseater
and first read about this system indirectly in Gödel Escher Bach by Douglas Hofstadter some time ago. to me personally very interesting as it also touches experimental mathematics
9:14:28
lotuseater
the great mathematicians like Euler, Gauss, etc were all experimental mathematicians in the first part of their work pipeline
9:15:19
lotuseater
so I found an archived repo of AM translated from Lisp to Prolog but the file organization seems messy
9:29:42
hayley
Anyways, AM looks like an interesting project. In the context of CL programs, I considered a program which would just nudge things around to find dumb mistakes that I fail to find because I'm not thinking about them.
9:31:24
hayley
Well, his shtick is that abstraction is a net loss would you flip through lots of codebases, or would you be a new programmer. But as Dijkstra said (paraphrasing) "the aim of abstraction is to make a layer that one can be totally precise about."
9:32:41
hayley
Without such a mechanism, one achieves a vulgar kind of simplicity where they can't do very much, even if the components are blatantly obvious in what they do. It's like less-is-less rather than less-is-more.
9:34:23
hayley
Should I shut up now? I could go on for a long time about how annoying it is that such a bad idea of "simplicity" permeates the minds of a lot of hackers.