3 ms·

I thought he literally lived in one of MIT's office/academic buildings rather than having an actual apartment?

• eru 10y ago
  Oh, I meant where he's living intellectually. But I think my perception of what classifies an academic is pretty skewed: I managed to code Haskell for money for the first five years of my career (now still sneaking it in at Google in my 20% time), and don't consider myself an academic at all. Perhaps I also have a European bias here. After the war, the Americans got to play with their computers early on, and their academics ended up with Lisp. The European computer scientists had to wait, and thus had nothing better to do but think. They ended up with types and ML (the family that Haskell sprang from). These days, it seems that the European tradition has firmly won in the most academic parts of computer science. Lisps are still around, and with Clojure have seen more mainstream success that ever before. But in Academia the only Lispers left standing seem to be the Schemers, and they have warmed up to static types, too. (They did some great work on contracts.)