12 ms·

I think the vast majority of coders would struggle to write anything like SHRDLU.

• kazinator 8y ago
  The problem is that you can't arrive at such a thing by ordinary exploratory coding without a strong conceptual framework guiding what you're doing.
  • joe_the_user 8y ago
    Indeed, Winograd wrote a short but serious book explaining the linguistic and other theories behind shrdlu. However, I don't think even a complete understanding of the points of his book would be sufficient to understand shrdlu's code.
    • whytaka 8y ago
      Could you tell me which of his publications you refer to here?
    • pjc50 8y ago
      > I don't think even a complete understanding of the points of his book would be sufficient to understand shrdlu's code That sounds like a point against the use of Lisp. There's certainly quite a lot of handwritten case-specific parsing code: https://github.com/stuartpb/shrdlu/blob/master/gramar https://github.com/stuartpb/shrdlu/blob/master/gramar Perhaps the bit which looks most lispish is the dictionary: https://github.com/stuartpb/shrdlu/blob/master/dictio https://github.com/stuartpb/shrdlu/blob/master/dictio (It also looks like this was written on one of those ancient systems that didn't support lowercase and only allowed 6-character filenames)
      • kbp 8y ago
        > (It also looks like this was written on one of those ancient systems that didn't support lowercase and only allowed 6-character filenames) A limitation that also led to 'Schemer' dropping the R.