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It is interesting how PL used to be central to AI (I remember the strong association of AI people and Lisp from my era). Of course, neural networks and deep lea
by Upvoter33 4y ago
It is interesting how PL used to be central to AI (I remember the strong association of AI people and Lisp from my era). Of course, neural networks and deep learning changed the focal points of the area - in a good way - which makes a lot of the old work seem interesting perhaps only historically. Times do change, I suppose...
- bodhiandphysics 4y agoLanguage design used to be central to everyone! It was one of the major core skills of programming computers. Consider for instance how when bell labs had a difficult programming job to do (like write an operating system!), they tended to eventually create (multiple) languages.
- runevault 4y agoWhen you have to express things in code, what code allows you to express at various difficulty levels matters. When things like models come into the picture and change how you can express the problem and/or solution it changes what matters in a given scenario.
- ssivark 4y agoI don’t think the essential nature has changed. All the emphasis on “systems engineering” in AI/ML these days (while data heavy) is also innovating on the programming systems — from the interfaces in Julia/PyTorch/Jax (incl. slick wrappers for probabilistic programming, modeling, etc) to XLA backends, the nature of the work is presumably not very different from PL work back in the day.