4 ms·
Needs a timeframe and context. Back in the, say, 1990s or maybe even early 2000s, when the modern world was just forming and the only languages students would w
by jonahbenton 4y ago
Needs a timeframe and context. Back in the, say, 1990s or maybe even early 2000s, when the modern world was just forming and the only languages students would work in were C and C++, maybe with some Bash and Perl on the side, 25k lines is a reasonable estimate for a brand new symbolic engine- a thing that in imperative languages didn't exist- with some element of typical PhD edge case over-engineering.
25k lines in fact could be considered small for that sort of C++ engine.
But it would have been reasonable at the time to explore the type system around such a thing and produce a PhD (or a couple of PhDs) from it over a period of a few years.
Of course even at that time there was prior art in the Lisp world, but after the AI winter 1980s no students were going to work in Lisp. C++ was where the jobs were going to be.
- uonpopular_th 4y ago>Needs a timeframe and context. Back in the, say, 1990s or maybe even early 2000s, when the modern world was just forming and the only languages students would work in were C and C++, maybe with some Bash and Perl on the side, 25k lines is a reasonable estimate for a brand new symbolic engine- a thing that in imperative languages didn't exist- with some element of typical PhD edge case over-engineering. The modern world was very much formed by the 90s. Mathematica, Axiom, Maple, etc were all mature software written a decade or more ago. What people were doing wasn't writing a CAS from scratch but writing one that could slot into whatever program they needed at the time, e.g. chaotic simulation of the solar system: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_of_Classical_Mechanics?useskin=vector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structure_and_Interpretation_o...
- pjlegato 4y agoMathematica is a comprehensive symbolic manipulation engine and functional programming language written by a physicist starting in the late 70s. It has been used to solve various real world physics problems since the early 80s. It has been commercially available since 1988. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stephen_Wolfram