8 ms·

Conversation with Larry Masinter about standardizing Common Lisp

110 points by djha-skin 4y ago

e40 4y ago
The answer to the first question (is Duane Rettig still alive) is yes. I saw him yesterday. (And chatted today.)
- pfdietz 4y ago
  Thanks for that. :)
nikhizzle 4y ago
How strange, I met Larry about two decades ago at a research conference and we stayed in touch by email for a little while. I had no idea he was this prominent or influential, and he never mentioned anything other than his current work. Super good guy, very kind to a grad student who was a nobody in the world.
aidenn0 4y ago
> 2:26:37 masinter i tell people that my greatest contribution to the Common Lisp standard was inventing the form you had to fill out to get a change to the language passed in the cleanup committee > 2:27:31 masinter where you had to list the problem you were solving without making reference to your solution That's really great. Decoupling problems from solutions is often the only way for discussion to move forward.
- EdwardCoffin 4y ago
  Very much in the same spirit is Kent Pitman reflecting on the value of the charter [2] for the X3J13 standardization committee [1]: 5.3 Charter: Susan Ennis (1986) Sitting in a room for a good part of a meeting coming up with words to write as part of our mission did not seem like a good use of time to me at that moment. But I went along with it because there seemed no stopping it. In retrospect, I consider this a major administrative contribution and I credit the committee chair, Susan Ennis, for getting us to do it. What I found later was that there were many times during work on the standard where people disagreed about what the right way to proceed was. In many of those cases, we might have been hopelessly deadlocked, each wanting to pursue a different agenda, but I was able instead to point to the charter and say, “No, we agreed that this is how we’d resolve things like this.” ... The time spent writing the charter later paid for itself many times over and it’s an exercise I recommend to any committee engaged in any large endeavor over a period of time. Edit: I just noticed that the very next section, 5.4 Cleanup: Larry Masinter, discusses this very point about forms [1] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html [2] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/x3j13-sd-05.html http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/x3j13-sd-05.html
  - pmoriarty 4y ago
    "this is how we'd resolve things like this" So how did they resolve them?
    - tmtvl 4y ago
      In accordance with how they agreed they would resolve them in the charter.
    - EdwardCoffin 4y ago
      The charter [1] is linked to in the references section of the untold story article I linked to. [1] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/x3j13-sd-05.html http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/x3j13-sd-05.html
bitwize 4y ago
I found his remarks about how (modern, ML-based) AI is the winter for Lisp interesting and congruent with how I see things currently. At the end of the day, many of the hardest problems in computing are solved best by simply throwing more compute (esp. matrix and array), memory, and data at them. Today's Lisp machines are GPGPU.
- mepian 4y ago
  In my view, GPGPU is much closer to contemporary Connection Machines, which used Lisp machines for their front-ends. Now the front-end is x86-64 machines running Python instead of Lisp. Guy Steele wrote the first edition of Common Lisp the Language, the original de facto standard, while working for the makers of Connection Machines.
  - larve 4y ago
    Similar. So much of llm is about language design and leveraging being able to quickly manipulate semi formal dsls that I think lisp is a brilliant “driver”, so much more so than then current “string templates and regex parsing” approaches.
- zackmorris 4y ago
  I've been surviving a winter of my own since 1997 when video cards took over and Moore's Law for CPUs started slowing down, finally ending around 2007 when smartphones arrived and research dollars got redirected to cost and power reduction. We also got stuck with stopgap SIMD measures like SSE/AltiVec instead of a truly scalable multicore/multiprocessor MIMD architecture. Which made it much more difficult to experiment with stuff like genetic algorithms or any other machine learning algorithm that don't map well to vectors. Because a 10 billion transistor GPU that reports thousands of shading units may only have 64 physical cores. Whereas something like a 1 GHz DEC Alpha with 15 million transistors would give us more on the order of 100-1000 cores on the same die, especially if the cache was removed and it used a distributed content-addressable memory for data locality and a near-linear bandwidth increase for workloads like map-reduce. Anyway, maybe something like MIMD could be built on GPGPU? I just want to get info on my system and see 1024+ threads and 10 TB/sec memory bandwidth on a chip that costs no more than $1000. The fact that this doesn't exist today after all these years, and that people are perfectly happy to keep repurchasing the same desktop computer the same speed as ones from a decade ago, and on top of that go to the ends of the earth to get the simplest shader code working (rather than just coding directly in stuff like Rust/D/C#/Java/C++ and Docker and/or Lisp) just absolutely blows my mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_instruction,_multiple_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_instruction,_multiple... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer http://aggregate.org/MOG/ http://aggregate.org/MOG/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/mimd-on-gpu/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/mimd-on-gpu/
koito17 4y ago
The cool thing about the CL community is how by simply joining #commonlisp on libera.chat, you are in the same room as a bunch of compiler designers and even people who were involved at one point in the CL specification itself. I have some interesting IRC logs from Larry Masinter on reviving Interlisp, some regrets about including LOOP into Common Lisp, and so on.
raphlinus 4y ago
I was expecting this to be the recent conversation[1] about Medley Interlisp, presented at Bay Area Lisp almost a month ago. It's been on my list to watch. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYWFTiai_tA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYWFTiai_tA
deleted 4y ago
[deleted]

110 points by djha-skin 4y ago

e40 4y ago

The answer to the first question (is Duane Rettig still alive) is yes. I saw him yesterday. (And chatted today.)

pfdietz 4y ago
Thanks for that. :)

nikhizzle 4y ago

How strange, I met Larry about two decades ago at a research conference and we stayed in touch by email for a little while. I had no idea he was this prominent or influential, and he never mentioned anything other than his current work. Super good guy, very kind to a grad student who was a nobody in the world.

aidenn0 4y ago

> 2:26:37 masinter i tell people that my greatest contribution to the Common Lisp standard was inventing the form you had to fill out to get a change to the language passed in the cleanup committee > 2:27:31 masinter where you had to list the problem you were solving without making reference to your solution That's really great. Decoupling problems from solutions is often the only way for discussion to move forward.

EdwardCoffin 4y ago
Very much in the same spirit is Kent Pitman reflecting on the value of the charter [2] for the X3J13 standardization committee [1]: 5.3 Charter: Susan Ennis (1986) Sitting in a room for a good part of a meeting coming up with words to write as part of our mission did not seem like a good use of time to me at that moment. But I went along with it because there seemed no stopping it. In retrospect, I consider this a major administrative contribution and I credit the committee chair, Susan Ennis, for getting us to do it. What I found later was that there were many times during work on the standard where people disagreed about what the right way to proceed was. In many of those cases, we might have been hopelessly deadlocked, each wanting to pursue a different agenda, but I was able instead to point to the charter and say, “No, we agreed that this is how we’d resolve things like this.” ... The time spent writing the charter later paid for itself many times over and it’s an exercise I recommend to any committee engaged in any large endeavor over a period of time. Edit: I just noticed that the very next section, 5.4 Cleanup: Larry Masinter, discusses this very point about forms [1] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html http://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html [2] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/x3j13-sd-05.html http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/x3j13-sd-05.html
- pmoriarty 4y ago
  "this is how we'd resolve things like this" So how did they resolve them?
  - tmtvl 4y ago
    In accordance with how they agreed they would resolve them in the charter.
  - EdwardCoffin 4y ago
    The charter [1] is linked to in the references section of the untold story article I linked to. [1] http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/x3j13-sd-05.html http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/x3j13-sd-05.html

bitwize 4y ago

I found his remarks about how (modern, ML-based) AI is the winter for Lisp interesting and congruent with how I see things currently. At the end of the day, many of the hardest problems in computing are solved best by simply throwing more compute (esp. matrix and array), memory, and data at them. Today's Lisp machines are GPGPU.

mepian 4y ago
In my view, GPGPU is much closer to contemporary Connection Machines, which used Lisp machines for their front-ends. Now the front-end is x86-64 machines running Python instead of Lisp. Guy Steele wrote the first edition of Common Lisp the Language, the original de facto standard, while working for the makers of Connection Machines.
- larve 4y ago
  Similar. So much of llm is about language design and leveraging being able to quickly manipulate semi formal dsls that I think lisp is a brilliant “driver”, so much more so than then current “string templates and regex parsing” approaches.
zackmorris 4y ago
I've been surviving a winter of my own since 1997 when video cards took over and Moore's Law for CPUs started slowing down, finally ending around 2007 when smartphones arrived and research dollars got redirected to cost and power reduction. We also got stuck with stopgap SIMD measures like SSE/AltiVec instead of a truly scalable multicore/multiprocessor MIMD architecture. Which made it much more difficult to experiment with stuff like genetic algorithms or any other machine learning algorithm that don't map well to vectors. Because a 10 billion transistor GPU that reports thousands of shading units may only have 64 physical cores. Whereas something like a 1 GHz DEC Alpha with 15 million transistors would give us more on the order of 100-1000 cores on the same die, especially if the cache was removed and it used a distributed content-addressable memory for data locality and a near-linear bandwidth increase for workloads like map-reduce. Anyway, maybe something like MIMD could be built on GPGPU? I just want to get info on my system and see 1024+ threads and 10 TB/sec memory bandwidth on a chip that costs no more than $1000. The fact that this doesn't exist today after all these years, and that people are perfectly happy to keep repurchasing the same desktop computer the same speed as ones from a decade ago, and on top of that go to the ends of the earth to get the simplest shader code working (rather than just coding directly in stuff like Rust/D/C#/Java/C++ and Docker and/or Lisp) just absolutely blows my mind. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_instruction,_multiple_data https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_instruction,_multiple... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer http://aggregate.org/MOG/ http://aggregate.org/MOG/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/mimd-on-gpu/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/research/video/mimd-on-gpu/

koito17 4y ago

The cool thing about the CL community is how by simply joining #commonlisp on libera.chat, you are in the same room as a bunch of compiler designers and even people who were involved at one point in the CL specification itself. I have some interesting IRC logs from Larry Masinter on reviving Interlisp, some regrets about including LOOP into Common Lisp, and so on.

raphlinus 4y ago

I was expecting this to be the recent conversation[1] about Medley Interlisp, presented at Bay Area Lisp almost a month ago. It's been on my list to watch. [1]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYWFTiai_tA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYWFTiai_tA

deleted 4y ago

[deleted]