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Huh. I was around the AI Lab in the late 1970s -- as an undergrad -- and I don't recall hearing anyone talk about Chomsky in the way you imagine. DARPA fundin

Huh. I was around the AI Lab in the late 1970s -- as an undergrad -- and I don't recall hearing anyone talk about Chomsky in the way you imagine. DARPA funding was still flowing rather freely, it seemed to me, well into the mid-1980s. I don't recall anyone suggesting that there would have been yet more DoD money if it hadn't been for Chomsky. And the grad student I did some work for, who was working on natural language parsing, was clearly intimately familiar with Chomsky's ideas on transformational grammar and referred to them throughout his dissertation. So this isn't ringing true for me. I also recall Gerry Sussman speaking quite highly of Algol 60. No, I think you're quite wrong: the reasons for the popularity of Lisp at the AI Lab have to do with its actual advantages over other languages for the kinds of problems they were working on. And there is an example of a language in the MIT tradition with infix syntax: Dylan. Great language, but wasn't in the right place at the right time to catch on.

hga 13y ago
Was Sussman talking about the syntax, or things like lexical scope, which he and Steele introduced to the LISP world with Scheme in the mid-70s? About the only relevant negative thing I remember being said about Chomsky in a period just after your's was Marvin Minsky saying he saved someone from going down a rabbit hole following Chomsky's work. But that was a judgement of merit of his linguistics work, not his politics.
- ScottBurson 13y ago
  Well, the lexical scope, certainly, but I don't recall him disparaging the syntax. I don't recall any burning of Dragon Books. Nor was Vaughan Pratt tarred and feathered for releasing CGOL, which allowed one to write Lisp in infix syntax. People were aware of it, and a few people used it, but it didn't catch on in a big way. I don't think this was for ideological reasons; I think it was simply that most people writing Lisp (myself included) found that with proper editor support, editing fully parenthesized code is easy and pleasant -- more so, in many cases, than editing infix code. That is the fact that many non-Lispers cannot believe could possibly be true. And yet over and over again, people who learn Lisp report that it is.

hga 13y ago

Was Sussman talking about the syntax, or things like lexical scope, which he and Steele introduced to the LISP world with Scheme in the mid-70s? About the only relevant negative thing I remember being said about Chomsky in a period just after your's was Marvin Minsky saying he saved someone from going down a rabbit hole following Chomsky's work. But that was a judgement of merit of his linguistics work, not his politics.

ScottBurson 13y ago
Well, the lexical scope, certainly, but I don't recall him disparaging the syntax. I don't recall any burning of Dragon Books. Nor was Vaughan Pratt tarred and feathered for releasing CGOL, which allowed one to write Lisp in infix syntax. People were aware of it, and a few people used it, but it didn't catch on in a big way. I don't think this was for ideological reasons; I think it was simply that most people writing Lisp (myself included) found that with proper editor support, editing fully parenthesized code is easy and pleasant -- more so, in many cases, than editing infix code. That is the fact that many non-Lispers cannot believe could possibly be true. And yet over and over again, people who learn Lisp report that it is.