Kurt Stephens

Should Combined-Object-Lambda-Architecture really be Combined-Lambda-Object-Architecture?

Ian Piumarta’s IDST bootstraps a object-system, then a compiler, then a lisp evaluator. Maru bootstraps a lisp evaluator, then crafts an object system, then a compiler. Maru is much smaller and elegant than IDST.

Are object systems necessarily more complex than lambda evaluators? Or is this just another demonstration of how Lisp code/data unification is more powerful?

If message send and function calls are decomposed into lookup() and apply(), the only difference between basic OO message-passing and function calling is lookup(): the former is late-bound, the latter is early bound (in the link-editor, for example). Is OO lookup() the sole complicating factor? Is a lambda-oriented compiler fundamentally less complex than a OO compiler?

Brain simulation research is more important than putting a man on Mars or starting wars.

We will see exoscale computers simulating raw human bandwidth in within 10-15 years.

http://fora.tv/2011/11/02/David_Eagleman_Will_We_Ever_Understand_the_Bra...

“We perceive because we decide.”

We can take his ideas to the stars and back again.

http://techcrunch.com/2011/10/24/creator-of-lisp-john-mccarthy-dead-at-8...

50th anniversary of Objects? – Alan Kay

http://tele-task.de/archive/video/flash/14029/

• Dumb Code is Clean Code.
• Smart Code is Dirty Code.
• Advice is not Aspects.
• Advice is objects.
• Advice is dynamic.
• Slides

• Code

http://ftp.squeak.org/Media/AlanKay/Alan%20Kay%20at%20OOPSLA%201997%20-%...

It still hasn’t happened.

Dr. Kay said “The Art of the Metaobject Protocol”
Gregor Kiczales, Jim des Rivières and Daniel G. Bobrow was the best book in 10 years, but wished it had not be written with a Lisp frame-of-reference.

Joe Damato drills deep into the implied contracts of the MRI/C API:

The need for RB_GC_GUARD(v) is probably due to faulty register spilling in the MRI eval/thread/GC machinery; the PRE_GETCONTEXT() and POST_GETCONTEXT() macros in MRI eval.c might be the real problem.

In contrast, the Boehm-Demers-Weiser (BDW) GC library manages to scan registers without demanding client code to explicitly flush pointers to the stack.

However, in general, it is problematic, in language design practice to make GC contracts completely transparent to API client code. This difficultly is explicitly solved in the design of Lua:

Interesting post over at http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4222

http://elilies.com/rule110-full.html

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rule_110

Wasn’t familiar with Rule 110, but this caught my attention:

While working on the development of NKS, Wolfram’s research assistant Matthew Cook proved Rule 110 capable of supporting universal computation. Rule 110 is a simple enough system to suggest that naturally occurring physical systems may also be capable of universality— meaning that many of their properties will be undecidable, and not amenable to closed-form mathematical solutions.[4]

http://learnpythonthehardway.org/book/advice.html

http://www.amazon.com/Year-Million-Science-Edge-Knowledge/dp/1934633054

Entertaining essays. However, it’s absurd that this book is not Kindled. I hope we are not pulverizing living things into sheets so we can encode bits with such low throughput in the year 1,000,000.