Sometime during summer 2003 I read Altered Carbon by Richard Morgan. Reading it was as close to total immersion as you can get outside a neural interface. This book is thight, it rocks, it screams! Uncompromising pulp fiction. Highly recommended. Here's a quote that illustrates the attitude of the main character towards the powers that be:

The personal, as everyone's so fucking fond of saying, is political. So if some idiot politician, some power player, tries to execute policies that harm you or those you care about, take it personally. Get angry. The Machinery of Justice will not serve you here — it is slow and cold, and it is theirs, hardware and soft. Only the little people suffer at the hands of Justice; the creatures of power slide from under it with a wink and a grin. If you want justice, you will have to claw it from them. Make it personal. Do as much damage as you can. Get your message across. That way, you stand a better chance of being taken seriously next time. Of being considered dangerous. And make no mistake about this: being taken seriously, being considered dangerous makes the difference, the only difference in their eyes, between players and little people. Players they will make deals with. Little people they liquidate. And time and again they cream your liquidation, your displacement, your torture and brutal execution with the ultimate insult that it's just business, it's politics, it's the way of the world, it's a tough life and that it's nothing personal. Well, fuck them. Make it personal.
— Altered Carbon, Richard Morgan

Joe Marshall wrote an neat introduction to CLOS for beginners. He also hosts some interesting Lisp papers at his page.

Bjorn Lindberg in comp.lang.lisp pointed to an interesting article titled The Psychology of Learning. Here's a quote from the article:

The people in the category perfection-oriented have a natural intellectual curiosity. They are constantly searching for better ways of doing things, new methods, new tools. They search for perfection, but they take pleasure in the search itself, knowing perfectly well that perfection can not be accomplished. To the people in this category, failure is a normal part of the strive for perfection. In fact, failure gives a deeper understanding of why a particular path was unsuccessful, making it possible to avoid similar paths in the future.

The people in the category performance-oriented on the contrary, do not at all strive for perfection. Instead they have a need to achieve performance immediately. Such performance leaves no time for intellectual curiosity. Instead, techniques already known to them must be applied to solve problems. To these people, failure is a disaster whose sole feature is to harm instant performance. Similarly, learning represents the possibility of failure and must thus be avoided if possible.

I think Common Lisp is a good match for the perfection-oriented.

It's been a while since I read Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist regularly. Back then Carlo Rubbia's "Energy Amplifier" was my favourite energy solution. It uses Thorium as fuel and a particle accelerator to create neutrons by spallation to support the chain reaction. Looks like 2004 will be remembered as the year when denial of "Peak Oil" came to an end. Time to fetch my old field notebooks and check the sketches of an improvised particle accelerator. Nowadays I could do the math on my Powerbook. Talk about a Cray 3 in your backpack. Maybe it's time to do a nuclear energy startup?

The progress page by John McCarthy gave me back my optimistic smug grin. No wonder Paul Graham called him the "old guy with the beard" at ILC03. Seems like McCarthy hasn't entirely given up on humanity.

Via Bjoern Lindberg in comp.lang.lisp.

Kent M. Pitman quote from a thread in comp.lang.lisp:

A Lisp identifier is a symbol, not a piece of text.  Some code is 
constructed entirely from programs and never even goes through the
text phase and has no such thing.

All characters are, in principle, allowed in a symbol.  You have to
use \x or |xxx| escaping to get some in.

If your question is about symbols, rather than about identifiers, 
that's a legit thing to ask, but is a completely different matter.
Not all symbols are identifiers, though.

Most languages are parsed from text to program, with no intermediate
phase.  In Lisp, text (if there was any) has been parsed prior to the
time that expressions start to become considered as programs.  Lisp 
programs are not made out of characters, they are made out of structured
(i.e., already extant and composed) objects  (conses, symbols, numbers,
etc.).

Usually, when asked about Lisp I quote Paul Graham:

Believe it or not, there is a reason Lisp code looks so strange. Lisp doesn't look this way because it was designed by a bunch of pointy-headed academics. It was designed by pointy-headed academics, but they had hard-headed engineering reasons for making the syntax look so strange.

Frode Vatvedt Fjeld just announced on comp.lang.lisp that his Common Lisp OS development platform for x86 systems is now available at common-lisp.net. Great!

Stop reading right now and take a look at your desktop. How many things are you doing right now in addition to reading this column? Me, I've got a terminal session open to a chat room, I'm listening to music, I've got Safari open with three tabs open where I'm watching Blogshares, tinkering with a web site, and looking at weekend movie returns. Not done yet. I've got iChat open, ESPN.COM is downloading sports new trailers in the background, and I've got two notepads open where I'm capturing random thoughts for later integration into various to do lists. Oh yeah, I'm writing this column, as well.

I'm so glad Erik Naggum is back to comp.lang.lisp! Hip Hip Hurray!
Welcome back Erik.

Donald Fisk wrote a version of Life [1] [2] [3] in MIDAS assembler for ITS.

Life was invented by John Conway. He is the same guy who also discovered surreal numbers. Donald Knuth wrote a very good book about surreal numbers.

One of the first exercises in Etudes for Programmers by Charles Wetherell is to implement Life. This wonderful book teaches programming like no other book before or after. Sadly it has been out of print for 25 years.

I think Edward Fredkin was first to state that the "universe is a computer program". Daniel F. Galouye wrote the best book about this idea which was published under the titles "Simulacron-3" and "Counterfeit World".

Regarding your 13 Jan blog entry: good for him, but there was already a Life program written in Midas for ITS when I showed up at MIT in 1976. It was a lot longer than Donald Fisk's one, and was very, very, very fast. It was one of the programs I studied to learn how to program in Midas; unfortunately, I did not realize that it was coded in a very opaque style... I don't know whether any version of this program still exists. It was called "MLIFE". Whoever wrote it had left the lab by the time I showed up. Bill Gosper would probably remember who wrote it (Gosper had also left by then, but I met him later).

The absolute, hands-down best Midas program I ever read was COMSAT, the mail transfer agent, by Ken Harrenstein. He adopted a set of programming conventions and followed them carefully, commented clearly and articulately, and so on. I see that Donald Fisk's program uses Ken's macro package, from the KSC directory. (It stands for Kennedy Space Center.) I helped Ken Harrenstein maintain it, a little bit. I think I am the author of the SUPDUP utility, which is probably entirely useless these days on KLH-10's. I was only doing Midas programming for maybe half a year before Richard Greenblatt started me on the Lisp Machine in the summer of 1977...

-- Dan

OK, the answer is that the original Life program at AI was written by Mike Speciner. The core algorithms were re-written for speed later by Steve Root, and that plus Mike's user interface are, as far as anyone can reconstruct, the MLIFE program that I encountered when I showed up. By then Speciner, Root, and Gosper had all moved on.

-- Dan

I found this nice quote while reading boingboing.net:

Planning to write is not writing. Outlining, researching, talking to people about what you're doing, none of that is writing. Writing is writing. . . . Writing is like driving at night in the fog. You can only see as far as your headlights, but you can make the whole trip that way.
--E.L.Doctorow

Most of the time software development works exactly like this. If you're lucky, you can use such marvelous tools as Common Lisp and Emacs. Explorative programming in a language other than Lisp is pure torture most of the time.

Here is another good quote by Erik Naggum about the relationship between writing and coding:

Like other information should be available to those who want to learn and understand, program source code is the only means for programmers to learn the art from their predecessors. It would be unthinkable for playwrights not to allow other playwrights to read their plays, only be present at theater performances where they would be barred even from taking notes. Likewise, any good author is well read, as every child who learns to write will read hundreds of times more than it writes. Programmers, however, are expected to invent the alphabet and learn to write long novels all on their own. Programming cannot grow and learn unless the next generation of programmers have access to the knowledge and information gathered by other programmers before them.
--Erik Naggum in comp.lang.lisp

Richard P. Gabriel wrote a very good book about the relationship between writing and programming. His Patterns of Software is available online at RPG's site.

Paolo Amoroso wrote a short article in comp.lang.lisp about Movitz, a Common Lisp OS development platform created by Frode Vatvedt Fjeld. Very cool!

Wow, this is a nice surprise: "Hackers and Painters", a collection of Paul Graham's essays, is going to be published by O'Reilly in May.

Now, does this make a new trend? Next thing up is someone starting to build Lisp Machines again?
...Just kidding. Or hoping?

I started this new year with my family at a remote Dutch beach house. While staying there I edited the print edition of "Successful Lisp" by David B. Lamkins. It is a really good book. Of course, being the publisher, I'm a bit biased, but it is a good book.

I also read "Darwin among the Machines" by George B. Dyson. It is an inspiring book and although he does not mention the future Singularity, first described by Vernor Vinge, he gives a good account of the history and the the present of men and machines. His Olaf Stapledon citations reminded me of my childhood dreams of an unbounded future. Later, during my twenties, the future seemed to be in limbo. Or to quote Calvin from The 'Indispensable Calvin And Hobbes:

"You call this the future? Ha! Where are the rocket packs? Where are the disintegration rays? Where are the floating cities? I mean, look at this! We still have the weather?! Give me a break!"

This changed when I read Engines of Creation : The Coming Era of Nanotechnology by K. Eric Drexler. Nanotechnology seemed to make AI, longevity and interstellar travel thinkable again. Software still was a big problem, but we had Lisp Machines to help with that, right? And then we all got stuck with Intel PCs, the lowest common denominator. Oh how the mighty have fallen!

Another book I can recommend is The Mystery of the Aleph : Mathematics, the Kabbalah, and the Search for Infinity by Amir D. Aczel about Georg Cantor and his research into the nature of infinity. Aczel creates a richly textured environment in which the tragedy and triumph of Georg Cantor's life unfolds beautifully.