Hi All, I'm quite interested in knowing what the VPRI list people think about the Kernel programming language with respect to McCarthy's work. By the way, if you're not familiar with LISP, Maru & Kernel, please don't comment.
In the recent months, I've done SO MUCH reading and learning... I've finally gone through and taken a look at LISP after skirting it for decades. I honestly can't believe I've missed that language in my life as a programmer - it's PHENOMENAL, anyway I digress. This has let me understand the Maru work obviously with much more clarity than before (which previously was more like wading through mud in the dark). I did notice, as I learned more and more Common LISP, that there are some deficiencies in purity and homogeneousness... (ie for example special operators) and this brings me to Kernel... Kernel purports to be the perfect tool in terms of purity, and yet so much of it is unapproachable. I hesitate to criticise someone who is without doubt far more intelligent than myself, but I find a lot of the creator's writing incredible difficult to understand. It seems to be something to do with adhering (or lack thereof) to a standardised nomenclature within its own parameters, but I could be completely wrong here. Perhaps it's just that the nomenclature of the creators of languages such as this presuppose so much understanding. It seems that it's not being written to be approachable by anyone with the required intellectual development, but rather to be approachable to anyone who has absorbed years upon years of computer science "cruft" - ie someone who has a doctorate in computer science. Also, simply, what are the "semantic inadequacies" of LISP that the "Maru paper" refers to (http://piumarta.com/freeco11/freeco11-piumarta-oecm.pdf)? I read the footnoted article (The Influence of the Designer on the Design—J. McCarthy and Lisp), but it didn't elucidate things very much for me. It seems, on a whole, that Common LISP isn't particularly uniform with respect to special operators and macros, and Kernel seeks to address that. However, it seems that Maru has a smaller "kernel" than Kernel itself does while achieving what Kernel attempts to do with a much more pragmatic approach. Am I missing things here? I'm not attempting to detract from Kernel: it seems a master work by any standard! I have to say that all of these papers and works are making me feel like a 3 year old making his first steps into understanding about the world. I guess I must be learning, because this is the feeling I've always had when I've been growing, yet I don't feel like I have any semblance of a grasp on any part of it, really... which bothers me a lot. Thanks for your thoughts, Julian _______________________________________________ fonc mailing list fonc@vpri.org http://vpri.org/mailman/listinfo/fonc
