[lbo-talk] Speaking of intelligence....

[ravi]

On Nov 23, 2007, at 6:58 PM, Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> On Nov 24, 2007 12:43 AM, joanna <123hop at comcast.net> wrote:
>> A friend sent this. Very interesting.
>>
>> http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/04/technology/circuits/04pogue.html?pagewanted=1
>
> This has many techies salivating:
>
>    "There are also three programming environments of different
>    degrees of sophistication. Incredibly, one keystroke reveals the
>    underlying code of almost any XO program or any Web page. Students
>    can not only study how their favorite programs have been written,
>    but even experiment by making changes. (If they make a mess of
>    things, they can restore the original.)"
>
> This has a long tradition, actually. The "Lisp" and "Smalltalk" worlds
> had this long ago, but Windows and Unix won in the market.
>
> They went with Python, which was also used for letting gamers program
> Civ 4. Something for the techies:
> http://dlweinreb.wordpress.com/2007/11/20/xo-the-next-lisp-machine/
>

I don't get it. So a lot of the code is written in an interpreted  
language, which means you can look at the code if you want to (which  
you could do with today's AJAX/JSON driven Javascript web as long as  
the logic is on that end), which is the case with any such beast, say  
Perl, before Python became the new craze (I guess that should be s/ 
Python/Ruby/ at this point). Or with GNU or open source. Even that  
dinky little AT&T Unix PC came with a good bit of source code. And of  
course if we all ran BSD like god intended, we could even hack  
ourselves a new kernel! ;-) I don't want to knock this box, but this  
is quite a different thing from a Lisp machine, methinks.

	--ravi