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

[Tayssir John Gabbour]

On Nov 24, 2007 4:41 AM, ravi <ravi at platosbeard.org> wrote:
> On Nov 23, 2007, at 6:58 PM, Tayssir John Gabbour wrote:
> > 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! ;-)

The blog link I offered (above) was from a cofounder of the Lisp
Machine company Symbolics.

The problem is that something like GNU/Linux isn't easily hackable.
Having the sourcecode under a free license is a precondition for easy
hackability, but not sufficient.

The Lisp Machine guy mentioned:

    "The XO does everything in Python. You can see all the code, with

    a single keystroke (that shows the code of what's running) and

    even modify the code."

In contrast, Unix doesn't invite the curious user in. "Compiling" the
Linux code is weird -- it's just supposed to be a matter of running a
simple program over data, but somehow it's fraught with difficulty and
obscure error messages.

(For those who don't know what compiling's all about, it's like when
we chew food so our digestive system can better metabolize it. A
compiler is just supposed to take a human-readable set of instructions
and turn it into a form that a computer can more efficiently execute.
Just like you're often not conscious about the chewing process, you
usually don't want to be conscious that a compiler is running,
either.)

Tayssir