[LispM-Hackers] Outageness

[John Morrison]

Hi;

Paul Fuqua wrote:

>     I certainly agree that for an emulator usable to run the system _as a
>     system_, you most likely will want a macroinstruction level emulator.
> 
> Well, that is my interest.  I'd like to perpetuate the Explorer

Mine, too.  I fondly remember the days when the Symbolics I worked on
tried to think in 1/2 MWord of memory, at 1MHz.  Now I've got 2GHz
Windows boxes that have 512MB, page their brains out when writing a Word
document (??), and crash 3 times a day.  This neither smells nor feels
like progress.

> environment.  I used to write microcode for the darn thing so that
> aspect is less interesting to me now.  (But fast simulators are a
> current interest, and the SIMICS people are doing good things with
> system simulation, and Explorers only ran at 6, 25, or 40 MHz so
> reasonable performance is reachable with a reasonable slowdown factor.
> Hmm.)

That's the Plan.

On a personal note, at the Day Job, we are trying to do some Applied AI
stuff.  What appalls me is how thoroughly C-thinking (I do not see huge
differences between C, C++, and Java) has straitjacketed the new
graduates.  They simply "do not get it" when it comes to shaping the
language to the problem.  The whole "extensible language" thing makes no
sense to them because they've never seen one, and it's so far outside
their "comfort zone" that they are absolutely not going to go there
without some hand-holding, and there are very few left who are capable
of doing so.   (It is my opinion that if you need either a "scripting
language" or multi-megabyte, S-expression-based "data" files, then
that's a Sign From God that your primary language is seriously
hamstrung.)

I would be very happy if there were lots of new CL programmers hacking
about.

-jm

-- 
==== John Morrison
==== MAK Technologies Inc.
==== 185 Alewife Brook Parkway, Cambridge, MA 02138
==== http://www.mak.com/
==== vox:617-876-8085 x115
==== fax:617-876-9208
==== jm@mak.com