Re: Paul Graham's PyCon Keynote & The Programmer's Apprentice

[Guy Steele - Sun Microsystems Labs <address@hidden>]

   Date: Mon, 31 Mar 2003 16:42:02 -0600
   From: Andrew McKinlay <mckinlay@axonsoft.com>
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   CC: ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu
   Subject: Re: Paul Graham's PyCon Keynote & The Programmer's Apprentice
   
   How about Hillis's Connection Machine and its Lisp?
   
   Andrew McKinlay
   http://www.suneido.com
   
   Steve Dekorte wrote:
   
   > It seems like a problem that needs to be address from both sides of 
   > the software/hardware fence. Right now we seem to have hardware folks 
   > trying extract parallelism out of sequential instruction streams and 
   > language folks trying to write software that runs fast on sequential 
   > processors. Both sides are assuming that one or more register or stack 
   > based CPUs are the only way to compute. Perhaps it's time to drop 
   > these assumptions and start from scratch. In other words, how would we 
   > design an ideal hw/sw to work together to make the best use of what 
   > can be done with modern chip manufacturing? Are CPUs hooked by a bus 
   > to RAM really the optimal solution? Are languages that lack explicit 
   > parallelism really appropriate?
   
   
Yeah, how about it?  :-)

FWIW, I remind the mailing list that there were actually
*two* Lisp-based languages developed for the Connection
Machine: *Lisp and CM-Lisp.  They had rather different
properties.

--Guy