Ron Garret

I happened to be at the 40th LISP anniversary conference 1998, with John McCarthy. Erann's JPL talk about the Remote Agent was by far the most interesting talk there, and I still consider it one of the best conference talks ever.
I'd really like to see the slides being published.

I also attended this famous "dinner with eric" at the same conference, actually sitting next to Eric and Erann was sitting on the other side: http://blog.rongarret.info/2009/06/my-dinner-with-erik.html
I liked Eric a lot, and really enjoyed his troll interactions with Xah Lee, one of the most famous trolls ever. Unfortunately he didn't know exactly who to pick a fight with. Erann was clearly the wrong target. Erann hated it.
But as outsiders who stayed out of those silly fights we learned a lot, what boils in a LISPer. XML especially. Or Windows. Or special variables: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.lang.lisp/WRQkT572RQ0/OvN9X5oNq8MJ A very good CLL thread btw. Most of the people agreed with Eric, even if Erann's proposal was very good.

(I used his old name to be able to look things up. The name change happened much later, when Erann got married and choose a better name, Ron Garret.)

PS: Eric said 99 in his lugm blog post, but I'm pretty sure it was 98. http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

PPS: I found some old RA material here: https://web.archive.org/web/19991014000627/http://www-aig.jpl.nasa.gov/public/home/gat/
but mostly for ESL (the control language), not the actual RA simulation and…

> That depends entirely on whether or not real numbers can be physically represented in our universe. That is unknown.

At least some real numbers can be. Take the construction of reals from Cauchy sequences of rationals. We can easily write a computer program that produces a sequence of rationals that converges to e. To produce later terms it would have to run for a long time on a large computer, but the program still represents e.

The existence of numbers other than those which are representable as a computation on a computer is a question for philosophical debate. That is what I was referring to with:

> > The existence of those real numbers depends on philosophical debates about what "existence" means. > > Yes, I address that here: > > https://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/31-flavors-of-ontology.html

Except that you don't address that point there. You don't say anything relevant to it other than the trivial statement that existence is not a pithy value.

Again, you are showing a complete lack of awareness of literally decades of historical debate within mathematics.

> That is an earlier essay which is not a part of this series. The upshot is that the question is not whether or not the reals exist, but rather what ontological category the belong in. That is an open question.

Of course it is open. The answer depends, among other things, on your beliefs about God.

However the best that can be proven is that we have a collection of axioms which involve statements about…

JPL uses an organizational structure called matrix management. There are two orthogonal management structures, one organized according to expertise (the "line management") and another, almost completely independent one organized according to task (the "program office"). The program office's job was to win contracts, and the line management's job was to provide the people to work on the resulting projects. Through most of JPL's history, its contracts were large NASA missions with budgets in the billions of dollars, and so this management structure made a certain amount of sense. A vast amount of paperwork had to be generated to win even a single contract.

For most of my career I worked on contracts that had already been awarded, so the inner workings of the program office were completely opaque to me (and still are to this day). By the time I got involved in a project the contract had already been awarded according to a proposal that had been generated by some mysterious process that I never fully understood, and which I never actually saw. All I knew was that my line management gave me a set of account numbers, and I wrote those account numbers down on my time card, and I got paid every other week. And this was true of most of the rank-and-file engineers that I worked with.

The result of this opacity was that the incentives and reward structure for individual employees was often in direct conflict with the goals of the Lab and NASA. For example, one of the factors that…

He wrote a followup to that post on his site:
http://blog.rongarret.info/2008/02/what-are-programming-languages-for.html

Main quote addressing your question:

"One thing that many people found unsatisfying about my how-I-lost-my-faith posting is that I never really got around to explaining why I lost my faith other than saying that I saw people being productive in other languages. Sorry to disappoint, but that was basically it. What I think needs clarification is exactly what faith I lost. I did not lose faith in Lisp in the sense that it stopped being my favorite programming language. It didn't (notwithstanding that I switched to Python for certain things -- more on that in a moment). What I lost faith in was that Lisp was the best programming language for everyone (and everything), and that the only reason that people didn't use Lisp is that they were basically ignorant. My faith was that once people discovered Lisp then they would flock to it. Some people (hi Kenny!) still believe that. I don't."

I think every programmer that tries common lisp eventually comes to the same conclusion, however none of the new versions of "standard" libraries got any traction to my knowledge. Usually it's used only by the author who created it which makes their code unique in some sense, like a recent post from Ron Garret [0].

The spec is really valued by cl community and I guess I'll tell an unpopular opinion now, but I think there could be a place for an ecosystem built around one of the compilers like sbcl with all the old cruft removed and a really good all purpose standard library (similar in capabilities to the one of go for example). What that will achieve is that it will allow new developers to write the code without reading on why the things were designed is a certain way 40 years ago because of now forgotten os or hardware limitation.

Similar to what was done with neovim project

[0]: http://blog.rongarret.info/2023/01/lisping-at-jpl-revisited.html

No, I didn't follow the chain of references back to there, nor, now that I'm looking for it, do I see any such references.

The reference that I did see was to here:
http://blog.rongarret.info/2014/09/are-parallel-universes-real.html

And that page has what I would regard as an appropriate level of skepticism for it's own position. It says things like "IMO". It says what it thinks is correct, but it recognizes that it could be wrong. (Reasonable enough, when you're saying that the Copenhagen interpretation of QM is wrong. That may in fact be correct, but dogmatism is not warranted yet, and may never be.)

The links you present show a paper that puts forward a theory. Again, I'm not saying it's wrong, and it seems to make some things easier to understand. But where's the experiment that tests a prediction of this paper, which other interpretations of QM can't explain? Without that, it's just a nice theory. There are lots of those.