Erik Naggum

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…

>I think it's an acceptance of reality.

All of technological progress consists of refusing to roll over and "accept reality" - instead, attacking it and modifying it to suit our needs.

>There is a phase change when systems become too complex for a single human to ever understand them in their entirety.

This is how innovation dies. The disease is preventable:

http://naggum.no/erik/complexity.html

> To them, MySql is the hardware. Is it a bad thing?

Yes! It is. A programmer's finite mental capacity for dealing with complexity is consumed by an ever-greater load of accidental complexity - inconsistencies in the medium learning about which teaches you nothing. They are holes in reality. The thing that made modern technology possible is that physics, chemistry, etc. do not have "bugs." A correctly set up experiment will yield the same results when done a week from now, in Australia, etc. And in the end, there are unifying principles governing it, which will explain everything that happened in a way that teaches you something permanent. A medium with "holes", like a buggy programming system, is a universe where "science does not work":

http://xkcd.com/298/

> Some of them hopefully will dig down the stack

Wading in sewage.

> languages are not all that important

This statement is true when the languages are all equally crippled - as they increasingly are, through their reliance on an ever-sinking foundation of 35-year-old rotting OS.

I like a lot of what Joel writes, but I profoundly disagree with him on this, and I'm not alone in my dislike of accidental complexity which, which I think is now an order of magnitude greater than essential complexity. So there is a "silver bullet". It just needs someone to bite it.

The author of the article recognizes there's a problem, but is less clear on how to go about solving it. A clue is in this article by Erik Naggum: http://naggum.no/erik/complexity.html

Dan Ingalls once wrote: "Operating System: An operating system is a collection of things that don't fit into a language. There shouldn't be one." What he meant is we should migrate the functionality of the operating system into the programming language. This is possible if there's a REPL or something similar, so no need for the shell or command line. The language should be image-based, so no need for a file system. So, a bit like Squeak, or a Lisp with a structure editor.

There's still a gap between the processor and the language, which should be eliminated by making the processor run the language directly. This was done in Burroughs mainframes and Lisp machines.

Further up the "stack", software such as word processors and web browsers are at present written entirely separately but have much in common and could share much of their code.

what the hell? this is not "just coming to lisp", it's something someone wrote as a personal hack. I upvoted it and commented to encourage more lispers to post here.

Erik Naggum's essay on the subject is highly referenced and cited by people developing time and date libraries for other languages and systems:

http://naggum.no/lugm-time.html

The premiere text on time and date algorithms IS written in Common Lisp:

http://www.amazon.com/Calendrical-Calculations-Millennium-Edward-Reingold/dp/0521777526/

And here is a taste of what's out there;

http://www.cliki.net/TIMER
http://www.cliki.net/net-telent-date
http://www.cliki.net/local-time
http://www.cliki.net/Date-Calc
http://www.cliki.net/cl-l10n

Be careful with introducing monetary rewards. Rewards can sometimes have weird psychological effects on people, and may actually lessen their willingness to contribute because the task comes to be seen more as "work" than pastime [1] .

Small side-note : A special property of the Stackoverflow system is that the user's profile can actually gain a value on its own, by reflecting so well on the user that it can be included in a CV. This value is very difficult to recreate for most on-line communities. I believe that Stackoverflow profiles have become a new hunting ground for head hunters to find suitable candidates.

[1] http://naggum.no/motivation.html

From his website, http://www.naggum.no/

"I am unable to keep my company in operation for health reasons, but it is one of those things I just cannot give up. Instead of being a commercial undertaking, it is now only a hobby. Until my health improves, which it might never do sufficiently, I am generally unable to accept programming projects, teaching opportunities, or requests to advise students, although I would really like to see what I can do if you would like my input."

If you're looking for more of his, ahem, observations try his page on wikiquote : http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Erik_Naggum