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Marvin Minsky – The beauty of the Lisp language

by fxbois on 12/9/13, 10:57 PM with 47 comments

• by maaku on 12/9/13, 11:34 PM

  Please resubmit with the actual story, not your G+ profile link:

  http://www.webofstories.com/play/marvin.minsky/44

• by kirkthejerk on 12/10/13, 12:47 AM

  I got great grades in college, but could never wrap my head around LISP (Lost In Stupid Parentheses). For anything non-trivial, I cheated and handed in somebody else's work.

  There, I said it.

• by ISL on 12/10/13, 3:48 AM

  What does he mean when he says that it's not possible to write a C program that can write other C programs?

  Seems like there are counterexamples here: http://www.nyx.net/~gthompso/quine.htm

  Furthermore, it's possible to encode another programs' code into a single print statement, thereby writing one piece of code with another. As that's trivial, I suspect he meant something else. What was it? :).

• by brudgers on 12/10/13, 6:34 AM

  The Minsky clip was great, but I just spent an hour watching parts of the interview with Knuth. 50 years writing a book - there's a book about the book in there waiting.

  http://www.webofstories.com/play/donald.knuth/47