Comment by waynecochran
7 hours ago
I remember writing a Prolog(ish) interpreter in Common Lisp in an 90's AI course in grad school for Theorem proving (which is essentially what Prolog is doing under the hood). Really foundational to my understanding of how declarative programming works. In an ideal world I would still be programming in Lisp and using Prolog tools.
> In an ideal world…
I see this sentiment a lot lately. A sense of missed nostalgia.
What happened?
In 20 years, will people reminisce about JavaScript frameworks and reminisce how this was an ideal world??
I can tell you, from the year 2045, that running the worlds global economy on Javascript was the direct link to the annihilation of most of our freedom and existence. Hope this helps.
Lucky you and your multiverse. In our multiverse we vibe coded the economy until the LLM decided we needed to construct more paperclips.
Speaking as someone who just started exploring Prolog and lisp, and ended up in the frozen north isolated from internet - access. The tools were initially locked/commercial only during a critical period, and then everyone was oriented around GUIs - and GUI environments were very hostile to the historical tools, and thus provided a different kind of access barrier.
A side one is that the LISP ecology in the 80s was hostile to "working well with others" and wanted to have their entire ecosystem in their own image files. (which, btw, is one of the same reasons I'm wary of Rust cough)
Really, it's only become open once more with the rise of WASM, systemic efficiency of computers, and open source tools finally being pretty solid.
It is not nostalgia. It is mathematical thought. It is more akin to to an equation and more provably correct. Closer to fundamental truth -- like touching fundamental reality.
I also see the CL or Tcl+C or Assembly as an ideal world.