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Comment by pjmlp

6 hours ago

Blame IBM and other Smalltalk vendors.

They were the ones that almost on day one pivoted their Smalltalk offerings into Java.

Eclipse still has the Visual Age Smalltalk object browser.

If you look into OS/2 documentation, and SOM (OS/2 version of COM), you will find out Smalltalk on OS/2 had a role similar to .NET on Windows.

I think AI is the revenge of Lisp, dealing with Python without JIT, and the whole 4 GLs, CASE tooling that tried to automate programming in the 1990's, this time around it goes.

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pjmlp

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bch  5 hours ago

> I think AI is the revenge of Lisp, dealing with Python without JIT, and the whole 4 GLs, CASE tooling that tried to automate programming in the 1990's, this time around it goes.

Perhaps it’s because I haven’t had a coffee yet, but I’m not following/parsing this last paragraph - can you expand?

  • pjmlp  4 hours ago

    Sure.

    Lisp was the AI language, alongside Prolog (see Japan's 5th generation computing project).

    Instead of having nice Interlisp-D and Symbolics machines with their graphical tooling, hot code reloading and machine code generation, we got Jupiter notebooks and C/C++/Fortran libraries on a pure interpreted language [0].

    Additionally in the 1990's there were several efforts to move into the next level of programming, with more human like languages, CASE tooling, RUP method (with UML), most of them failed, SQL is one of the survivors, think its declarative nature.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Programming_language_generatio...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_software_engine...

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rational_unified_process

    So while not all of those ideas caught on as expected, now we get to program in natural language, use Markdown waterfall plans for agents, integrate them with Web services, seat reading email and Internet surfing until their activities are ready for review.

    In low code/no code cloud platforms like Workato, Boomi and co, classical programming is already past tense.

    [0] - Granted now JIT is being part of CPython roadmap, and there are some nice IDEs for Python actually.