GJS and SICP inspired me to love programming - before that, I only knew the rigid and cold C++ "Pyramid". Lisp is more dynamic and "organic" to me. (And I like his Babylonian wizard costume more than a Harry Potter one!)

The past decades were dull for me in terms of programming languages, compared to the era of Scheme and Prolog. But the computing industry advanced steadily: multi-core programming, map-reduce clusters, CUDA, etc. And these led to these crazy generative neural networks we see today.

I recall GJS gave several talks on this "We Don't Know How to Compute". I can't find the source and I skimmed this video and couldn't find it, but I remember he talked about how Gecko (or Lizard I'm not sure) could be transplanted with extra arms and still function. It strikes me as how much we don't know about computing, if we view biology and other things as computation.

Now, with the AI hype, these frontiers seem open again to exploration. For example, you can give AI agents goals and tools and let them act on their own, it's still clunky but it works and it's improving fast every single day. It's just that we haven't figure out the patterns, implications and best practices yet. Exciting times!