mroll

I've recently moved to this model too. I follow mailing lists and blog feeds via emacs gnus. I don't use fb or twitter bc I don't think the (content value)/(time) ratio is too low

I'm at the point in my emacs journey where I'm looking for places in my day-to-day editing that can be made more efficient by writing code that writes that code. I have implemented some helpful macros, but I think I would benefit a lot from reading macros written by a more experienced emacs programmer.

are your configs anywhere online? I'd love to read them.

I don't think any of the comments so far have addressed what EY is trying to get across with this story. He's saying we aren't very good at extracting information from data (doing science), but that we do have tools that can help us do better. I'm not sure it's worthwhile to target this argument at the highest levels of science and say "You physicists really should be more efficient about discovering a theory of quantum gravity." But I do think it's a valuable lesson to the rest of us. We may be relatively blind meatbags by default, but we can improve our own reasoning systems by leaps and bounds and probably be better for it

I'm curious to know why you think there is a tcl connection? Not saying there isn't, just don't see it myself

imo the coolest way to generate permutations https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Factorial_number_system

Vote for Aaron Swartz

How can you say that the arrival of Jesus changed the morality of the universe to be more merciful and forgiving with two world wars in the past 100 years?

I've read both of his other survey articles linked in the post. Judging by those this will certainly be interesting. Aaronson does a great job tying formal theory to applications and getting across a good mental model for the math he writes about. Looking forward to digging into this one!

I don't know many other tcl hackers, and I'm really interested in what the community looks like right now. I put that there to drum up conversation with a tcl hacker.

Wow, very interesting. Thanks for pointing out picolisp!

Lisp is an interesting thing because once you learn it, you start seeing use cases for the ideas you've picked up during the process all over the place.

Yes, everything is a string. But you can pass data around anywhere you like without worrying about coercing. A command will receive its data in string representation and treat it however it likes. So when you go to do math with the 'expr' command, 'expr' will treat its arguments as numbers.

    set x 5
    expr { $x + 3 }

'expr' receives x as the string 5 but knows to treat it as an int.

I'm not sure that's a great explanation. Maybe a decent summary of the concept of 'no types' is "the language does not presume to tell you how you can or cannot use your data."

It matters because if the braces are not syntax, you can decide what code to execute as the condition body at runtime.

    set condition-body {puts "Hello, world"}
    if { $condition } $condition-body

To get this to run, you need to splice in the condition-body like so,

    if { $condition } {*}$condition-body

But you get the point.

I have also heard that, but only from secondary sources. Here is a clip of Russell talking about the time he wrote the first lisp interpreter. He doesn't mention McCarthy being surprised, but he seems to imply that he, Russell, was quicker to grasp the idea of translating the functions McCarthy had been writing to machine code.

http://www.computerhistory.org/pdp-1/1020b307d766e0019de2b4a...

I just read a bit of documentation from the Picolisp page. It looks really cool, but can it reach arbitrarily far up the call stack? That's the quality of tcl that I don't see other places. The capabilities of 'upvar' and 'uplevel'.

[Edit] I should say "one of the qualities." The other important one is that Tcl has no types. Even all the lisps I know have types.

This example of "everything as an expression" doesn't take it as far as Tcl, though. In the above code snippet, the conditional body is surrounded by braces, which are syntax. In Tcl, the second argument to the 'if' command is also an expression, which only uses braces as a quoting mechanism, if it needs to.

Yeah the level of dynamicness (dynamism?) you can get in tcl is unparalleled as far as I can see. Having no types or syntax and access to the entire runtime at any point in the program opens up all kinds of crazy doors. But you're right, that slows it down.

But you might be interested to know there is currently an effort to get Tcl to compile to native/near-native code. Here is a paper on the new techniques being developed and a link to a talk given by one of the lead tcl core team members.

http://www.tcl-lang.org/community/tcl2015/assets/talk14/TheT...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RcrqmZV88PY&t=38s

If you like everything being an expression, check out tcl. A lot of ideas from lisp show up in tcl, especially the idea of everything as an expression. Tcl embodies this idea while also having the look of an algol-like language. Funny it can pull this off while having basically no syntax.

Nice article. Check out Paul graham's The Roots of Lisp for a similar exploration in which he shows how to build the metacircular interpreter.

> John McCarthy wrote 6 easy things in machine code

It was actually Steve Russel, McCarthy's grad student, who had the idea of writing McCarthy's eval function in machine code.

No, it's a dig at roger penrose

This looks great. The compactness reminds me of Arc, with the bonus of having all of python's libs.

tcl is also written directly in the ast. And there is a built in command, expr, for doing infix math

I'll be looking forward to reading Aaronson on this

This comment is a great representation of tcl's relevance, which is nice to see because tcl is often dismissed nowadays by people who don't understand it

I recommended Stephenson to a friend today and suggested they start with the same two :)

Hah yeah I realized that meta joke after I posted

Can I get your email? Would love to hear about that stack

There is arbitrary code transformation in tcl through subst or string map

Do you know about the sugar package? Sugar implements real lisp macros.

http://wiki.tcl.tk/11155