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From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp
Subject: Re: Is this the end of the lisp wave?
Message-ID: <5332@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 14 Jan 91 06:40:52 GMT
References: <96861@aerospace.AERO.ORG> <5256@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <4178@syma.sussex.ac.uk>
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In article <4178@syma.sussex.ac.uk> aarons@syma.sussex.ac.uk (Aaron Sloman) writes:
;eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) writes:

;> It died because it was linked to AI and that died. The whole beauty of
;> list processing was that at one time it was seriously believed that
;                                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
;> thought was essentially list processing, and if you toss in recursion
;> you can accomodate self-consciousness too. A lisp machine was a machine
;> whose resident language was "the logic of thought." No one believes this
;> anymore,....
;
;Actually, having been involved with AI since about 1969 I don't
;think I've ever met any serious thinker who believed this.

I can back that up. 

;I keep finding people who say AI is dead because the AI people
;believed X and X has been proved wrong, when in fact X is so
;obviously false that nobody ever would have believed it, except
;perhaps a few badly taught students, and people on the fringes
;trying to understand a difficult discipline and latching onto
;simplified slogans because they couldn't see what was really going
;on. 

THis isn't a paraphrase of my point, I hope. I claimed that Lisp
is now COMPUTATIONALLY relative, that it does not need to be
identified as THE language of intelligence, artificial or 
otherwise. I did not suggest that AI is dead "because no one believes
that the mind is a list processor any more." The proposition that
list manipulation is intrinsic to thought is not, anyway, "so
obviously false that nobody would ever have believed it." 
It's not that obviously bad a hypothesis to propose that you represent 
lists AS lists, rather than in some other more machine-like idiom, say 
arrays. And this is by no means a banal assertion.


;Choice of language and data-types was clearly an implementation
;detail. 

Today, yes. The question is whether it was in 1969.