Bay Area Lisp & Scheme Users Group

On Saturday, November 1st, we'll have a talk by Raph Levien, who is an expert in Rust and rendering on GPUs, who founded Advogato, and who designed Inconsolata, a great monospace font. His talk's title is I Want a Good Parallel Language. Here's the abstract:

We have very good choices of programming languages for the standard serial execution model, but things get painful when it comes to exploiting parallelism. It's been understood for a long time, even before Connection Machines and *LISP, that exploiting parallelism is the only way to keep scaling performance, none of the mishmash of parallel languages are entirely satisfying. Adding to the problem, parallelism is exposed at many different units of granularity, and most parallel computers have weird constraints in their execution models. This talk is largely a survey of different approaches, including threads, array languages, shader languages, and newer tile-based approaches from modern GPUs. It ends with a wishlist; designing an actually good parallel language remains an open challenge.

Next, Jeff Shrager will give a talk on reviving early AI programs like ELIZA and IPL-V. His talk's title is RetroAI: Reanimating the Earliest AIs in the Lost Languages that Predated Lisp. Here's the abstract:

I’ve long been fascinated by how code evolves. This curiosity led me into the pastime of “reanimating” some of the earliest AI systems. Over a decade ago we reanimated Bernie Cossel’s 1966 Lisp ELIZA, by layering a MacLisp adapter over Common Lisp. In 2021 we rediscovered Joseph Weizenbaum’s original 1965 ELIZA, written in MAD-SLIP (his own list-processing language), and last year we reanimated it on an emulated MIT Project MAC 7094 CTSS environment. More recently I've turned even earlier, to the Logic Theorist (LT), the first true AI system, created in the mid-1950s by Newell, Shaw, and Simon at RAND. LT was written in IPL-V (“Information Processing Language – Five”), an amazing, and amazingly ugly (!) assembly-like language that preceded Lisp by nearly a decade, but which was built around symbols, stacks, lists, recursion, and generators! In this discussion I’ll describe our efforts to reanimate IPL-V and LT, contrasting IPL-V’s assembly-like awkwardness with the clarity of Lisp’s later design, while also highlighting how many of AI’s core ideas -- such as lists, trees, symbols, recursion -- were already present in the 1950s. For Lispers, IPL-V provides a striking glimpse of what symbolic programming and AI looked like before Lisp.

Finally, we will have several lightning talks. If you'd like to give one, just let us know at the meeting, or earlier if you can.

Also, we're planning a meeting in San Francisco in December or January, and are looking for speakers. If you or anyone you know would like to give a talk on LISP, Scheme, AI, etc., please let me know.

We will meet at Hacker Dojo in Mountain View (855 Maude Ave.).

Please join us in person. I'm not sure whether I'll live-stream this time. After the talks, we'll mingle and have snacks. Good things come from meeting in person.

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