Cybernethics / Cybernéthique

I am pleased to tell you about the new release 1.74 of CL-Launch, that small infrastructure I wrote to make your Common Lisp software easy to access from a Unix command line.

Since I initially announced cl-launch on this blog, it has grown a variety of features making it more usable, such as the easy execution of cl-launch from a script, a short notation for common cases (read-eval-print of single form), the ability to dump Lisp images for fast startup, support for more implementations (sbcl, clisp, cmucl, openmcl, gcl, allegro), a small library of Lisp functions, extensive documentation, debian packages, and more.

To make it more usable, I even officially adopted the shorter alias cl to invoke cl-launch. Enjoy!

I am glad to announce my latest piece of semi-useful software, CL-Launch, an infrastructure to easily make your Common Lisp software launchable from a Unix command line.

Last month, I was thinking a lot about polyphasic sleep schedules. I didn't manage to discipline myself in such a schedule yet, and my feeble attempts only combined with procrastination into reducing my sleep time, to my ultimate psychological downfall. A more reasonable target will be to shoot for simple biphasic sleep, with a regular nap in the afternoon after a regular lunch: when at ENS, I met someone who did quite well this way, which is also the way it was done for all children in my kindergarten. When I manage that, it will be time to add more naps and do less sleep.

However, short sleep schedules have the power to bring more lucid dreaming. And with my reading about lucid dreaming, and my recurring disappointment since I was a kid at not being able to take notes in my dreams that I could leave to my waking self, I had this most interesting meta lucid dream.

Derisive comments are often made about the syntax of Lisp, as witness some reproaches on my previous blog entry. Thus the half-joking, half-serious backronym of Lots of (Insipid | Irritating | Infuriating | Idiotic | ...) and (Spurious | Stubborn | Superfluous | Silly | ...) Parentheses, and accusations that Lisp syntax would make code incomprehensible to read and error-prone to write. I will take exception to this general kind of comments, and I will argue in defense of the Lisp syntax.

Lisp has this particularity that (1) there are distinct syntaxes for data structures and for program code, that (2) code syntax is a subset of data syntax (code can be seen as data), and that (3) data syntax can be embedded easily into code syntax (by enclosing it in the QUOTE special form). It is then possible to write in Lisp a small program that executes Lisp programs seen as data structures, EVAL. The discovery of such a simple canonical correspondance between code and data is what made Lisp so great. Alan Kay called it Maxwell's Equations of Software.

So you think there is nothing interesting to say at the intersection of Computer Science and Political Economics? Well, Feynman said that Everything is interesting if you go into it deeply enough. And going deeply into it is precisely what I've been doing for ten years now. So there below are some things I have to say about Computer Science and Political Economics.

That is, things beyond the fact that both Computer Science and Political Economics are completely fallacious albeit traditional names: indeed, the former is not a Science (it is an Art, or an Engineering Enterprise, which is one and the same) and to quote Dijkstra it is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes, whereas the other is both against Politics and beyond Economics (in either the original Aristotelian meaning of husbandry, or the modern statist meaning of taxable monetary transactions). Good Computer Science is actually Lisp Lore and Craft; good Political Economics is Libertarian Human Action.

Note that if you're not too much into computing, you may skip directly to the paragraph that mention Political Economics and Education. Yes, this is also about Education.

The Evil of Academic Curricula in Computer Science
Chapter I
Parsing Considered Harmful

Flow with the Tao, and the Tao will flow with you.

I wanted to write an article on the evolution of LISP programming style, from LISP 1.0 to the latest advances in Common Lisp and beyond. But I find I haven't got time for that, so I just write a meta-article suggesting that someone could write such an article. Maybe there already exists descriptions of LISP style evolution between the 1950s and the 1970s, from FORTRAN-style to functional and object-oriented programming styles?

When discussing epistemology, and particularly when disparaging Karl Popper as a half-wit (which still makes him waaaay ahead of the usual crowd of witless zeroes who are paraded as philosophers), I often like to tell about Solomonoff Induction, this compelling solution to the problem of induction. Popper believed such solution was impossible (and redefined "induction" so as to prove his point with Hume's argument), even though all humans (nay, mammals) had been showing him wrong for millenia, and though a formal solution had been hinted as Occam's Razor (tell me about Diogenes the Cynic's response to Zeno's Paradox).

Well, it so happens that Ray Solomonoff has written a nice historical account of his discovery (kudos to CiteSeer). Lots of reflective epistemological insight there -- and a lot of other great heroes who played a role in this story, including (surprise!?) a key contribution by the founders of LISP.

Of course, Solomonoff Induction is not meant to formalize exactly the way we either think or ought to think. Most importantly, it doesn't take into account the cost of thought, which limits the depth and precision of our probability computations. But that's not the point. The point is that we can formalize the way that induction is being done, and capture in an understandable way the essence of understanding -- and its limits, as Chaitin would no doubt remark.

PS: of course, there exist or can be invented infinitely many variants of Solomonoff Induction, that will take into account constraints on computation such as costs, reversibility, etc. These variants can help serve a variety of purposes, from modelling human learning processes to building machines that learn and otherwise mine data. But the details of these variants is secondary and comes naturally; the great discovery was in Solomonoff Induction.

Drieu Godefridi, fondateur de l'Institut Hayek Institute, est un garçon que j'aime et que j'admire. Nous avons beaucoup en commun, et je suis fier d'avoir marché à ses côtés à Bruxelles dernièrement; sur le plan humain, j'aurais beaucoup à apprendre de lui, de même que de la plupart des libéraux que je connais. Cela n'empêche pas qu'il y a des divergences intellectuelles entre nous: il s'est notamment fendu en son temps d'une Critique de l'Utopie libertarienne (il veut dire par là de l'anarcho-capitalisme), qui par delà les choix contestable des correspondances mots-définitions, repose à mon sens sur une erreur d'attitude. Pour moi, Drieu est une victime profondément atteinte du Ghost Not phenomenon: trompé par les mots parce que voulant être trompé par les mots.

Information protectionists and other corporate fascist try to sell us software, goods or services under the terms of shrinkwrap licences they unilaterally define, and that they claim to bind you by your merely opening the package. Well, as a reply to such juridic abuse, I hereby introduce a solution to all these problems. Indeed, I have no less right than these fascists to impose unilateral terms that apply to people who want to do business with me. So I hereby solemnly declare that anyone who undertakes to have any business whatsoever with me is bound by the terms of following contract, therefrom known as the end-seller license.

mood: calm

Mon ami David Madore m'écrit une lettre fort pertinente au sujet de mon blog, avec comme à son habitude cette pénétration exceptionnelle qui est la sienne. Il met le doigt sur certains points essentiels qui ne vous ont je l'espère pas échappé, en tout cas qui méritaient d'être discutés. Voici le texte complet de sa lettre, et ma réponse incise. Merci donc à David.