Keynote presentation by Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman at the fourteenth RacketCon

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The Keynote presentation by Hal Abelson and Gerald Sussman at the fourteenth RacketCon is now available at https://youtu.be/_2qXIDO-cWw

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Any plans to support emacs?

:popcorn:

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Seriously: It was interesting to hear them discuss (1) the pendulum swinging between "science" and "industry", and (2) using natural language for programming.

IMHO: The latter is an example of the former -- "industry" swinging for the fences.

Natural language might not be optimal for humans to "write code". But it's already how managers get software projects done -- natural language conversations with project managers and engineers. Their goal now is "just" to eliminate most of the other humans.

(There is a certain breed of manager who is indignant about unseen remote workers... only if they're human employees. I'm not a psychologist, so I can't diagnose sociopathy, but I know how to duck-type. :slight_smile: )

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Don't miss the special surprise at the end (around 1:05:05) :smiley:. (thanks to 'iguanathesecond' for the reminder)

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Anecdote about natural language and duck-typing: for years, I was under the impression, having never read-up about it but being aware of the term and its use in context, that duck-typing meant being able to duck under something.

That is, if some object X can duck under a bar I set for it (has property Y, e.g.), it must be the thing I am looking for.

So, yeah...

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That's great! :smile:

Let's go to the LLM prompt and ask it to summarize the thread so far; it says:

"If objects X, Y, Z walk into a bar, and Z quacks in the bar, then Z must be a duck whose cousin is a sociopath seagull manager."