A Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of Life (2021)(woodrush.github.io) |
A Lisp interpreter implemented in Conway's Game of Life (2021)(woodrush.github.io) |
It looks like this approach uses display bits to do calculations!? Maybe it's nice for debugging, but using these cells seems pretty inefficient!? Couldn't the pipelines and many of the logic cells be implemented in a much more direct way in GoL?
A Lisp Interpreter Implemented in Conway's Game of Life - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29661616 - Dec 2021 (85 comments)
Show HN: LambdaLisp – A Lisp interpreter that runs on lambda calculus - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32879848
Woodrush's projects are stunning. Like the warrior poet he's a hacker in the classical sense. Everything he builds just makes me think, wow, I can't believe something this cool actually exists. For example, he build a LISP engine for a 512 Byte Blc lambda calculus I wrote. I thought my own work was mostly educational, the sort of virtual machine that would never interpret more than small learning exercises but then woodrush comes along, hands me a giant binary blob of lambdas for me to feed into its standard input, and suddenly, I have LISP REPL in my terminal!
One thing that's easy to miss though, in this blog posts, is just how well the stuff he builds actually works too. Normally with hobby projects like these, you'd expect to see more bugs when it's initially announced, or at least some pain getting the thing to work. But not with woodrush. His stuff always works so perfectly that it makes life difficult on discussion boards, since the only response that comes to mind is: wow!
lol. Programming skills and expert-level understatement. Nice. This is a cool thing.
Sent from my Lisp Machine.
While the metaphor is correct.
(House(kitchen ( bathroom (bedroom))))
Surely the meaningful part of a house, or lisp, is everything else.
(((()))) Is neither a house nor lisp.
Yes it probably is, but the meaningful part is the nothing that's in there, not the parens surrounding the nothing.
A house isn't just 4 walls. It's where you live, surely that's the important part.
I'll stop getting philosophical with throwaway comments now.
If not, it's a prison.
But the house bedroom bathroom kitchen bit is more important than the (((()))).
Maybe I'm thinking about this too much (read, I am thinking about this too much) but maybe the data / use is more important than the structure