This is the first installment of my hand transcription of Kentâs most recent episode on the lispy gopher climate.
Kent reads his haiku senryu and I note a pop science article on the climate crisis.
The originally intended additional guests, Vindarel and KHinsenâs time-zone-mixup is noted. Vindarelâs blog and CIEL are mentioned.
Kent briefly gives a timeline including
You can (and please do) discuss the first eight minutes on the
Please do share these pieces of lisp, web and computer science history however and whereever occurs to you.
Though climate zealots
were efficiently silenced
climate change was not
Screwlisp: Thank-you @Kentpitman@Climatejustice.social, live, for that haiku senryu. How did you define haiku and senryu by the way Kent?
Kent Pitman: Well, the haikus are supposed to be about nature and seasons and so on but nature and seasons are kind of getting blown away by changes in climate or tending in that direction, so some of my alleged haikus are meta and some of them are not using the traditional climate or the traditional seasonal framework. And so, the senryus are usually about mankind as opposed to about nature and often theyâre humorous, though I wouldnât say that anything I write on this topic is humorous, but the question of whether climate change is natural or a thing of man is sort of open to question, so I always just label it with both in case anybody is searching for one or the other, and to raise a little consciousness about the fact that the senryu artform is similar to but slightly different than the haikus. So people can control that if they want.
Screwlisp: Uh-huh, and so just on the climate crisis kind of topic, I saw when Vassil was responding to it on the mastodon there was this article by somebody named Steve, How much extra energy are we adding to the earthâs system? and he goes through some kind of back of the envelope estimations and finds weâre force-feeding earth about 2E17 calories every hour. Which is quite an interesting one. I should have put that in the mastodon link, I might add that afterwards. So that was how much energy are humans consuming versus how much hotter or otherwise energy absorbtion is happening on earth? He goes through a bunch of arithmatic that got vetted by several other climate scientists and mathematicians owing to some changes. I wish I knew⊠What is their surname? Theyâre at University of Toronto. Well, thereâs somebody named Steve at UoT.
So, today we were planning to have Vindarel and Konrad Hinsen, but they genuinely thought that the live time slot for the show was 12pm French time instead of 12am French time, so they are both sleeping at the moment, and they are going to respond to whatever we say afterwards. If I can just quickly mention what you should know Vindarel and KHinsen from.
Vindarel has the somewhat long-time lisp blog lisp-journey.gitlab.io and both Vindarel and Konrad Hinsen work on a lisp program which is focused on Shebang interpreted scripts of lisp for web purposes so I was hoping we could go into web stuff a little bit today with Kent. So you were going to share odd bits and pieces of web stuff youâve done over the ages Kent.
Kent: Well I was just saying before we went on the air because we were talking about what my background is in the web, obviously I did the common lisp hyperspec that many of the people out in the audience are familiar with and I had done the hypertext editor earlier and so that led naturally down the line, some of the time I spent I Harlequin I spent writing an HTML rendering engine for postscript technology so that we could be html-ready and be able to just print html documents.
Thereâs actually a Dilbert cartoon where Ratbert accidentally authors a web browser and I remember seeing that and thinking, âI did that!â Because when I got done with the rendering thing I realized this is probably a web browser, and I went back and changed the back end to use CLIM [See-lim] instead. To see how close it was to a web browser and it was missing the anchors, I had to implement anchors, and I had to implement a little dancing harlequin to go up in the corner because all web browsers at the time when they were busy had some little thing to keep you busy while you waited for something to run.
And then later on I spent some time writing an http server in lisp because I wanted to write a book about using lisp for the web but I spent about six months on it and at the end of that time, Franz announced AllegroServ (git) and all that hard work that I had done on my web server seemed kind of pointless because then my value proposition was not going to be âOh look lisp has a web serverâ but- âMy thing has better syntax than theirsâ and I was not very excited to compete on those particular terms.
That just set the stage for some of my beliefs about open source in general, the complexity of spending time on giving something away because it undercuts people who have invested real time in doing things and it wasnât until servers became really common that where were viable models for how to make money as a programmer any more. There was a period of time where it wasnât clear that programmers could really make money.
Screwlisp: Mdhughes just over in LambdaMOO where we are of course chatting away live is saying, because theyâve customized their display message, âmdh display: I miss OS/2 webex - you could have per-site spinning animationsâ - just kind of nostalgic for that.
Foolsbane is saying âYâknow, better syntax is no small thing.â.
screwlisp proposes kittens