An excellent essay indeed! Enjoyed reading it very much.
Danny Hillis is indeed a good writer. Even his Ph. D dissertation where he describes Connection Machine is quite interesting to read (as far as Ph D dissertations go!).
Bit of trivia - the CMs were programmed in Lisp. Why Lisp?
As per Danny Hillis: "Lisp was chosen... for a combination of technical and social reasons. On the technical side, Lisp is extensible, has dynamic storage allocation, and is generally good for symbol manipulation. In addition, excellent Lisp programming environments already exist. On the sociological side, most members of the AI community, for whom the Connection Machine was originally designed, are already familiar with Lisp".
Comments
An excellent essay indeed! Enjoyed reading it very much.
Danny Hillis is indeed a good writer. Even his Ph. D dissertation where he describes Connection Machine is quite interesting to read (as far as Ph D dissertations go!).
Bit of trivia - the CMs were programmed in Lisp. Why Lisp?
As per Danny Hillis: "Lisp was chosen... for a combination of technical and social reasons. On the technical side, Lisp is extensible, has dynamic storage allocation, and is generally good for symbol manipulation. In addition, excellent Lisp programming environments already exist. On the sociological side, most members of the AI community, for whom the Connection Machine was originally designed, are already familiar with Lisp".