Richard P. Gabriel

Designed as designer

Conceptual integrity arises not (simply) from one mind or from a small number of agreeing resonant minds, but from sometimes hidden co-authors and the thing designed itself.

The structure of a programming language revolution

Engineering often precedes science. Incommensurability is real.

A pattern of language evolution

In 1992 when we completed our first draft of the History of Programming Languages II paper, The Evolution of Lisp [1], it included sections on a theory or model of how complex language families like Lisp grew and evolved, and in particular, how and when diversity would bloom and consolidation would prune. The historian who worked with all the HOPL II authors, Michael S. Mahoney, did not believe our theory was substantiated properly, so he recommended removing the material and sticking with the narrative of Lisps evolution. We stopped working on those sections, but they remained in the original text sources but removed with conditionals.

Workshop on Software Technologies for Ultra-Large Scale Systems

Given the inevitable trends towards increasing complexity of software-intensive systems, many future software-intensive systems will be ultra-large scale (ULS). Radical scale-up of systems will be manifested in many dimensions: implementation complexity, distribution, decentralization, networking, storage, and quality-of-service, dependability/security, size and structure of development organizations and methods, complexity of organizations surrounding deployed systems, and so forth. Radical increases in scale and complexity will demand new approaches to all aspects of system conception, definition, development, deployment, use, maintenance, evolution, and regulation. This workshop, the First ICSE Workshop on ULS systems, has several goals: to raise awareness of ULS systems in the ICSE community; to further our understanding of the characteristics of such systems; to explore the unique research problems of ULS systems; to help foster a community who study and build ULS systems; and to understand the role and the shortcomings of traditional software engineering concepts, methods, and tools relative to ULS systems.

Better science through art

How do artists and scientists work? The same.

On Sustaining Self

There are three approaches, I think, to sustaining the health of running systems: designed perfection, instinctual adaptation, and learning. For small programsand for increasingly large programs over time-designed perfection is a viable approach. Such software has been proved (rigorously) or rationally has come to be believed to be impervious to variations in its environment, which is itself assumed reliable using some mechanism. Software with designed perfection is typically the most efficient, because it does not waste resources on adaptation or learning. Experience has shown there is very little such software, but hopes remain high and research is active and fruitful.

InkWell: A Creative Writer's Creative Assistant

InkWell is a writers assistant---a natural language revision program designed to assist creative writers by producing stylistic variations on texts based on craft-based facets of creative writing and by mimicking aspects of specified writers and their personality traits. It is built on top of an optimization process that produces variations on a supplied text, evaluates those variations quantitatively, and selects variations that best satisfy the goals of writing craft and writer mimicry. We describe the design and capabilities of InkWell, and present an early evaluation of its effectiveness and uses with two established literary writers along with an experiment using InkWell to write haiku on its own.

I Throw Itching Powder at Tulips

Programming comes in many shapes & sizes.

in the control room of the banquet

Creativity, AI, programming, the Turing Test, and mystery.

Artificial sentiment: using machines to manage public sentiment on social media at OpenSym 2015

Social media is where public opinion is happening: where its born, where it grows / matures, and where it dies. In this talk I review techniques and approaches for machine processing of public sentiment on social media: how to analyze and understand it, how to react to it, and how to influence it. The age of artificial intelligence is upon us.