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Symbolic Computation Questions


Hi,

One thing I read is that we are entering the age of the "symbolic worker".
I also read that these Oracle web PC's are based on the concept of "the 
network is the computer".

If a future programmer does symbolic computation using the network as the 
computer, which basically means they don't have to deal with memory 
allocation,etc. (I think this is called process and data encapsulation), 
why would they want to use a C++ variant (Java) which forces them to deal 
with implementation issues?

If the industry is moving from the present set-up of large, bloated 
operating systems on individual PC's to numerous, widely distributed 
stripped down "Web" PC's for content "consumers" along with hypermedia 
servers for content "creators", what do you think the language of choice 
on these hypermedia servers will be? Lisp? What other languages can be 
used on these hypermedia servers?

Do you think that content creators will shift from using mainly C/C++ to 
languages that allow process/data encapsulation (CLOS, etc.)?


[John McCarthy, what is the operating system you want running on that 
"dream machine" you listed on your web pages? You alread said that a lot 
of what you are doing and have done would be impossible in other 
languages - C/C++.

What do you think the people doing symbolic computation on these 
hypermedia servers will have as criteria for the servers they use, the 
languages they program in, the projects they take on? What are your 
criteria for using CL-HTTP, Lisp, and the projects you take on?


Does anyone know a more appropriate place to hash out ideas? I am sort of 
a novice programmer and I am not sure I know exactly what I'm talking 
about. :)

Someone asked me if I was going to present a paper to a conference... Do 
I have to be a tenured academic to present a paper?

PS Does anyone know if MIT allows people to audit courses there? I don't 
have the grades to get into MIT and it's going to take me a while before 
I can get those grades, but I'd like to take Gerald Sussman's Intro to 
Computer Science using SICP. Maybe I should just learn it on my own and 
plan to go there for grad school. :)

Andrew Moreno
amoreno@broken.ranch.org
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