The LISP defender

This is me. A CS major about to graduate. (´・ω・｀)

I go to the worst possible school in america. MIT.

The kids here are just brogrammers and webdevs, and dumb idiot girls who dress like sluts have neon colored hair and can't even code, and are all really mean bullies.

The thing is I always have my Dijkstra book with me everyday in all of my classes. I have decent grades and I love reading papers from the greats like Knuth, Dijsktra, McCarthy, Sussman, Steele, The list just goes on and on.

The kids at my school mostly read horribble blogs like Ragenwald (2.0) beta, Coding Horror, r/programming, all of thaht. My favorite blogs the top 3 are: lambda the ultimate, olegs kiselyovs homepage, and the codeless code.

One day this idiotic and slutty girls comes up to me and asks what I'm reading.

"OMG!!! Like what are you reading to!!!LOL"

"Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Algol 60" I say.

"OMG!!1!! You read OLDDD Stuff. THATS OUTDATED AND FAGGY LIKE FORTRAN! NODE.JS AND ARE BETTER!!!"

"like fortran??"

"OMG LIKE EVERYBODY!!! HE READS SPECIFICATIONS FROM THE 60s!!!! WAT A FAG"

Everyone procede to look at me.

"AHAHAHA!! GET OUT OF HERE AND TAKE YOUR STUPID MANUAL"

I turn to walk away and try not to cry...

and then it wells up inside me.. I turn around I just fucking say it:

"Look here you dumb slut. Don't you ever say that ALGOL 60 is for fags or outdated. ALGOL is legendary. They created BNF what everyone uses to specify syntax. The entire compiler was bootstrapped by hand compiling the implementation after the wrote it. node.js is for fags. ALGOL influenced scheme and so many other structured languages it's a legend. So just remember this: ITS NOT FOR FAGS!! GOT IT!!!!"

I then proceede to walk out singing my favorite song "The eternal flame/God wrote in lisp code - julia ecklar" out loud.

The girl starts to cry.

I am now know as "The LISP defender" cause of that day. Know everyone learns to never fuck with me and my programming texts. And to this day I am glad I stood up to this girl. Keep structured programming alive, don't let it die out.

I was a lisper until I discovered machine learning.
I don't care about the language I'm writing in anymore, my ultimate goal is to devise a general learning algorithm (think scaled up reinforcement learning a-la deepmind) then train it to display interesting competencies.
An example of competency is generating programs from dubious natural language specifications.
Imagine programmer-instances, engineer-instances, mathematician-instances, all trained on their own different curricula by the same algorithm.

We have reached the endgame, guys. Replacement of human specialists with appropriately trained DL models running on cheap cloud instances will happen in 1-2 decades.
It's already happening.