Re: Just take me out back and shoot me...

Did you run the code? When I did a lot of these early experiments the code
looked good on the surface but it fell apart when I tried to run it, very
quickly.

Regards,

Eben Bruyns


On Fri, 8 Aug 2025 at 08:12, David McClain (as dbm at refined-audiometrics
dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:

> Interesting, thanks for the pointers…
>
> I asked it to show a Lisp implementation of a thread-safe FIFO queue that
> supports multiple concurrent readers and writers. (Hint: MP:MAILBOX).
>
> Claude did a respectable job with a Bordeaux-Threads portable
> implementation.
>
> I then asked it to recode in Lispworks Common Lisp, and it did a decent
> enough job, using LW MP.
>
> But then I pointed out that it could just as well have used an MP:MAILBOX
> and be done. So it abided by my wish, embedding an MP:MAILBOX into its FIFO
> Queue structure, alongside a Size counter and an MP:LOCK to make updating
> the Size safe.
>
> That is funny, to me. MP:MAILBOX-SIZE and MP:MAILBOX-COUNT already exist
> in MP, so there is really no code needed at all, beyond just generating an
> MP:MAILBOX.
>
> Just sayin… But I’d give Claude a serious B+ from what I see so far.
>
> I really do think that these kinds of encyclopedic tools, with connective
> intelligence, would be most useful for understanding and using frameworks,
> like CAPI, as you have already mentioned.
>
> - DM
>
> > On Aug 7, 2025, at 11:23, Alexey Veretennikov <
> [email protected]> wrote:
> >
> > Yes indeed Claude could write Lisp code now. I've tried and it works for
> some primitive functions/algorithms. I successfully used it with Aider for
> CL code.
> > I would love to see some MCP agents with integration to popular APIs in
> LW, so we can try to use it at least in chat mode with ability to modify
> open files.
> > Would be also nice to have a feature in Editor for auto-reverting
> modified buffers, so integration with command line tools like Aider could
> be easier. I've submitted the feature request for that and hope it is not a
> huge work to do, it would help a lot.
> > Would be nice as well to have a terminal with ansi colors support so we
> can launch i.e. aider directly from LW.
> >
> > BR,
> > /Alexey
> >
> >
> > On Thursday, August 7th, 2025 at 20:14, Arnold Noronha (as arnold at
> tdrhq dot com) <[email protected]> wrote:
> >
> >> Claude (not Claude Code, not Claude Chat, but the Anthropic API)
> >> actually writes Lisp really well, as long as you give it the right
> >> context because everyone's Lisp code looks different.
> >>
> >> It even handled CAPI quite nicely, even though it hallucinated a bit..
> >> but close enough to guide me through my first CAPI app.
> >>
> >> It's also remarkably good at writing Elisp, which makes it easier to
> >> write dev tools. I used that to bootstrap a little Cursor like Emacs
> >> integration, which I use almost daily now.
> >>
> >> Thanks,
> >> Arnold
> >>
> >> On Thu, 2025-08-07 at 09:59 -0700, David McClain (as dbm at refined-
> >> audiometrics dot com) wrote:
> >>
> >>> I finally caved in this morning and tried ChatGPT. I am long familiar
> >>> with “AI” in its present state, having directly used Perception,
> >>> Kohonen, and Probabilistic networks back in the 1990’s for control of
> >>> “rubber mirrors”, target tracking for missile guidance, etc, etc.
> >>>
> >>> I was holding off because this is not AI, just a recognizer of
> >>> patterns with an ability to generalize. Komogorov wrote a theorem a
> >>> while back that a feedback perceptron network with N inputs +
> >>> feedback can emulate an Nth degree attractor in high dimensional
> >>> fractal systems. That’s why we could use the rubber mirror to cancel
> >>> out atmospheric scintillation of star images on the Kitt Peak 4m
> >>> telescope back in the early 90’s.
> >>>
> >>> At any rate, I saw a video expressing the virtues of ChatGPT for web
> >>> search, rather than Google search, since it doesn’t offer up tons of
> >>> extraneous finds based on whomever paid the most to get in front of
> >>> your eyeballs. And so I tried it, and it does work better.
> >>>
> >>> But, as long as you already know a great deal about some topic, you
> >>> are prepared for its hallucinations (which I have yet to see), and
> >>> its tendency to offer up a consensus opinion as authoritative fact.
> >>> You have to push back and challenge its answers, and that generally
> >>> provokes an even better response.
> >>>
> >>> So, along the lines of a discussion about Transactional Conventional
> >>> Hewitt Actors, it offered up the statement at one point about
> >>> parallel concurrent activation of the same Actor by two different
> >>> dispatch threads sending two different messages at the same time:
> >>>
> >>> "You retry only if the actor behavior was concurrently
> >>> changed, which is rare in practice if messages are processed
> >>> quickly.”
> >>>
> >>> I challenged that as an opinion, not fact, since I had the experience
> >>> of a debug monitor Actor becoming overwhelmed by parallel message
> >>> collisions in my Ionosphere Watch System:
> >>>
> >>> "Your statement "You retry only if the actor behavior was
> >>> concurrently changed, which is rare in practice if messages are
> >>> processed quickly." is just a (hopeful) opinion. It could very well
> >>> happen that collisions in some situations could happen very
> >>> frequently.”
> >>>
> >>> To which it acknowledged my criticism as valid, and offered an even
> >>> better answer, mentioning an exponential back-off, like we use in
> >>> TCP/IP and Transactional Memory systems.
> >>>
> >>> That was an interesting suggestion, but I can probably get by just
> >>> using a “put the collision message back on the queue for later
> >>> delivery attempts”, instead of a direct immediate retry with an
> >>> exponential back-off.
> >>>
> >>> At any rate, I am now willing to concede that ChatGPT may be useful,
> >>> especially if you are alone in a room staring at 4 walls. But I’m
> >>> still not willing to consider it true AI. And I haven’t allowed it to
> >>> write any Lisp for me. Maybe someday...
> >>>
> >>> - DM
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> _______________________________________________
> >> Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users
> >> [email protected]
> >> http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Lisp Hug - the mailing list for LispWorks users
> [email protected]
> http://www.lispworks.com/support/lisp-hug.html
>