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Message: [QUOTE="Yegorange, post: 3300513, member: 803"] RIP, Dr. Pardee. You, [USER=27]sutomcat[/USER] and others brought back memories. The moment the Link Hall weather cam showed up I half expected something like this to be brought up. Wacky Eddie was a personal favorite. If I recall correctly, a hippie child of the 60s, ex-Harvard guy. Took us to a Grateful Dead concert ... after getting us, umm, spiritually elevated. LISP was his baby. He used it in CIS 255 to zero in on those he deemed to have the right aptitude. Looking back, he was right in many ways. We had close to 200 people sign up for the course, and only about 30 made it thru. That was the core that wound up graduating with Comp Sci degrees. Plenty of others, including those with BASIC programming experience, got bewildered by reverse Polish and those “cars” and “kidders”. Funny note is I loved LISP so much, years later I wound up taking an IT job because their product was implemented using a LISP/Scheme hybrid. It was great for data processing (as its name would imply: LISt Processor). Though they were forced by the industry to switch to Java within a few years, that triggered a long IT career for me - supporting Army (and other branches) for the past 15 years. As for APL, that was another favorite. Took the Intro to Artificial Intelligence course with world renowned Alan Robinson using Prolog - a very confusing language at the time. We saw the luminary once or twice the whole semester. Conference in Sweden, conference in Japan, etc. Prof (later Dean) Ernie Seibert replaced him basically. But it was fun. As a final freestyle project my friend (Comp Engineering major) and I wrote a 3D tic-tac-toe game on DEC-10 and APL. He did the graphics, I - the algorithm, etc. To do 3D we realized 3x3x3 wouldn’t work as main diagonals intersect, so the first player starts with an x in the middle of the cube and forces a win within 2 moves. So we did 4x4x4 and broke it up into a 4 square representation. Took some imagination to play it, but it worked. APL with its matrix manipulation was golden for this. Still have the printout (like 2 inches thick). Damned if I could understand any of it now. Saw a Windows version of the exact same idea in the 90s with a proper 3D representation of a see thru cube and balls you’d place into each slot. Looked good, but my algorithm was better :) Sorry for a long post, but I believe it‘s on topic of this thread. Being somewhat cranial and all. I’ll see myself out now... [/QUOTE]

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