I'm 43 and I remember the death of 5th Generation Project in the
late 80s (well, I learned about it in 1990/1991) I had a CS
professor who was very lucky to have a NeXT. He was very pro
LISP, anti PROLOG but was skeptical of the future of parallel
processing and AI generally because of reports he was getting
about the failing FGCS in Japan. Handwriting was on the wall and
he already looked at his brand new NeXT with some sadness, like
a prototype of great things that won't be. [he wanted more but
this was Hampshire College, whose emphasis was still on film and
funding for the computer dept was lackluster at best] He
suggested I get some Pascal under my belt, because I had
experience in BASIC, start moving away from the VAX/VMS and
start working in the Unix environment and C, master Emacs and
THEN come back to him in a few semesters for LISP if I was still
interested. I had a friend who was doing some Neural Network
stuff as well who, in contrary to the professor, was very
excited about the future of AI and machine learning. Well, I
never got that far. I found my child psych classes more
interesting than programming, although I did take his suggestion
on a Pascal course which, to me, wasn't any much different than
BASIC, toyed around with the Unix systems but preferred the VAX
and the Internet (well, BITNET but the Internet was nice too),
mailing lists and such. Alas, money ran out in late 1991, so I
could never complete a full set of anything. Still, I got to
revisit LISP years later on a theoretical basis on my own and
was toying with it as well as finally mastering the basics of
Emacs along with Erlang (the parallel-ness of Erlang fascinated
me - this was very recent though, just a few years ago) Never
did dabble in Prolog though. I was surprised when AI made a
comeback though. I expected neural networking to be dead
forever. All the languages but C that my professors were
teaching were dying off in the 90s. Thrilled in the early 2000s
when I started to get news of robotics projects and AI starting
to make a comeback but I was still very skeptical. [mostly I was
telling Google to go through my old Usenet postings from the
early 90s and delete them 'cause they sucked up Usenet and
exposed it to people like my mother at work suddenly, so I had
to act fast to get those old posts off] Anyway, when you said
"No modern computer language" - you brought me back 25 years to
seeing dusty APL books with its weird typewriter...wide carriage
teletype machines that were being pushed aside by the green
screens... and a future direction I didn't take. No regrets
either but I'm simply glad the AI winter finally ended. I
suspect had I followed suit in my original goals I would've
either been working in linguistics/AI stuff or Theoretical
Physics and been stuck working on string theories higher math
but ended up skipping all of it thanks to no $$.. and a
mathematics professor I was counting on being on sabbatical my
first semester causing me to go into child psych as a primary
focus instead of physics, and enough classes in child psych to
help me understand people in general... perhaps in the end a far
more useful thing for me to have gotten smile emoticon
