@vnikolov @dougmerritt @screwlisp @nosrednayduj

I feel like I've written this before, so apologies if there's some duplication. I guess there's a lot of things I say more than once. But someone once taught me that when people repeat themselves, instead of complaining, you should just hear them as saying it's important. (I'm probably repeating that, too, but hey .. it's important)

I don't take Moon's insights for granted, but the MIT AI lab was full of gifted people. Dave Moon, Tom Knight, Mike McMahon, Richard Greenblatt, Bernie Greenberg, Dan Weinreb, Howard Cannon, Guy Steele, JonL White, Bob Kerns, Jeff Golden, Ellen Lewis, Richard Bryan, Earl Killian, Gene Cicarelli, Richard Stallman, Danny Hillis, Alan Bawden, Glenn Burke, Henry Lieberman, George Carrette, Jonathan Rees, ... and of course Ron Rivest, Vaughan Pratt, Chuck Rich, Richard Waters, Gerry Sussman, Hal Abelson, Carl Hewitt, Pat Winston, Pete Szolovitz, Bill Martin, Marvin Minsky.

I'm probably leaving many out, as these are just those that spring quickly to mind. But these people were the fabric of the AI Lab and the Lab for Computer Science at Tech Square, where my office was. I knew some of them better than others. Some just as passing acquaintances or people who gave talks or taught courses, but many of them well enough to say hi to or chat about things. Some I interacted with more. Some got cc'd into email and I came to know them through bug reports or fixes.

I write this message is in context of an assertion that I should pay attention to the specialness of one person. And I don't mean to name drop, though it surely must sound like that, but just to paint a scene of how dense that place was with fascinating and talented people.

There were open araas where people collected, some referred to as playrooms, where people had interesting exchanges. But they were the "ordinary" people of that community, not because they were any of them ordinary, each was special, but because with people like that around, the kinds of conversations one has as ordinary chitchat or routine matters of concern is different than with people you might meet on the street.

You could walk up to anyone and ralk to them about anything. Moshly no one stood on credentials or used titles. Often login names, which might be first names or initials. What mattered was to be interesting and so it was a soup of perpetual insight and interestingness.

It was the colocation of such people, as much as any individual, that caused things They were each contributing, of course but also driving each other to solve hard problems and make each other laugh. The funnies for the Sunday Morning Edition of the pitmanual show examples. https://maclisp.info/pitmanual/funnies.html
Pay attention to the headers, not just the message content. But also the complexity of the discourse

So yes, back to the context of this message thread, it might seem deep, the idea of two levels of recursion in errors, but that was routine discussion in a community like that, people who thrived on complexity.

I was privileged to be there at all. A great deal of dumb luck. And yet if one stood always in awe and didn't just dive in and be part of it as ordinary practice, one missed the real opportunity to live it.

As for the luck part, for anyone on LinkedIn, I recently wrote some rants about that in conversation on this post.

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/giantsandbox_when-people-say-if-you-dont-like-your-activity-7448761105188933633-LPce
(My first comment is in response to a comment by Joseph Kim.)

TL;DR I think it's the responsibility of those privileged with such luck to make sure others less fortunate aren't left behind. To the extent that we succeeded, it was out of a sense of community and for the purpose of community. No one can do everything on their own, nor should they have to.