Re: forth/fifth generation languages?

[agate!spool.mu.edu!uwm.edu!linac!uchinews!news@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU (Dave Griffith)]

In article <1993Aug9.084733.16628@rulway.LeidenUniv.nl>  
ruiter@ruls41.LeidenUniv.nl (Jan Peter de Ruiter) writes:
> In article <FOUTS.93Aug8152353@cello.hp.com>, fouts@cello.hp.com (Marty
> Fouts) writes:
> 
> |> fifth generation:	A myth the Japanese spent a *lot* of money on
> |>   About a decade ago, MITI decided it would spend 10 years and a lot
> |> of money applying AI to programming, thus solving the software crisis.
> |> The project spent its money and its ten years and just recently closed
> |> down with a wimper.  It looks a lot like programming languages have
> |> gotten about as good as they are going to, probably peaking at C, and
> |> that we are currently in a period of regression, including such
> |> languages as Ada and C++.
> |> 
> 
> Unfortunately, you're not telling us what the goal of the 5th generation
> languages was. I only know that they failed, but what were they trying
> to do?
> 

Hell, most of the time they barely knew what they were trying to do, why should
  
you?  The idea, cynically put, was that with sufficiently advanced hardware and
  
some fancy new language constructs, functional and logic programming would be  
practical for large-scale use.  It was thought that these would be necessary  
for the advanced applications of the 21st century (speech and text recognition 
 
were especially targetted application areas).  Unsurprisingly, this turned out 
 
to be money down a rat-hole as the rest of the world went to OO.  The fifth  
generation project is just about the perfect thing to point to when someone  
tries to argue for government direction of computer science research. 
--
Dave Griffith, Information Resources, University of Chicago,
Biological Sciences Division               dave@delphi.bsd.uchicago.edu
"The faults in bad software can be so subtle as to be practically theological"
--Bruce Sterling