lioeters1 hour ago
The best kind of absurd experiment, pushing the limits of technology and reason, just to see if it can be done. The adventurous spirit of "What if?" and "Why not!" I love when such an idea is implemented seriously, like having a CI action to test a factorial function. I shudder at its monstrous beauty.

Is there a spark of practical potential? It's intriguing to imagine, how a Docker-like container could be a language primitive, as easy to spin up like a new thread or worker. Not sure what advantage that'd bring, or any possible use case. It reminds me of..

  2.1 Xappings, Xets, and Xectors

  All parallelism in Connection Machine Lisp is organized around a data structure known as the zapping (pronounced “zapping,” and derived from “mapping”). Xappings are data objects similar in structure to arrays or hash tables, but they have one essential characteristic: operations on the entries of xappings may be performed in parallel.
Thinking Machines Technical Report PL87-6. Connection Machine Lisp: A Dialect of Common Lisp for Data Parallel Programming. https://archive.org/details/tmc-technical-report-pl-87-6-con...
piloto_ciego3 hours ago
This is the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen and I love it.
_boffin_2 hours ago
Just my thoughts. Love that people do just because they want to do. Love it.
idontwantthis2 hours ago
So scalable! If you need to execute more functions just scale horizontally!
a11ce2 hours ago
It does allow for a pretty clean parallel map builtin...
waldrews2 hours ago
well, sure, that uses a large number of processing cycles for each small operation. But asking a frontier LLM to evaluate a lisp expression is more or less on the same scale (interesting empirical question whether it's more or less). And, if we count operations at the brain neuron level it would take to evaluate one mentally....
Pay081 hour ago
My first thought was a simple wrapper macro, but this is way more impressive and way more fun.
Shorel1 hour ago
Oh no. I both hate and love this at the same time.
andreamonaco3 hours ago
This is a nightmare XD
teaearlgraycold4 hours ago
I'm impressed GitHub managed to handle this beast:

https://github.com/a11ce/docker-lisp/actions/runs/2216831271...

500+ container invocations to compute factorial(3)