I have a hard copy of this issue; it predated my subscription to Byte by a couple years, but I was able to purchase it as a back issue some time in the early 80s.
Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
31–40 of 109 posts
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#32Earlier quoted context omitted.
Can you imagine cutting off the bottom 1/4 of a magazine page, writing your name and address on the order form, putting that in an envelope with a check and then waiting 6-8 weeks for your new memory card to show up in the mail?
Imagine? No. Remember? Yes. And this in an era where there was no such thing as package tracking. You got your stuff when you got your stuff. I've ordered a few things mail order this year because they were not available any other way. The wait doesn't bother me. Order confirmation comes when the bank tells me the check has been cashed. But the lack of package tracking causes mild anxiety.
Wow, what can you still order by mail but not online?
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#33I loved the old Byte issues with the fun covers (I still want to buy prints of a couple like the AI and Smalltalk covers). This particular one was a bit funny because my mom thought it was more of that D&D crap[1]. Thinking about it, reading the DMG and articles about Lisp, might make me think she had a point. 1) I should point out that my parents never bought into that whole D&D is evil craze. Star Frontiers was "cu…
Amazingly enough, you can! Robert Tinney was the illustrator for many Byte covers from the 70s and 80s (though not sure if he did this one, based on the style). He used to have a website up, but if you check archive.org you can still find his email address. If you send him an email, he’ll let you know what cover prints are available and you can order them directly from him. I recently ordered 5.
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#34The second article in this issue of BYTE has a delightful mention of Logo (the programming language). On page 20, it says, "LOGO is, up to surface structure, more or less equivalent to LISP." It further says, "The LOGO system supports two different (by no means disjoint ) environments: the Turtle, Graphics and Musicbox world (ie: peripheral devices which are controlled by a command language) and the LISP world." And…
>The second article in this issue of BYTE has a delightful mention of Logo (the programming language).
Hacker News discussion of BYTE's special Logo issue: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556>
>In my own life, I was fortunate to have stumbled upon Logo as my first computer programming language. The simplicity and elegance of Logo had a powerful effect on me at a very young age. It immediately turned me into a computer programmer for life!
I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion is.
While I have never worked as a professional software developer, computers have been a hobby all my life. I don't think the fact that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#35Starting on page 154 a now-familiar new product is introduced, and compared to Lisp as such: > Returning to the LISP theme of our current issue, Visi- Calc is an example of a tree-oriented parallel data struc- turing problem for which LISP is a most appropriate lan- guage of expression. Due to a lack of availability of LISP as a software development tool for personal computing hardware, its authors did not use LISP.…
And, in turn, whenever Joel Spolsky's "You Suck at Excel" video comes up, people discuss how Excel (and spreadsheets in general) is a functional programming language (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545&p=2#12454400>).
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#36I looked through the rest of the magazine. From the preview of the Motorola 68000:
> Coupled with the new low cost, high density memory devices with 64 K bit capacity and with even greater density coming, the personal computer will attain or exceed the power of an IBM 360 Model 30 within the next decade.
Wow. We've come a long way...
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#37Earlier quoted context omitted.
This exactly matches my thoughts. It seems that machine language and LISP are the only two languages (that i know anyway) where code and data are fundamentally the same kind of thing.
Prolog and Clojure (effectively a LISP dialect) probably also qualify, and more modern: I think that in a way JSON also qualifies.
JSON is not a programming language.
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#38Memory Lane!
Page 177 had an advertisement mentioning Alpha Micro Systems, where I worked at the time.
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#39Earlier quoted context omitted.
This exactly matches my thoughts. It seems that machine language and LISP are the only two languages (that i know anyway) where code and data are fundamentally the same kind of thing.
There are many languages that are dynamic and let you generate code and run it inside the program. For instance in Java you can generate bytecode for a class and run one of the methods. In FORTH you can write new "words" (roughly functions) that are the same as the built-in words. It is mainly languages built around AOT compilation like C, Pascal, FORTRAN and such that completely separate code and data. (I guess thou…
As a sibling post said, code is data is a different thing. https://taeric.github.io/CodeAsData.html is a fun blog I wrote on this once.
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#40It's amazing that this magazine issue is still (somewhat) relevant and interesting 43 years after its initial publication.
(I note that HN frequently has posts on Lisp as well as 8-bit systems.)
Other than HN, is there anything equivalent to BYTE in the modern era?
I do like magazines like Linux Format and RasPi, but they're focused on Linux and Raspberry Pi whereas BYTE seems to have covered all "small systems" from microcontrollers to multiuser systems (so both Linux and Raspberry Pi systems would be in scope, as would Arduino as well as Apple/Microsoft/Android/etc..) This issue also included a wide range of contributors from enthusiast developers to industry professionals to teachers and researchers.