Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

archive.org

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 109 posts

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#61

Post by tssva »

sizzzzlerz wrote: post #53
protomyth wrote: post #10

I 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…

Byte, in it's heyday, had the best cover illustrations of any magazine published before or since.

I would put The Saturday Evening Post cover illustrations by Norman Rockwell ahead of the Byte cover illustration.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#63

Post by [deleted] »

FullyFunctional wrote: post #4

Ah I miss the old Byte Magazine (like people miss the NES or PS1 etc). The ads looks completely insane with 2022 glasses on - who'd buy a random 64 KB ram extension for an S-100 bus? What was the market for this? Couldn't have been large.

[deleted]

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#64

Post by abecedarius »

bmitc wrote: post #55
susam wrote: post #13

The 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 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." Whelp, the lack of an Oxford comma there really through me for a loop until I continued reading. Anyway... > "Our experiences, especially with young students, indicate that programming in LOGO may serve as a brid…

Turtle Geometry is still worth checking out. The value is in working through the ideas, and details of Logo take up very little of the book.

(I've only glanced through CS Logo Style and haven't seen the other two.)

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#66

Post by spirographer »

projectramo wrote: post #29

Love these ads. There were almost as many computer companies back then as there are crypto currencies now. For a mere $1595, you got a 16k computer with microsoft basic but the best part is that it comes with 2 Z80 chips. Not sure how much a Z80 chip cost but surely the user would prefer an extra 8k or whatever. Best part is that you get to learn how the computer works by building it. You can see why user testing is…

I was a teenager, desperately looking for the cheapest possible system (because I couldn't afford any of them). And I would longingly read all the ads hoping a miracle wold happen. Later on I learned that one of those companies was named after the college dorm where the computer was conceived. So cool.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#67

Post by sbf501 »

266 pages of well-written, edited, fact-checked electronics and computer programming. Monthly. Let that sink in.

There is so much good info packed into this one issue, it is worth terabytes of crap on stack overflow. Clearly there was less information back then, but it was far higher quality.

I'd like to understand how C came to dominate the world when LISP could replace all of the scripting languages we used today. Was it tooling on cheaper machines that made C so popular? Or that it was closer to ASM than LISP? I never really formed a good opinion on this, I'm missing lots of history.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#68

Post by bmitc »

abecedarius wrote: post #64
bmitc wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "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." Whelp, the lack of an Oxford comma there really through me for a loop until I continued reading. Anyway... > "Our experiences, especially with young students, indicate that programming in LOGO may serve as a brid…

Turtle Geometry is still worth checking out. The value is in working through the ideas, and details of Logo take up very little of the book. (I've only glanced through CS Logo Style and haven't seen the other two.)

I think the same basically goes for any of those books. One could easily port the code to Racket, for example.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#69

Post by dragonwriter »

bmitc wrote: post #55
susam wrote: post #13

The 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 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." Whelp, the lack of an Oxford comma there really through me for a loop until I continued reading. Anyway... > "Our experiences, especially with young students, indicate that programming in LOGO may serve as a brid…

> It's disappointing to me that Logo died out and didn't remain around or evolve

But it did remain around and evolve.

See, e. g.:

StarLogo Nova: https://www.slnova.org/

NetLogo: https://ccl.northwestern.edu/netlogo/

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#70

Post by earleybird »

kazinator wrote: post #6

The article about the Lisp interpreter written in 6809 machine language describes a stackless garbage collector which uses the pointer-reversal trick for traversing the heap. > "The author's system uses the pointer reversal method, and he will testify to the unlimited number of obscure problems which can appear during the debugging phase of its implementation." :)

They don't cite[0] quite possibly because they independently discovered it as did others like L.P. Deutsch (who sometimes is prepended as Deutsch, Schorr, Waite). It stands out for me as something I ended up working out as an improvement for an implementation of LispKit Lisp[1] sometime around 1982. Imagine my surprise when I came across a reference to DSW describing my 'little pointer trick' :-)

[0] https://xlinux.nist.gov/dads/HTML/SchorrWaiteGraphMarking.ht...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lispkit_Lisp

Post reply on HN