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Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

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Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#81

Post by zozbot234 »

kazinator wrote: post #77
sbf501 wrote: post #67

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.…

C came to dominate the world because of Unix. But not directly, because Unix didn't really dominate the world other than some of the institutional and corporate world. GNU and Linux picked up the domination torch and are still working on it. I strongly suspect Microsoft was the catalyst which propelled C, absent of Unix. Microsoft had been infatuated with Unix from early on. They had their own version called Xenix, b…

The main competitor to C would have been PASCAL, and the drawbacks of standard PASCAL for low-level programming (a necessity on the computers of the day, where even ASM programming was commonly resorted to in order to eke out the best performance) were very well known. C was not perfect by any means (the segmented memory models on 16-bit x86 required non-standard extensions to support, for example) but it was a lot better than the alternative.

LISP would've been a total non-starter for serious use given its requirement for GC and being an interpreted language. Quite comparable to the dog-slow Java applets of the mid-1990s, and in fact even worse on early hardware.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#82

Post by pjmlp »

kazinator wrote: post #77
sbf501 wrote: post #67

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.…

C came to dominate the world because of Unix. But not directly, because Unix didn't really dominate the world other than some of the institutional and corporate world. GNU and Linux picked up the domination torch and are still working on it. I strongly suspect Microsoft was the catalyst which propelled C, absent of Unix. Microsoft had been infatuated with Unix from early on. They had their own version called Xenix, b…

The irony of reading this.

Until Visual C++, almost no one would bother with buying Microsoft compilers, rather going for Borland and Watcom offerings on MS-DOS, which was fully written in Assembly.

On the MS-DOS days, C was was yet another slow high level language, sharing attention with Modula-2, Pascal dialects (mostly QuickPascal, TMT Pascal and Turbo Pascal), BASIC (QBasic, Turbo Basic and QuickBasic), and Clipper/Paradox for DB stuff.

Anyone that cared about performance was using TASM and MASM for most of their coding.

When Windows finally became usable, with version 3.0, anyone that cared about productivity was buying Borland C++ for Windows, using Object Windows Library, or Microsoft's Visual Basic, only masochists were using pure C with the Win16 SDK.

Only the release of Visual C++, alongside MFC, made most devs have a second look at Microsoft's own compilers, and then with Borland's mismanagement, devs eventually jump ship from what was then Delphi and C++ Builder into Visual C++.

Microsoft was never a big C shop, as proven with the decision to ignore C past C89, which they only backtracked (sadly) due to customer pressure.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#83

Post by pjmlp »

mianos wrote: post #71
sbf501 wrote: post #67

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.…

C is much closer to the machine and very fast. When I learnt C I went to the book store. There were two C books (K&R and Byte Books C) and one Lisp book. I learnt both. Lisp was fun but, at the time, I never appreciated the introspection. It was only when, a long long time later, I learnt Python and remembered the ability to iterate the elements of a class and thought how handy that was for some programs. C could mor…

Lisp Machines, Lisp just as C, had low level primitives.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#84

Post by pjmlp »

lbruder wrote: post #78
sbf501 wrote: post #67

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.…

Worse is better. C and Unix were faster to implement new stuff as they were only 'good enough'. Lisp machines wanted to do everything 'right', right from the start, and were slower to implement new features. Unix was already winning by then... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

And now the industry is going after C Machines, as the ultimate solution to fix C memory corruption issues, the irony.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#85

Post by zelphirkalt »

PaulHoule wrote: post #58
thweoru23432 wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Metaprogramming" is a very broad term. Templates etc. might be nice, but it's hardly anything compared to what you can do with Lisp macros (there's an orthogonal issue that this power leads to unreadable code; see "Lisp Curse", but ignore it for now.).

There is this project https://github.com/paulhoule/ferocity/ which I might finish up when I'm done with the report I'm writing. It is possible to create Java expression trees with trees of static method calls that look a lot like S-expressions and stick them together into statements, methods and classes. You should be able to do the same tricks people do with LISP macros and it could work code generation miracles but…

How does this compare to Common Lisp or Scheme macros in in terms of amount of code needed to generate things? How does it compare in terms of what kind of functions and instructions are used? Can one use standard Java language to use it? Could one for example throw a for loop in there or directly write something like "class Point { ..."?

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#86

Post by hota_mazi »

zozbot234 wrote: post #79
hota_mazi wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wasn't it predictable, though? Take a look at that issue of BYTE entirely dedicated to LOGO that was referenced multiple times in this discussion. A dozen articles about the language, with listings. The screenshots? All the same, showing recursive pictures of rectangles and circles. Great. LOGO can do that. But what else? Big empty void there. Contrast that with what BASIC could do at the time... Is it any wonder LOG…

> Contrast that with what BASIC could do at the time... Is it any wonder LOGO died out and BASIC thrived? AIUI, implementations of BASIC on home computers were a lot simpler and more straightforward than LOGO or LISP - for instance, GC in BASIC was an afterthought and only applied to strings. The real competitor to BASIC back then was FORTH.

Mmmh... no.

I grew up and learned programming in that era, bought magazines, typed pages and pages of listings.

98% of the listings in these magazines were BASIC, 1% were assembly, and the rest was... well, others.

LOGO was a niche language then, and Forth even more so.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#87

Post by hota_mazi »

zozbot234 wrote: post #80
hota_mazi wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair, out of these 256 pages, 200 are really just ads. Your point still stands, but the actual substance is a lot smaller than you describe.

The advertisements are among the most interesting things about old magazines like BYTE, though. They preserve a snapshot of what the computer industry was like back then. Even the pricing information alone is very valuable.

Oh absolutely! Browsing through these pages today, I find myself reading the ads a lot more than the actual articles, which haven't aged well.

But back then... man, these ads were cancer and they made up 80% of the weight and price of the magazine.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#88

Post by bmitc »

hota_mazi wrote: post #76
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…

Wasn't it predictable, though? Take a look at that issue of BYTE entirely dedicated to LOGO that was referenced multiple times in this discussion. A dozen articles about the language, with listings. The screenshots? All the same, showing recursive pictures of rectangles and circles. Great. LOGO can do that. But what else? Big empty void there. Contrast that with what BASIC could do at the time... Is it any wonder LOG…

What could Basic do over Logo? As a few of the books I posted show, Logo is a very capable language, ignoring turtles. Was Logo in the 80s somehow less capable?

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#89

Post by quickthrower2 »

Always love the cheesy old computer mag ads.

But the "No Loose Ends" ad is pretty good. Probably the most modern sort of advertising, i.e based on an emotive pull, a dream, rather than every thing else that uses tech spec numbers, bigger is better.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#90

Post by westoncb »

lbruder wrote: post #78
sbf501 wrote: post #67

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.…

Worse is better. C and Unix were faster to implement new stuff as they were only 'good enough'. Lisp machines wanted to do everything 'right', right from the start, and were slower to implement new features. Unix was already winning by then... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Irony is the "worse is better" guy was a lisp fanatic IIRC :)
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