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A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

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Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#51

Post by skissane »

taeric wrote: post #45
skissane wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Not sure how this is a counter point? GCC being freely available didn't require massive corporate backing. So lack of massive corporate backing is insufficient as an explanation of Common Lisp's lack of free availability (on then-mainstream platforms) circa 1995. I think the real explanation is, at that point, the Common Lisp community mostly didn't get why it was important. And by the time they got it, it was too…

GCC being freely available is by far the exception, historically. Such that I don't really get your point. Do we know why/how GCC was able to pull off being free? And, as I said in a sibling thread, my assertion is that it took massive corporate spending for Sun to get inroads with Java. In large because they were competing with GCC.

> Do we know why/how GCC was able to pull off being free?

Because RMS is an ideological obsessive for whom software being free was more important than making money. Although he wrote a major Lisp implementation himself (Emacs Lisp), he saw C as the more pragmatic path to making free software widely available than Lisp. Also, as a former employee, MIT gave him a lot of (in-kind) support.

(Actually GCC was not the first free compiler. RMS started out planning to turn LLNL's free compiler for a Pascal derivative, Pastel, into a C compiler. But he abandoned that approach, because the Pastel compiler was a big resource hog by the standards of the time – it was initially developed to run on a supercomputer, it wouldn't work on the Unix workstation RMS was using.)

CMU Common Lisp was free, and CMU's research funding paid for it. But their focus was on Unix workstations, they never saw the value in porting it to x86 (let alone DOS/Windows). By the time the x86 port happened (done by volunteers, not paid for by CMU), Java had already taken off.

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#52

Post by SighMagi »

dleslie wrote: post #39
skissane wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was Sun's corporate backing and muscle that enabled you to get their SDK for free. You could get GCC for free before Java 1.0 was released. My personal introduction to GCC was Walnut Creek's Hobbes OS/2 CD-ROM from 1994, the EMX port. Paid for the CD-ROM, but we could have downloaded it for free if we had Internet access. EMX did DOS too, and DJGPP was also available at the same time (and ended up overtaking EMX…

djgpp + allegro That combination was killer for a broke teenager in the 90s.

That was indeed where many of my teenage hours went - hacking out game experiments in DJGPP and Allegro on our family’s 486. It was also my intro to Emacs which stayed with me for decades afterwards.

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#53

Post by dleslie »

jll29 wrote: post #47
pfdietz wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. It took a while for a good free Common Lisp to become available. Arguably this wasn't until SBCL (initial release, December 1999).

(Free) LISPs on Linux today look a bit rough, is there any implementation that turns Linux into something that has the look and feel of a LISP machine? Parentheses aside, don't expect people to pick up a language if all they can see is a REPL where the only edit operation that works is DEL(ete), at a time when all other languages have graphical IDEs with syntax coloring, context-sensitive help, single-step debugging…

No, there is not. There's no desktop environment for Linux that supports the runtime extensibility and inspection abilities of a symbolics lisp machine.

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#54

Post by wott »

housel wrote: post #46
musicale wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have never really understood people‘s aversion to parentheses A common refrain from Lisp family language enthusiasts. (Personally I prefer Smalltalk-style "conversational" syntax to Lisp-style or C-style syntax, yet it's similarly unpopular.) For better or for worse, the vast majority of programmers seem to have voted with their feet for C-style syntax (C/C++/Java/JavaScript/etc.) and its variants (Python). In a…

(Open) Dylan is surviving just fine, and we expect to do a new release later this month.

I haven't given a look at this language in a few years; is it still so that there are no enums, and that operators must be surrounded by spaces?

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#55

Post by bambataa »

wrycoder wrote: post #26
nerdponx wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think S-expressions are fundamentally too difficult to work with, without good editor support, to make Lisp anything other than a niche power tool for the highly motivated. I love CL, Scheme, Clojure, Janet, Fennel, etc. but I don't blame anyone for finding them inaccessible. I think Python, JavaScript, and Go have caught on for somewhat similar reasons, compared to Java and C#: they are easier to get started with,…

But, you always have good editor support. Lisp/Scheme has traditionally been coded using Emacs or its equivalent. With that support, the parens seem to disappear after you've been writing lisp for awhile. Beginner lispy languages come with a suitable beginner IDE, e.g. Racket or Logo. A typical lisp statement has a leading '(' and a trailing ')', which replaces the ';' in Algol-like languages. So, one additional char…

I tried using Slime with Scheme when I was doing SICP. I’m sure it’s great when you know it well, but I kept pressing the wrong shortcut and moving things around in ways I didn’t intend and then it wouldn’t let me manually type or delete parentheses to fix things. I found it very frustrating and ended up turning it off.

Just another barrier and C-style languages seem much easier to write in comparison.

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#56

Post by Jtsummers »

bambataa wrote: post #55
wrycoder wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But, you always have good editor support. Lisp/Scheme has traditionally been coded using Emacs or its equivalent. With that support, the parens seem to disappear after you've been writing lisp for awhile. Beginner lispy languages come with a suitable beginner IDE, e.g. Racket or Logo. A typical lisp statement has a leading '(' and a trailing ')', which replaces the ';' in Algol-like languages. So, one additional char…

I tried using Slime with Scheme when I was doing SICP. I’m sure it’s great when you know it well, but I kept pressing the wrong shortcut and moving things around in ways I didn’t intend and then it wouldn’t let me manually type or delete parentheses to fix things. I found it very frustrating and ended up turning it off. Just another barrier and C-style languages seem much easier to write in comparison.

Slime did that? Slime doesn't take over the editor that much (it shouldn't prevent you from typing parentheses, I've used it for 16 years or so and never experienced anything like that). Was it paredit or another editor mode?

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#57

Post by dannymi »

housel wrote: post #46
musicale wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I have never really understood people‘s aversion to parentheses A common refrain from Lisp family language enthusiasts. (Personally I prefer Smalltalk-style "conversational" syntax to Lisp-style or C-style syntax, yet it's similarly unpopular.) For better or for worse, the vast majority of programmers seem to have voted with their feet for C-style syntax (C/C++/Java/JavaScript/etc.) and its variants (Python). In a…

(Open) Dylan is surviving just fine, and we expect to do a new release later this month.

As a Guix developer (there's a lot of Scheme and Common Lisp in Guix :) ), every few years I check on Open Dylan but so far each time there was something missing that made me unable to package it for Guix (building it entirely from source).

I've checked it a few minutes ago and Open Dylan's ./configure says to download a bootstrap compiler from https://opendylan.org/download/index.html first -- but there's no such bootstrap compiler there.

Do you have some hints on how to package it?

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#58

Post by jes5199 »

djha-skin wrote: post #50

> programming languages don't become mainstream based on their elegance or their deep utility. For any given project, the best programming language to use is the one everyone else is using for that kind of programming at that time. It doesn't have to be the language that is best or most beautiful, and it hardly ever is. As long as the currently-dominant language is adequate to the task without TOO many infuriating sh…

counterexamples: python ruby perl clojure C C++

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#59

Post by hajile »

dleslie wrote: post #5
lisper wrote: post #2

"What I came to understand, after years of work on Common Lisp and the death of Dylan, the ongoing popularity of the hideous C++, and the rise of Java, is that programming languages don't become mainstream based on their elegance or their deep utility. ... [T]he best languages very rarely take over, if ever. Some language starts being used because it has the backing of some big company or project, people doing simila…

He's overlooking an incredibly important factor: Java and C++ had capable, even enterprise quality free compilers at a time when Common Lisp environments were typically either hideously expensive or poorly supported or both. You could grab Sun's JDK for free, or GCC, or (later) Visual Studio Express at a time when the best options for Common Lisp were thousands of dollars per seat, or barely working on x86 (CMUCL did…

If this were the case, then explain StandardML which is vastly superior to Java and it's relatives in every conceivable way outside of a big corporation to push it.

Even today, a large company like google would rather spend time with an inferior language like Go than work with SML.

Re: A brief interview with Common Lisp co-creator Dr. Scott Fahlman

#60

Post by bmitc »

musicale wrote: post #37
bmitc wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have never really understood people‘s aversion to parentheses. Many languages require them in ad-hoc ways to groups expressions. For S-expressions, you give up some mild convenience and looks for extremely consistent semantics.

> I have never really understood people‘s aversion to parentheses A common refrain from Lisp family language enthusiasts. (Personally I prefer Smalltalk-style "conversational" syntax to Lisp-style or C-style syntax, yet it's similarly unpopular.) For better or for worse, the vast majority of programmers seem to have voted with their feet for C-style syntax (C/C++/Java/JavaScript/etc.) and its variants (Python). In a…

My favorite languages are MLs, particularly F#, which usually have some of the cleanest syntaxes available. It’s not just Lisp-family enthusiasts. I think it’s more for anyone that thinks rather that follows or assumes or whatever.

I actually learned about Lisp/Scheme after I had learned about several other languages.

What do people not like about parentheses? It’s normally along the lines of “well, I just don’t like them”, which can be read as “it’s not what I’m used to”. Yet, these same programmers will freely throw parentheses around expressions in an ad-how manner to communicate with the compiler in their given language. In some ways, one can back Lisp/Scheme out of popular languages by stating that instead of letting parentheses be used to frequently but not always clarify precedence and grouping and function application, they are going to be required to enforce these. Such a thing is not such a radical or unreasonable stance.

McCarthy’s original M-expressions are somewhat irrelevant. He wasn’t trying to make a programming language for software development. He was investigating it as a tool for his research.

My primary complaint about popular languages like Python, C++, C#, etc. are their irregularities. There a lot of syntax, semantics, and little quirks in the languages that make it very hard to just know the language and move on solving problems. My favorite thing about Schemes are their regularity. The social popularity of languages can’t be explained by their technical merits. It’s more due to social and historical phenomena than a technical reason.

For what it’s worth, I also like Smalltalks.

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