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

Post by twoodfin » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 12:24 AM UTC

hajile wrote: post #59

dleslie wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Post by Animats » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 12:30 AM UTC

rjsw wrote: post #68

Animats wrote: post #63

The early LISP crowd just didn't get the concept of making a product. The idea that eventually you generate an executable and leave the development environment behind was totally alien. I used Berkeley's Franz LISP in my years at the aerospace company. That was a compiler which generated .o files. So they were close to being able to do this. But you didn't link the .o files; you had to load them into the development…

Franz Lisp could generate executables from the beginning, the debugging features didn't add much to the size.

Post by layer8 » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 1:16 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #65

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.

The syntactic consistency is at the same time its downfall: everything looks the same. (Functional languages like Haskell have a similar problem.) It’s more accommodating to human cognition if at least some part of the complexity and diversity of conceptual constructs in programming is represented in the syntax, meaning a certain range of different syntactic constructs that humans can attach meaning to. There is a sw…

Post by headhasthoughts » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 1:34 AM UTC

dannymi wrote: post #57

housel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(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 bo…

Post by bmitc » Sun, Nov 13, 2022, 1:53 AM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #73

bmitc wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can understand this argument. However, at the same time, S-expressions do allow for rather expressive function names not usually available in other languages. various arrows, question and other punctuation makes, etc. can make for some nice function names. I do agree with the sentiment to some degree though that it all looks the same. In an aesthetic sense, there is something I do like about it though. Being a fan…

> expressive function names Yes, but those are effectively library conventions, not fixed properties of the language. Maybe more importantly, names aren’t a structural construct, like a for loop or a class definition. And, arguably, you can have similar syntax in other languages, like e.g. `!` in Rust or the type sigils ($, @) in Perl, except that here you can be sure of their semantics.