Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

The S-100 bus was popular with an early generation of machines with 8080 or Z-80 processors that ran CP/M, though there were a few counter examples.

By the time I started reading Byte at the public library (1980) there were a few computers that were mass market like the TRS-80, Apple ][, Commodore PET, TI-99/4A, etc. Mass market computers were talked about a lot in the editorial in Byte but Byte was also full of ads for more exotic machines aimed at OEMs, for instance to build a cash register system for a supermarket. Cromemco, for instance, advertised harder than anybody, but it was rare to see Cromemco and other exotics talked about in the articles.

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 then in a later bullet point on page 22,

"Our experiences, especially with young students, indicate that programming in LOGO may serve as a bridge between natural language communication and reasoning and the formal and abstract symbols and reasoning in mathematics and programming languages."

This bullet point ends with,

"Our findings can at least be partly explained by the cleanliness by which the basic computational ideas are embodied in LISP/LOGO."

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!

People at MIT like Seymour Papert were aghast that BASIC became the dominant programming language for education in the 8-bit age, they were hoping they could push out LOGO as a new standard but it did not get a lot of traction.

Three years later Byte ran a special issue on LOGO which I thought was one of the best issues of Byte ever

https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08

in particular it had some great reviews of LOGO implementations for different home computers some of which were pretty strange like the TRS-80 Coco and the TI-99/4A. It was very close to the cultural peak of the 1980s before Michael Jackson dropped off the charts, the Atari 2600 went down without being immediately replaced (unless you count the C-64), etc. Byte was a lively magazine so long as the market was split up between a wide range of computers but it never really found it's niche in a world dominated by the IBM PC at the high end and the C-64 at the low end.

Speaking of which, LISP never really caught on in the 8-bit era. This issue has some articles about how you would do so but it didn't seem to shoehorn so well into a tiny machine (like the 1k of RAM on the Sinclair ZX80) as BASIC did. From the viewpoint of a kid who just learned BASIC, FORTH seemed to offer a lot of what LISP did and it was very available, even if it was a few weeks of assembly coding to write a FORTH.

I have fond memories of Allen's book Anatomy of Lisp. I guess there are only historical reasons to read it now, but at the time it felt like an introduction to wizardry.

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 though you can make a C program that writes a C program, runs "cc" on it, makes a shared object file, loads the library dynamically, and calls a function from it.)