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Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

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Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#101

Post by abecedarius »

bmitc wrote: post #68
abecedarius wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah. I recommend it because it goes way beyond the stuff another commenter complained about in this thread:

> 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.

E.g. the last chapter is an intro to general relativity, with a simulator for motion in curved spacetime.

(CS Logo Style also covers many topics, but it looked like they were all familiar to me as an experienced programmer. I haven't seen another book for programmers about most of the math in Turtle Geometry.)

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#102

Post by abecedarius »

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…

> Big empty void

See my comment upthread about Turtle Geometry.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#103

Post by jshaqaw »

mauriciolange wrote: post #27
aap_ wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This exactly matches my thoughts. It seems that machine language and LISP are the only two languages (that i know anyway) where code and data are fundamentally the same kind of thing.

Forth is the exact same thing.

I’m a Lisper but I love Forth and Forth people. The only computer subculture as devoted to their weird little secret ancient Jedi art as we parenthesis shufflers.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#104

Post by jshaqaw »

zozbot234 wrote: post #81
kazinator wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

Maybe I’m just projecting my own childhood as a universal case, but for a computer passionate teenager, Turbo Pascal was pretty much the sweet spot between kids tools like Basic (particularly pre qbasic if my memory serves) and C which I admit was still inscrutable to me. I’m trying to teach my middle school kids the fun side of programming and 35 years later I can’t find an IDE as perfectly integrated for debugging as I had in Turbo Pascal 5.

The folks I always had mad respect for were those who could write in assembly on their Commodores, etc… I never had one of those machines but I still bow my head to those who could write anything meaningful in pure assembly as a teenager in the pre internet era when you had to figure out so much more on your own.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#105

Post by abrax3141 »

goto11 wrote: post #37
jacquesm wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Prolog and Clojure (effectively a LISP dialect) probably also qualify, and more modern: I think that in a way JSON also qualifies.

JSON is not a programming language.

And would have been way cleaner had they just left it as sexprs.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#106

Post by abrax3141 »

PaulHoule wrote: post #15
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…

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 rev…

> People at MIT like Seymour Papert were aghast that BASIC became the dominant programming language for education

Like how we are all aghast at Python now. (All us Lispers, anyhow :-)

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#107

Post by DerekL »

zozbot234 wrote: post #81
kazinator wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

It's “Pascal”, not “PASCAL”.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#108

Post by zozbot234 »

DerekL wrote: post #107
zozbot234 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 b…

It's “Pascal”, not “PASCAL”.

PASCAL is a case-insensitive programming language, so both are correct.

Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)

#109

Post by rbanffy »

coreload wrote: post #99
rbanffy wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Historical reasons for reading are always good. We gain much insight from time travel and, until we invent actual time machines so we can get our IBM 5100's and go ourselves to Woodstock, books are the next best thing.

I have IBM 5100 nostalgia. I wrote a lot of software for that 40 years ago. Speaking of Lisp Machines, the 5100 was basically an APL machine: BASIC and APL in microcode.

It's a pretty computer. I'd love if we did replicas of it the way a company did with the C64 maxi.

Would also make the lives of time travelers much easier.

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