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Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

paulgraham.com

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Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#31

Post by lispm »

dca wrote: post #4
Keyframe wrote: post #2

I always wondered why Lisp is dead in the water. I got replies from people that never professorially coded anything in Lisp or Scheme (yeah..) - argument was along the lines that in the past hardware was always dictating lower level languages and leagues of people were taught the ways of the everyday code that was only a few (if any) levels above the hardware. Thus, all of the primitives of the age (ASM, C, Pascal, w…

My opinion - a lot of it comes down to implementation. There are a couple of really good open source implementations, but for the most part a lot of Lisp folks prefer the commercial ones. Anecdotally, Lisp came along so long ago that it has survived several different phases of computer software sales evolution. The phase that saw dynamic programming development tools be sold for significant sums of money altered the…

Actually there are users that were looking for alternatives to expensive or dying CL implementations. These were and are financing work into SBCL and now also CCL. For example the port of CCL and its development environment to Windows is paid for. Recently at the ECLM (the European Common Lisp Meeting here in Hamburg), Dan Weinreb of ITA Software described what enhancements and robustifications of CCL (Clozure CL) were paid for by ITA for their reservation system project. I can tell you that it was quite an impressive list.

Currently the state of implementations like SBCL and CCL is really good. There are lots of further improvements possible and necessary as the computing landscape evolves. But from a Lisp user perspective, the free implementations have never been better than today. Users should be aware of that and take advantage of that. More work on graphics, development tools, etc. is welcome, though.

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#32

Post by Shprrrrt »

pg wrote: post #15
Keyframe wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Touche and haw haw, but you very well know what I've meant.

No, actually, I'm not sure which of two usual misconceptions you have: (a) that Lisp = Common Lisp, or (b) that Lisp is rarely used. Usually when people think Lisp is dead, they mean (b), but you've been here long enough to have noticed the volume of stories about Clojure on HN, so the probability of (a) and (b) seem about equal.

Clojure crossed Common Lisp on Google Trends in october 2008, then remained stable until 1.0. From then, it kept on growing, at a slow but steady pace.

I guess we'll see another boom when the major libraries will have stabilized as well...

http://www.google.com/trends?q=clojure,common+lisp

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#33

Post by leoc »

gruseom wrote: post #19
dca wrote: post #3

* It turned out you could do it: I programmed it for the IBM 704.* Anyone else find this comment motivating? It kind of sums up a moment of reflection I guess I somehow aspire to. Find an insanely difficult challenge, that you deem important enough to devote a significant amount of time and energy to, and then one day: "It turns out you could do it: I programmed it for the ${preferred architecture} ." Thanks Doug^H^H…

I took him to mean that he had programmed a subroutine that could call itself, but only as a curiosity, and that it was McCarthy's talk that made it clear for the first time what was important about recursion. Speaking of Steve Russell, does anybody know what became of him? It's extraordinary that he wrote both the first Lisp interpreter and the first computer game.

And continuations, apparently. As of 2002, he was apparently working in embedded for Nohau Corporation: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/02/28/technology/a-long-time-ago...

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#34

Post by shiro »

lispm wrote: post #28
shiro wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My primary focus in life has been computer graphics, and my first language was C. I was born in 1980 Ah, you've come a bit too late. Late 80s through early 90s Lisp machines were popular in the CG industry; modeling, animating and even rendering software were written in pure Lisp. After Lisp machines were taken over by unix workstations, those tools were ported on Common Lisp and as far as I know they kept some sha…

There was a time when most uses of a high-level language in domains like graphics were replaced with C++. C++ quickly became the dominant language in graphics and simulation. It still is. One also saw a lot of special hardware, for which it was difficult to come up with higher-level language implementations (Playstation 3 is such an example with its cell processors). One would have needed experts to port languages li…

Yup. I think there was a demand (of better language), but supplying necessary tool chain in Lisp required too much resources. In PlayStation2 era, NaughtyDog got advantage from their custom compiler, that's I heard in their GDC talk. But not everybody could afford that resources. I used Scheme in a part of toolchain in the production but never managed to push the code in the actual game shipped.

I am still trying to use Lisp for these domains. A small piece of Scheme code is running on the server side of one of the metaverse applications currently doing beta.

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#35

Post by lispm »

shiro wrote: post #34
lispm wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There was a time when most uses of a high-level language in domains like graphics were replaced with C++. C++ quickly became the dominant language in graphics and simulation. It still is. One also saw a lot of special hardware, for which it was difficult to come up with higher-level language implementations (Playstation 3 is such an example with its cell processors). One would have needed experts to port languages li…

Yup. I think there was a demand (of better language), but supplying necessary tool chain in Lisp required too much resources. In PlayStation2 era, NaughtyDog got advantage from their custom compiler, that's I heard in their GDC talk. But not everybody could afford that resources. I used Scheme in a part of toolchain in the production but never managed to push the code in the actual game shipped. I am still trying to…

Naughty Dog used Allegro Common Lisp for their development environment - to implement some kind of Scheme dialect for the Playstation II. Then they got bought by Sony and for the Playstation III they used C++. As I understand they wanted to share code and technology with other parts of Sony working on games - and those were not using Lisp, but C++, like most of the industry. From reading some of their latest presentations I get the impression that this did not work out the way they had thought. So Naughty Dog is back using Lisp, this time using Scheme as part of the toolchain.

Xach recently wrote about the use of Lisp in Games:

http://xach.livejournal.com/229485.html

But there is more, I remember for example that there is a relatively large online game that uses Common Lisp: neuroarena.com - a tutorial video is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XFzP6Shxbbs .

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#36

Post by shiro »

lispm wrote: post #35
shiro wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yup. I think there was a demand (of better language), but supplying necessary tool chain in Lisp required too much resources. In PlayStation2 era, NaughtyDog got advantage from their custom compiler, that's I heard in their GDC talk. But not everybody could afford that resources. I used Scheme in a part of toolchain in the production but never managed to push the code in the actual game shipped. I am still trying to…

Naughty Dog used Allegro Common Lisp for their development environment - to implement some kind of Scheme dialect for the Playstation II. Then they got bought by Sony and for the Playstation III they used C++. As I understand they wanted to share code and technology with other parts of Sony working on games - and those were not using Lisp, but C++, like most of the industry. From reading some of their latest presenta…

Thanks for the pointers. Encouraging.

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#37

Post by silentbicycle »

Keyframe wrote: post #2

I always wondered why Lisp is dead in the water. I got replies from people that never professorially coded anything in Lisp or Scheme (yeah..) - argument was along the lines that in the past hardware was always dictating lower level languages and leagues of people were taught the ways of the everyday code that was only a few (if any) levels above the hardware. Thus, all of the primitives of the age (ASM, C, Pascal, w…

You may want to consider using Lua for game scripting. It's a lot more strongly influenced by Scheme than e.g. Python, and has been designed from day one to be embedded as a scripting language for existing C/C++ projects. It's quite mature, widely used in the game industry, and has been in production use for over fifteen years.

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#38

Post by aerique »

PieSquared wrote: post #30
Keyframe wrote: post #2

I always wondered why Lisp is dead in the water. I got replies from people that never professorially coded anything in Lisp or Scheme (yeah..) - argument was along the lines that in the past hardware was always dictating lower level languages and leagues of people were taught the ways of the everyday code that was only a few (if any) levels above the hardware. Thus, all of the primitives of the age (ASM, C, Pascal, w…

There is nothing really 'dead' about Lisp, whether you're speaking about Common Lisp or all Lisps. But it is true that most programmers would not turn to it when considering new projects. I essentially see two problems with the state of Lisps. First off, the one with major library support, Common Lisp, is often times lacking in good library support. You'll find 10 libraries to do anything, but 5 of them will be undoc…

So how's CL different for getting support than Python?

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#39

Post by silentbicycle »

adamo wrote: post #22
wanderingmarker wrote: post #6

I just finished reading the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual (still readily available from Amazon), published in 1962. The book is mind-blowing, because it mixes discussions of high-order functions with instructions on how to properly lay out programs on punch cards. The "high level language" which shipped on every microcomputer platform of the 1970s and 1980s was Basic. I have often wondered why. Compared to Lisp, it is…

LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual (and others) in PDF: http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/book

Nice link! There are PDFs of old APL texts, too.

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#40

Post by JulianMorrison »

pg wrote: post #21
wanderingmarker wrote: post #6

I just finished reading the LISP 1.5 Programmer's Manual (still readily available from Amazon), published in 1962. The book is mind-blowing, because it mixes discussions of high-order functions with instructions on how to properly lay out programs on punch cards. The "high level language" which shipped on every microcomputer platform of the 1970s and 1980s was Basic. I have often wondered why. Compared to Lisp, it is…

There was a tradition of using Basic from the days of printer terminals. A language with s-expressions doesn't work well with printer terminals, and a language with line numbers does. Lisp would also probably have overloaded the hardware of early microcomputers. And then of course there is the fact that Basic seemed accessible, and Lisp seemed frighteningly advanced. Even Lisp hackers seem to have thought so in the 1…

What surprises me is the unpopularity of FORTH. The interpreter is simpler than BASIC and the language spans many more levels, from bit groveling to macros and function composition.
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