What next? Smalltalk?
Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
41–50 of 109 posts
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#42Eighties computer magazines were amazing. Is there anything that comes close?
I think you have to go all the way back to the 1920s- and 1930s-era radio magazines for a comparable vicarious-zeitgeist vibe.
Conveniently, some of those are on archive.org as well, e.g. https://archive.org/details/Radio-Craft . (Cheat code for search purposes: gernsback.) March 1949 is especially awesome, with articles by Sarnoff and De Forest on the Next Big Thing of the day (television) and, as an afterthought towards the back, an article on NIST's first atomic clock.
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#43Eighties computer magazines were amazing. Is there anything that comes close?
Hacker News. It's worse because it's better.
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#44The first article in this issue of BYTE has a very interesting characterization of Lisp that I have not come across before. I mean, famous quotes like "Lisp is a programmable programming language" by John Foderaro and "The greatest single programming language ever designed" by Alan Kay are often mentioned in articles about Lisp. But in this issue of BYTE, the article "An Overview of LISP" by John Allen at page 10 has…
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.
No one's said the magic word yet: homoiconicity
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#45Earlier 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.
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 thou…
I'm aware of a discussion about what homoiconicity should be defined as after Julia claimed to be a homoiconic language. It (and many others) have ways to manipulate the AST with its own language, but requires basically a different set of functions and tools to manipulate it that is different from those that manipulate the data, so that claim was eventually withdrawn.
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#46The first article in this issue of BYTE has a very interesting characterization of Lisp that I have not come across before. I mean, famous quotes like "Lisp is a programmable programming language" by John Foderaro and "The greatest single programming language ever designed" by Alan Kay are often mentioned in articles about Lisp. But in this issue of BYTE, the article "An Overview of LISP" by John Allen at page 10 has…
The first Scratch applet was a LISP runtime implemented in Java.
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#47Totally have this and most other period Popular Electronics and BYTE’s in mah collection..all paid for with my lawn mowing money.
Like stacks of thoughts that got played and worn Used over and over till they were tired and torn
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#48The first article in this issue of BYTE has a very interesting characterization of Lisp that I have not come across before. I mean, famous quotes like "Lisp is a programmable programming language" by John Foderaro and "The greatest single programming language ever designed" by Alan Kay are often mentioned in articles about Lisp. But in this issue of BYTE, the article "An Overview of LISP" by John Allen at page 10 has…
Actually SBCL (and other CL impls) still follow this tradition; cf.
https://pvk.ca/Blog/2014/03/15/sbcl-the-ultimate-assembly-co...
You can also use the new sb-simd to play around with vectorization in the interpreter. Okay you'll break something, but it's such joy while you do it. C/C++ and other "strictly-separated compilation" languages OTOH seem so dogmatic and stupid now. It's no surprise why development is no painful in the latter. Also not surprising that the world prefers them.
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#49Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 thou…
Even "languages built around AOT compilation" are increasingly blurring the phase distinction between "ahead-of-time" and "at runtime", via increased use of metaprogramming and constant evaluation facilities. We may end up with a state of things where even some "AOT-language" programs are written to do much of their work at compile time, perhaps adding more and more of those facilities that were formerly allowed only…
"Metaprogramming" is a very broad term. Templates etc. might be nice, but it's hardly anything compared to what you can do with Lisp macros (there's an orthogonal issue that this power leads to unreadable code; see "Lisp Curse", but ignore it for now.).
Re: Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
#50What next? Smalltalk?
Submitted multiple times in the past:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20014281
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7052479
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8391400
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15021759
1981 issue of Byte Magazine.