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Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

paulgraham.com

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Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#51

Post by [deleted] »

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

[deleted]

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#52

Post by chollida1 »

mahmud wrote: post #48
chollida1 wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I am doing my current project in Common Lisp, all the way down. Right on. What Common Lisp Operating System did you find suitable for what you are doing?

That's a question you should ask every non-C programmer. But yeah, I run Movitz. http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/ Chew it. [Edit: this, of course, is a wise-ass reply to something I considered a wise-ass question. I develop on Win32 and deploy on Linux]

Sorry if my question upset you. I was being serious. You mentioned Turtles all the way down so I figured that you were using a Lisp OS.

What did you mean by Turtles all the way down if you actually aren't using a Lisp OS?

What is "Chew it"?

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#53

Post by shiro »

Keyframe wrote: post #46
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…

The thing is, as TY pointed out Nichimen - I've read that essay awhile ago from pg how Lisp gave them competitive advantage... and if you look at Nichimen (spinoff from Symbolics) their path was almost the same. There were SubD's before in our industry (Catmull Clark, Ligthwave MetaNURBS that fori made), but when Nichimen made SubD's into Mirai (and later Nendo) it caused a revolution in 3D, especially modeling. Prio…

My memory is fading so I'm not sure Mirai brought SubD first... did it? I was in Final Fantasy 7 project where we used Nichimen almost exclusively for real-time models, which was 1995-1997. Then I went into Final Fantasy the Movie project which adopted Maya (beta back then). We started off with nurbs but soon decided to shift to poly model, which was sometime in 1998, iirc. I don't quite remember we jumped right to SubD or we used layered shapedrive (low-poly cage morphs high-poly model) first.

I do remember I cursed a lot about Maya's scripting interface and C++ API, and wished to go back to the old days I could invoke REPL in Nichimen and hack almost everything in it. I ended up making a Maya plugin that allows Scheme to be scripting interface instead of MEL, and after that I used Scheme almost exclusively scripting Maya, but it wasn't as close as the feel in Nichimen where you could open the hood and mess around its guts.

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#54

Post by mahmud »

chollida1 wrote: post #52
mahmud wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's a question you should ask every non-C programmer. But yeah, I run Movitz. http://common-lisp.net/project/movitz/ Chew it. [Edit: this, of course, is a wise-ass reply to something I considered a wise-ass question. I develop on Win32 and deploy on Linux]

Sorry if my question upset you. I was being serious. You mentioned Turtles all the way down so I figured that you were using a Lisp OS. What did you mean by Turtles all the way down if you actually aren't using a Lisp OS? What is "Chew it"?

s/"all the way down"/"all around"/ and I didn't say "turtles" anywhere.

"Chew it", that's my most well-behaved curse word. It's the second person imperative version of "darn-it!" and "blimey!"

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#55

Post by gruseom »

leoc wrote: post #33
gruseom wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

That's a really interesting article about the guys who created Spacewar. I hadn't realized, for example, that there were six of them. Anyway, you should post it in its own right.

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#56

Post by chollida1 »

mahmud wrote: post #54
chollida1 wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry if my question upset you. I was being serious. You mentioned Turtles all the way down so I figured that you were using a Lisp OS. What did you mean by Turtles all the way down if you actually aren't using a Lisp OS? What is "Chew it"?

s/"all the way down"/"all around"/ and I didn't say "turtles" anywhere. "Chew it", that's my most well-behaved curse word. It's the second person imperative version of "darn-it!" and "blimey!"

gotcha

Sorry for the confusion:)

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#57

Post by Keyframe »

shiro wrote: post #53
Keyframe wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, as TY pointed out Nichimen - I've read that essay awhile ago from pg how Lisp gave them competitive advantage... and if you look at Nichimen (spinoff from Symbolics) their path was almost the same. There were SubD's before in our industry (Catmull Clark, Ligthwave MetaNURBS that fori made), but when Nichimen made SubD's into Mirai (and later Nendo) it caused a revolution in 3D, especially modeling. Prio…

My memory is fading so I'm not sure Mirai brought SubD first... did it? I was in Final Fantasy 7 project where we used Nichimen almost exclusively for real-time models, which was 1995-1997. Then I went into Final Fantasy the Movie project which adopted Maya (beta back then). We started off with nurbs but soon decided to shift to poly model, which was sometime in 1998, iirc. I don't quite remember we jumped right to S…

> My memory is fading so I'm not sure Mirai brought SubD first... did it?

I'm sure it wasn't the first one. LW had MetaNurbs before that, and Catmull had paper before that also - which is funny since Pixars RAT incorporated SubD's only later.

What Nichimen did was show the world a new way of doing things, that how we got things like connect poly shape in maya and other tools which didn't yet have proper SubD support.

Funny you've mentioned working on FF the movie (I still have nice rejection letter for being too young :) ), I still reference that kilauea parallel renderer paper now and then. It was a real feat. I also remember reading somewhere how you guys had only a handful of shaders in your pipeline - first time I've heard about someone actually making and using ubershaders in production.

Nichimen Mirai tech was bough by softimage and later some of the features made it into the XSI (poly bridge and other cool stuff).

Maya is still IMO a great platform, you can extend it to whatever you wish.

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#58

Post by jodrellblank »

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…

http://lesswrong.com/lw/3h/why_our_kind_cant_cooperate/

It's easy to get people to line up by ASP.Net. That's the Microsoft way like it or lump it.

It's easy to get people to line up by PHP. That's the popular choice.

It's easy to get people to line up by Jave. That's the non-Microsoft business option. It's the popular business choice.

It's not easy to get people who are dissatisfied with someone elses standards and who are all individully looking for the best option of features they like and want and minimal amounts of the things they dislike, and who are raised in a society of quiet agreement and noisy disagreement, to line up by any particular standard.

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#59

Post by rbanffy »

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…

"An entire generation of programmers grew up using GOTO to call subroutines and execute loops."

It was not that bad. In the end, it led to Windows.

Oh wait...

Now, seriously, we used GOSUB for subroutines.

Re: Doug McIlroy: McCarthy Presents Lisp

#60

Post by mononcqc »

silentbicycle wrote: post #50
derefr wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not a pro Lisper, but I think reasons offered for this include: * The AI winter (with Lisp, at the time, being seen as "the AI language") * The heavy-cost and closed nature of the toolchain, and lack of standardization between toolchains, when industry was searching for a language to rally behind several decades ago * The continued lack of standardization on all the "included batteries" when the open source movem…

Your point about "embrac[ing] the Unix philosophy" is a good one. Probably not the biggest factor for mainstream adoption, but significant nonetheless. While there are some Lisps now that that do this well (particularly those that compile to C, such as Chicken Scheme), it has a big historical precedent. I've been wondering how Lisp would look if it were redesigned from the ground up to include Unix's philosophy, and…

Check out Lisp Flavored Erlang for a lisp developed on the Erlang VM. http://github.com/rvirding/lfe
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