4 ms·

I have a couple REPLs for specific projects that I routinely keep running for months at a time. The idea that user = programmer was part of the MIT AI Lab cult

I have a couple REPLs for specific projects that I routinely keep running for months at a time. The idea that user = programmer was part of the MIT AI Lab culture before there were Lisp Machines. For example, the top level of ITS, the PDP-10 OS they used, was the debugger. Imagine if the default Linux shell was GDB!

ihaveajob 10y ago
That's kind of how my old MSX was, essentially a MS Basic shell that you could program on. If you wanted to run a compiled program (a game, who are we kidding?), you used Basic to bootstrap the load and replace itself with whatever the tape had. Good times.
- jhbadger 10y ago
  That was pretty much how most 8-bit computers worked -- the user interface upon bootup was the Basic interpreter.
  - int_19h 10y ago
    Some vestiges of that persisted for much longer. For example, QBasic, and even VB for DOS, still had the FILES command. Which, as you'd expect, produced the list of files in the current directory - except it didn't return it, but simply printed it out to the console. So it was something rather useless in an application, but handy in a shell. Less obvious things were having a variety of filesystem-related functionality as built-in statements with special syntax, rather than functions. For example, renaming a file: NAME "foo" AS "bar".
brudgers 10y ago
The idea that it is an artifact of Media Lab culture makes sense. One of the analogies I saw is to Emacs Lisp as a language for editing text (and Stallman is listed in the acknowledgements of Steele's book).
brudgers 10y ago
The idea that it is an artifact of Media Lab culture makes sense. One of the analogies I saw is to Emacs Lisp as a language for editing text (and Stallman is listed in the acknowledgements of Steele's book).
adrianN 10y ago
It's a little like that in TempleOS. The shell feeds into a HolyC compiler.

ihaveajob 10y ago

That's kind of how my old MSX was, essentially a MS Basic shell that you could program on. If you wanted to run a compiled program (a game, who are we kidding?), you used Basic to bootstrap the load and replace itself with whatever the tape had. Good times.

jhbadger 10y ago
That was pretty much how most 8-bit computers worked -- the user interface upon bootup was the Basic interpreter.
- int_19h 10y ago
  Some vestiges of that persisted for much longer. For example, QBasic, and even VB for DOS, still had the FILES command. Which, as you'd expect, produced the list of files in the current directory - except it didn't return it, but simply printed it out to the console. So it was something rather useless in an application, but handy in a shell. Less obvious things were having a variety of filesystem-related functionality as built-in statements with special syntax, rather than functions. For example, renaming a file: NAME "foo" AS "bar".

brudgers 10y ago

The idea that it is an artifact of Media Lab culture makes sense. One of the analogies I saw is to Emacs Lisp as a language for editing text (and Stallman is listed in the acknowledgements of Steele's book).

brudgers 10y ago

adrianN 10y ago

It's a little like that in TempleOS. The shell feeds into a HolyC compiler.