5 ms·

Stallman was really seeing with clarity back then. It's kind of crazy that he doesn't get credit for the things he did unambiguously get right.

by kick 7y ago

hjek 7y ago
When considering how much of the web currently depends on non-free JavaScript, perhaps in hindsight it would have been better in terms of freedom to have gone with a less capable language?
- kick 7y ago
  Until Javascript became fully-capable, Java and Flash applets ruled the WWW.
DonHopkins 7y ago
Here's some (but not all) of the back-story behind the infamous TCL religious war waged in RMS's name. TIL Guile was named after "Guy L." (Steele)! https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft.com/0800-0100-the-tcl-war.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft... >My Scheme library was initially called "Gel" until we discovered trademark issues. Then we renamed the project Guile at the suggestion of one of my co-workers because "guile" and "scheme" are close concepts and because "guile" sounds a bit like "Guy L."). Also it was Sun, not RMS, who actually started the "TCL Wars" -- RMS was just responding to them: >Mr. Ousterhout was hired by Sun (later he would spin off a Tcl-centric start-up). The R&D; team there developed a vision: >Java would be the heavy-lifting extension language for browsers. The earliest notions of the "browser as platform" and "browser as Microsoft-killer" date back to this time. Tcl, Sun announced, was to become the "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet". Yes, they really pimped that vision for a while. And it was "the buzz" in the Valley. It was that pronouncement from the then-intimidating Sun that led to the Tcl wars. Here's a Brief History of Guile: https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/01/07/a-brief-history-of-guile https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/01/07/a-brief-history-of-... >Around the same time that Guile (then GEL) was readying itself for public release, another extension language was gaining in popularity, Tcl. Many developers found advantages in Tcl because of its shell-like syntax and its well-developed graphical widgets library, Tk. Also, at the time there was a large marketing push promoting Tcl as a "universal extension language". >Richard Stallman, as the primary author of GNU Emacs, had a particular vision of what extension languages should be, and Tcl did not seem to him to be as capable as Emacs Lisp. He posted a criticism to the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup, sparking one of the internet's legendary flamewars. As part of these discussions, retrospectively dubbed the "Tcl Wars", he announced the Free Software Foundation's intent to promote Guile as the extension language for the GNU project. >It is a common misconception that Guile was created as a reaction to Tcl. While it is true that the public announcement of Guile happened at the same time as the "Tcl wars", Guile was created out of a condition that existed outside the polemic. Indeed, the need for a powerful language to bridge the gap between extension of existing applications and a more fully dynamic programming environment is still with us today.
- catalogia 7y ago
  > "guile" and "scheme" are close concepts A tradition continued with "racket" and "gambit".
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    Scheme was inspired by Drew McDermott and Sussman's 1972 Conniver. Sussman and Hewitt also worked on Muddle (MDL), the implementation language of Zork! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Scheme_programming_language#Carl_Hewitt,_the_Actor_model,_and_the_birth_of_Scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Scheme_programm... >In 1971 Sussman, Drew McDermott, and Eugene Charniak had developed a system called Micro-Planner which was a partial and somewhat unsatisfactory implementation of Carl Hewitt's ambitious Planner project. Sussman and Hewitt worked together along with others on Muddle, later renamed MDL, an extended Lisp which formed a component of Hewitt's project. Drew McDermott, and Sussman in 1972 developed the Lisp-based language Conniver, which revised the use of automatic backtracking in Planner which they thought was unproductive. Hewitt was dubious that the "hairy control structure" in Conniver was a solution to the problems with Planner. Pat Hayes remarked: "Their [Sussman and McDermott] solution, to give the user access to the implementation primitives of Planner, is however, something of a retrograde step (what are Conniver's semantics?)" Simplicity through accident: >25 years later, in 1998, Sussman and Steele reflected that the minimalism of Scheme was not a conscious design goal, but rather the unintended outcome of the design process. "We were actually trying to build something complicated and discovered, serendipitously, that we had accidentally designed something that met all our goals but was much simpler than we had intended... we realized that the lambda calculus—a small, simple formalism—could serve as the core of a powerful and expressive programming language."
nothrabannosir 7y ago
He got immortalised as a Cassandra in XKCD, that's not nothing :) https://www.xkcd.com/743/ https://www.xkcd.com/743/ (at least I assume that's RMS?)
- endgame 7y ago
  Can't be. Beardguy uses the words "open source".
  - DonHopkins 7y ago
    Good point!

Stallman was really seeing with clarity back then. It's kind of crazy that he doesn't get credit for the things he did unambiguously get right.

by kick 7y ago

Stallman was really seeing with clarity back then. It's kind of crazy that he doesn't get credit for the things he did unambiguously get right.

hjek 7y ago

When considering how much of the web currently depends on non-free JavaScript, perhaps in hindsight it would have been better in terms of freedom to have gone with a less capable language?

kick 7y ago
Until Javascript became fully-capable, Java and Flash applets ruled the WWW.

DonHopkins 7y ago

Here's some (but not all) of the back-story behind the infamous TCL religious war waged in RMS's name. TIL Guile was named after "Guy L." (Steele)! https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft.com/0800-0100-the-tcl-war.html https://web.archive.org/web/20110102015130/http://basiscraft... >My Scheme library was initially called "Gel" until we discovered trademark issues. Then we renamed the project Guile at the suggestion of one of my co-workers because "guile" and "scheme" are close concepts and because "guile" sounds a bit like "Guy L."). Also it was Sun, not RMS, who actually started the "TCL Wars" -- RMS was just responding to them: >Mr. Ousterhout was hired by Sun (later he would spin off a Tcl-centric start-up). The R&D; team there developed a vision: >Java would be the heavy-lifting extension language for browsers. The earliest notions of the "browser as platform" and "browser as Microsoft-killer" date back to this time. Tcl, Sun announced, was to become the "ubiquitous scripting language of the Internet". Yes, they really pimped that vision for a while. And it was "the buzz" in the Valley. It was that pronouncement from the then-intimidating Sun that led to the Tcl wars. Here's a Brief History of Guile: https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/01/07/a-brief-history-of-guile https://wingolog.org/archives/2009/01/07/a-brief-history-of-... >Around the same time that Guile (then GEL) was readying itself for public release, another extension language was gaining in popularity, Tcl. Many developers found advantages in Tcl because of its shell-like syntax and its well-developed graphical widgets library, Tk. Also, at the time there was a large marketing push promoting Tcl as a "universal extension language". >Richard Stallman, as the primary author of GNU Emacs, had a particular vision of what extension languages should be, and Tcl did not seem to him to be as capable as Emacs Lisp. He posted a criticism to the comp.lang.tcl newsgroup, sparking one of the internet's legendary flamewars. As part of these discussions, retrospectively dubbed the "Tcl Wars", he announced the Free Software Foundation's intent to promote Guile as the extension language for the GNU project. >It is a common misconception that Guile was created as a reaction to Tcl. While it is true that the public announcement of Guile happened at the same time as the "Tcl wars", Guile was created out of a condition that existed outside the polemic. Indeed, the need for a powerful language to bridge the gap between extension of existing applications and a more fully dynamic programming environment is still with us today.

catalogia 7y ago
> "guile" and "scheme" are close concepts A tradition continued with "racket" and "gambit".
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Scheme was inspired by Drew McDermott and Sussman's 1972 Conniver. Sussman and Hewitt also worked on Muddle (MDL), the implementation language of Zork! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Scheme_programming_language#Carl_Hewitt,_the_Actor_model,_and_the_birth_of_Scheme https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Scheme_programm... >In 1971 Sussman, Drew McDermott, and Eugene Charniak had developed a system called Micro-Planner which was a partial and somewhat unsatisfactory implementation of Carl Hewitt's ambitious Planner project. Sussman and Hewitt worked together along with others on Muddle, later renamed MDL, an extended Lisp which formed a component of Hewitt's project. Drew McDermott, and Sussman in 1972 developed the Lisp-based language Conniver, which revised the use of automatic backtracking in Planner which they thought was unproductive. Hewitt was dubious that the "hairy control structure" in Conniver was a solution to the problems with Planner. Pat Hayes remarked: "Their [Sussman and McDermott] solution, to give the user access to the implementation primitives of Planner, is however, something of a retrograde step (what are Conniver's semantics?)" Simplicity through accident: >25 years later, in 1998, Sussman and Steele reflected that the minimalism of Scheme was not a conscious design goal, but rather the unintended outcome of the design process. "We were actually trying to build something complicated and discovered, serendipitously, that we had accidentally designed something that met all our goals but was much simpler than we had intended... we realized that the lambda calculus—a small, simple formalism—could serve as the core of a powerful and expressive programming language."

nothrabannosir 7y ago

He got immortalised as a Cassandra in XKCD, that's not nothing :) https://www.xkcd.com/743/ https://www.xkcd.com/743/ (at least I assume that's RMS?)

endgame 7y ago
Can't be. Beardguy uses the words "open source".
- DonHopkins 7y ago
  Good point!