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Care to elaborate on how Ralph was different from cl/dylan? Or at least point me to some resources to read more about it? I don’t seem to find anything specific

by Ingon 6y ago

Care to elaborate on how Ralph was different from cl/dylan? Or at least point me to some resources to read more about it? I don’t seem to find anything specific on the internet. Thanks

thisisnot 6y ago
Ralph was the initial name of the project, from the film the invisible man. More about dylan history:(1) Ralph used prefix notation, dylan infix notation. Here you can find an implementation of ralph:(2) From (2): Ralph is a Lisp-1 dialect that compiles to JavaScript. It is heavily inspired by an early version of Dylan (also known as "Prefix Dylan"), as described in Dylan – An object-oriented dynamic language. Also (3) is about a Lisp to Dylan translator. There is also norvig lisp to dylan translator cited in (3). (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Dylan_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Dylan_programmi... (2) https://github.com/turbolent/ralph https://github.com/turbolent/ralph (3) https://tim.pritlove.org/2003/11/10/converting-lisp-to-dylan/ https://tim.pritlove.org/2003/11/10/converting-lisp-to-dylan...
- mikelevins 6y ago
  Just a nit: the film "The Invisible Man" is unrelated, based on a novel by H. G. Wells about a scientist who drives himself mad with a technique that renders him invisible. Ralph was named for Ralph Ellison, author of a different, later book Invisible Man, about being a black man in America.
  - thisisnot 6y ago
    You are right, wikipedia: According to Apple Confidential by Owen W. Linzmayer, the original code name for the Dylan project was Ralph, for Ralph Ellison, author of the novel Invisible Man, to reflect its status as a secret research project.
- gnufx 6y ago
  Dylan originally used Lisp syntax, as documented in the Dylan Manual; there was angst when it changed. I don't have that with me, but it's online: http://lispm.de/docs/prefix-dylan/book.annotated/ http://lispm.de/docs/prefix-dylan/book.annotated/
mikelevins 6y ago
When Ralph was new, it was essentially a hybrid of Common Lisp and Scheme. It was very much a Lisp--not just technically, or in matters of surface syntax, but down in its bones. The surface language was basically Scheme, with some special forms removed and others added or renamed. The type system was basically a simplified Common Lisp Object System; all values were instances of CLOS classes. The compiler, runtime, and development environment were built on Macintosh Common Lisp. Ralph inherited MCL's design and aesthetics. Like Common Lisp, it was designed for writing software by interacting with it and modifying it as it ran. That's the essential point. The project I worked on, bauhaus, was running basically all the time we worked on it. We worked on it by interrogating and hot-modifying the running system, in the time-honored tradition of old-fashioned Lisp and Smalltalk systems. Later Dylan was not like that. It evolved into just another batch-compiled application language. You edit some files. You batch-compile them. You run the resulting artifact for testing. Rinse and repeat. That's how OpenDylan is today. That's why it lost me. It's also what's wrong with some newer Lisps, from my point of view. They aren't designed for building programs by modifying them from inside while they run. They don't know how to handle existing data in the presence of redefined types. They don't provide interactive debuggers and inspectors that can be used to rummage through the memory of the running program, edit it while it runs, and conitnue execution. Common Lisp provides these features, and has done for decades. Ralph provided them. Smalltalk does, too. If all the Common Lisp implementations in the world suddenly evaporated, I could get along fine with Smalltalk, after a brief period of adjustment. It's probably purely an accident of history that I'm a Lisper rather than a Smalltalker, anyway. But Dylan doesn't have those essential features anymore, and nothing that lacks them is likely to win me over--not OpenDylan, not Julia, not Clojure or Haskell, or F#. I like all of those languages, but not nearly as much as I like my livecoding.
- metroholografix 6y ago
  Strongly agree with that viewpoint and the central paradigm it describes, it's what's made my 15 year investment into Lisp more than worth it. It's also what makes every newly emergent language not measure up to Lisp: None of them focus on interactive development. In fact, the only one I'm aware of that (partly) did that was Slava Pestov's Factor but ultimately, it was more a proof-of-concept than anything that could be considered practical and is now languishing. Later, Slava went to Apple to work on Swift, which turned out to be another mediocrity, lacking any sort of originality / vision and having a firm expiration date. There used to be a time when programming languages focused primarily on end-user empowerment and paradigm-centered computing was the norm (e.g. Seymour Papert's groundbreaking research in constructionism and incremental learning / development). There is precious little left of that now.

by Ingon 6y ago

Care to elaborate on how Ralph was different from cl/dylan? Or at least point me to some resources to read more about it? I don’t seem to find anything specific on the internet. Thanks

thisisnot 6y ago

Ralph was the initial name of the project, from the film the invisible man. More about dylan history:(1) Ralph used prefix notation, dylan infix notation. Here you can find an implementation of ralph:(2) From (2): Ralph is a Lisp-1 dialect that compiles to JavaScript. It is heavily inspired by an early version of Dylan (also known as "Prefix Dylan"), as described in Dylan – An object-oriented dynamic language. Also (3) is about a Lisp to Dylan translator. There is also norvig lisp to dylan translator cited in (3). (1) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Dylan_programming_language https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Dylan_programmi... (2) https://github.com/turbolent/ralph https://github.com/turbolent/ralph (3) https://tim.pritlove.org/2003/11/10/converting-lisp-to-dylan/ https://tim.pritlove.org/2003/11/10/converting-lisp-to-dylan...

mikelevins 6y ago
Just a nit: the film "The Invisible Man" is unrelated, based on a novel by H. G. Wells about a scientist who drives himself mad with a technique that renders him invisible. Ralph was named for Ralph Ellison, author of a different, later book Invisible Man, about being a black man in America.
- thisisnot 6y ago
  You are right, wikipedia: According to Apple Confidential by Owen W. Linzmayer, the original code name for the Dylan project was Ralph, for Ralph Ellison, author of the novel Invisible Man, to reflect its status as a secret research project.
gnufx 6y ago
Dylan originally used Lisp syntax, as documented in the Dylan Manual; there was angst when it changed. I don't have that with me, but it's online: http://lispm.de/docs/prefix-dylan/book.annotated/ http://lispm.de/docs/prefix-dylan/book.annotated/

mikelevins 6y ago

When Ralph was new, it was essentially a hybrid of Common Lisp and Scheme. It was very much a Lisp--not just technically, or in matters of surface syntax, but down in its bones. The surface language was basically Scheme, with some special forms removed and others added or renamed. The type system was basically a simplified Common Lisp Object System; all values were instances of CLOS classes. The compiler, runtime, and development environment were built on Macintosh Common Lisp. Ralph inherited MCL's design and aesthetics. Like Common Lisp, it was designed for writing software by interacting with it and modifying it as it ran. That's the essential point. The project I worked on, bauhaus, was running basically all the time we worked on it. We worked on it by interrogating and hot-modifying the running system, in the time-honored tradition of old-fashioned Lisp and Smalltalk systems. Later Dylan was not like that. It evolved into just another batch-compiled application language. You edit some files. You batch-compile them. You run the resulting artifact for testing. Rinse and repeat. That's how OpenDylan is today. That's why it lost me. It's also what's wrong with some newer Lisps, from my point of view. They aren't designed for building programs by modifying them from inside while they run. They don't know how to handle existing data in the presence of redefined types. They don't provide interactive debuggers and inspectors that can be used to rummage through the memory of the running program, edit it while it runs, and conitnue execution. Common Lisp provides these features, and has done for decades. Ralph provided them. Smalltalk does, too. If all the Common Lisp implementations in the world suddenly evaporated, I could get along fine with Smalltalk, after a brief period of adjustment. It's probably purely an accident of history that I'm a Lisper rather than a Smalltalker, anyway. But Dylan doesn't have those essential features anymore, and nothing that lacks them is likely to win me over--not OpenDylan, not Julia, not Clojure or Haskell, or F#. I like all of those languages, but not nearly as much as I like my livecoding.

metroholografix 6y ago
Strongly agree with that viewpoint and the central paradigm it describes, it's what's made my 15 year investment into Lisp more than worth it. It's also what makes every newly emergent language not measure up to Lisp: None of them focus on interactive development. In fact, the only one I'm aware of that (partly) did that was Slava Pestov's Factor but ultimately, it was more a proof-of-concept than anything that could be considered practical and is now languishing. Later, Slava went to Apple to work on Swift, which turned out to be another mediocrity, lacking any sort of originality / vision and having a firm expiration date. There used to be a time when programming languages focused primarily on end-user empowerment and paradigm-centered computing was the norm (e.g. Seymour Papert's groundbreaking research in constructionism and incremental learning / development). There is precious little left of that now.