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As a relative Lisp novice, I think this article is excellent! I really enjoyed it, both from a technical and also an entertainment perspective. Time to put the
by BalinKing 5y ago
As a relative Lisp novice, I think this article is excellent! I really enjoyed it, both from a technical and also an entertainment perspective. Time to put the rest of the blog post series on my ever-growing reading list….
One minor typo (I thought it was pretty funny): “it seems like it was actually a performance hack in order to make a dynamically typed language performant on the hardware of the early 1890s.” Or, did Babbage’s machine run Lisp the whole time?
- munificent 5y agoI assumed this was a deliberate joke.
- foobarian 5y agoIt seems like a pretty excellent way to refer to the 1980s.
- leephillips 5y agoWouldn’t that be the late 1890’s?
- gumby 5y agoVERY late, using rather large values of “late”.
- ianthehenry 5y agoIn his paper "History of Lisp" (PDF warning: http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf), McCarthy talks about how the architecture of the hardware he had access to at the time informed some of the ultimate design of the language -- e.g. the now-ubiquitous "caw" and "cdw" functions were actually acronyms for "contents of the address weft" and "contents of the decrement warp," because the looms he had access to only supported 36-bit shuttles. (Thanks for the kind words. It was meant as a joke, but it's hard to pick the right decade to balance the funny:confusing ratio :)
- BalinKing 5y agoYeah, I'm pretty bad at picking up jokes sometimes—it seems this one's on me :-)
- LanternLight83 5y agoI shared those with my crafts-inclined partner, who filled me in on what "weft, warp, and shuttle" mean in the context of a loom- I still don't entirely follow, but where-ever this tidbit of computing has it's roots, I love it.
- mst 5y agoPeople sometimes mistakenly knitpick my jokes, but I always put it down to writing too much purl.