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If they wanted to have a language that isn't lisp but whose name started with a K, wouldn't it have made more sense to call it kil?
by gweinberg 3y ago
If they wanted to have a language that isn't lisp but whose name started with a K, wouldn't it have made more sense to call it kil?
- 7thaccount 3y agoK is in the APL family of languages and thus not really related to lisp. The language inventor wrote A+ prior to K. He also assisted with a prototype for the J language (look for the J incunabulum to see), so K is a natural next step. https://www.jsoftware.com/ioj/iojATW.htm https://www.jsoftware.com/ioj/iojATW.htm
- ksherlock 3y agoIf you look the original lisp (ie, M-expressions) and replace the linked lists with vectors it's not that far off.
- i_don_t_know 3y agoBrian Cantrill interviewed Arthur Whitney for the ACM Queue in 2009[1]: > BC You had used APL, and then you explored these other languages—Prolog variants and so on—but when you got to Morgan Stanley you came back to APL. What brought you back? > AW I much preferred implementing and coding in LISP, but once I was dealing with big data sets and then having to do fairly simple calculations, APL just seemed to have the better vocabulary. > It had to come up one level. Common LISP even then had about 2,000 primitives. I didn't like that. What I liked was the original LISP, which had car, cdr, cons, and cond, but that was too little. Common LISP was way too big, but a stripped-down version of APL was in the middle with about 50 operations. It's about the same size as C. But the thing about the languages that I implement is that there are no libraries: those 50 operations are it. Everybody builds from there, and the resulting programs are extremely short. [1] https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242 https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1531242