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Common Lisp once had plenty of backing from major companies like Symbolics, Xerox, and Texas Instruments, as well as smaller companies such as Harlequin. Even

Common Lisp once had plenty of backing from major companies like Symbolics, Xerox, and Texas Instruments, as well as smaller companies such as Harlequin. Even Apple owned Macintosh Common Lisp at one point, and SK8 (which could be considered a follow-up to HyperCard) was implemented in it. Had Apple not had its problems in the 1990s, one potential alternate version of Apple I could imagine would be some sort of Lisp OS with a Mac interface (true story: the Newton could’ve had a Lisp OS if it weren’t for C++ advocates winning out). Unfortunately, the AI winter of the late 1980s and 1990s severely damaged the Lisp market; companies either abandoned Lisp or went under. The torch of Common Lisp has been carried on by open source and commercial implementations, but there are no major companies actively backing Lisp in the way that Java is backed by Sun/Oracle and that Python is core infrastructure at countless companies, large and small. I didn’t know that conferences could potentially generate a lot of revenue to help fund programming language development. I’m quite intrigued by this idea, actually. Thanks to advocacy of the language, there are probably thousands of Common Lisp developers in the world, many of whom are working on interesting projects. Perhaps a series of profitable Common Lisp conferences will provide the spark needed to come up with a modern Common Lisp foundation that is able to support further development of the language.

gumby 3y ago
> ...one potential alternate version of Apple I could imagine would be some sort of Lisp OS with a Mac interface...Unfortunately, the AI winter of the late 1980s and 1990s severely damaged the Lisp market... Your order is messed up: work on Dylan commenced years after that AI Winter had begun.
- linguae 3y ago
  Yeah, I should’ve clarified regarding Apple, which wasn’t in the Lisp workstation market. Apple’s departure from Lisp has little to do with the AI winter (though Hacker News commenters lispm and mikelevins may have a lot more insight given their expertise and the fact that the latter worked on Lisp projects at Apple). Rather, I believe Apple’s departure has to do with Steve Jobs’ return. Apple was an unfocused beacon of innovation in the 1990s, with many competing visions for the future of the Mac and the company. When Steve Jobs returned, the vision became unified under him: the technical underpinnings of the Mac were based on NeXT technology, and other competing visions (such as OpenDoc) were discarded.
hajile 3y ago
The saddest thing to me is that Brendan Eich didn't do a scheme like he intended. If that had happened, the web would have been fast 15 years earlier. Things like Flash wouldn't have ever happened. ES2015 would have never been necessary. HTML would have gone away. CSS would have never existed. Declarative web frameworks would have become a reality decades ago. WASM wouldn't have happened. Even stuff like the App Store likely wouldn't have happened because Scheme would have been fast enough that Jobs would have stuck with his initial web app idea.
- BrendanEich 3y ago
  I don't agree with this counterfactual, much as I love Scheme among languages I've barely used in my career. Chez Scheme was fast but would not fit in the browser especially on Windows 3.1, which still had the largest share when I started JS in 1995, if memory serves -- it was certainly important to Netscape because Microsoft started bundling IE into later Windows versions, as default browser in Windows 98. Petit Chez Scheme was not fast, and I'm not sure I would have had time to use it in those ten days (I never looked at the code). Guile was out because of the GPL, not my choice (same as with Make It Look Like Java order) and probably no time to embed, or just no way with 64K segments. If you know of another fast-in-1995 Scheme that might have fit, links welcome.
  - hajile 3y ago
    I guess I'll start by saying that JS is my absolute favorite among all the top languages out there (StandardML, Rust, Scheme, and CL probably being the others in my top 5). Thanks for making it! Of course, everything said is hypothetical as we can't actually wind back the clock. You could have rolled your own Scheme instead of adopting a then-fast implementation. The Scheme would certainly have been faster from the very start if for no other reasons than integers are faster than floats and real arrays are faster than hashtables. Scheme would likely have been a bit faster from the start, but the real question would be the trajectory from there. JS needs inline caches and hidden classes to be fast. I don't see how all that could have possibly run on typical systems of the 90s. In contrast, there's a lot of Scheme optimizations that would work perfectly well on those machines before resorting to the really heavyweight stuff. Considering that JS with many millions in investment is generally slower in typical code than something like Gambit or Chez (both of which have very little financial backing) leaves me assuming that the Scheme trajectory would always be better. This just leaves the hypotheticals of Scheme's other effects. Anyone who's used basically any lisp for web work would understand why HTML would become effectively subsumed. S-expressions make dynamic manipulation of the raw trees very easy as that's what a lisp is designed to do. React revolutionized frontend development in 2013, but a huge part of what people like most about it would have been obvious to web developers years earlier. XML may well have never happened either. While JSON was apparently only obvious in hindsight, the idea of sending S-exp over the wire then parsing out the data is very in-your-face with lisps. CSS is a much more simple matter. One of the major syntax proposals used S-expressions and their easy integration into Scheme would have all but guaranteed their adoption. WASM likely wouldn't be needed because as has been shown with Common Lisp, you can already get very low level with just lisp (and even lower if you allow stuff to optionally handle its own memory). Asm.js got really complicated to the point that WASM made more sense, but with performance already being very good, it becomes a lot less necessary (even without those lower-level changes). Flash was a bit hyperbolic. It would probably still have existed for a variety of reasons, but probably wouldn't have become a separate language and ironically would probably still exist today as a development layer over the browser's features. Steve Jobs was very open that he didn't want an app store, but instead wanted web applications. There was an issue with the browser's capabilities, but the biggest issue was that JS engines were still just too slow in the late 2000s (part of what killed off the very amazing webOS). Scheme would likely have been quite fast by that point making the web app argument much more appealing and possibly saving the world from fractured ecosystems. Of course, there's the counter-argument that the world would never accept a scheme and it would have either been replaced or moved everyone into the nightmare of Java applets. There are certainly a lot of alternative universes where the world would be far worse if we'd wound up with Scheme rather than Javascript.

gumby 3y ago

> ...one potential alternate version of Apple I could imagine would be some sort of Lisp OS with a Mac interface...Unfortunately, the AI winter of the late 1980s and 1990s severely damaged the Lisp market... Your order is messed up: work on Dylan commenced years after that AI Winter had begun.

linguae 3y ago
Yeah, I should’ve clarified regarding Apple, which wasn’t in the Lisp workstation market. Apple’s departure from Lisp has little to do with the AI winter (though Hacker News commenters lispm and mikelevins may have a lot more insight given their expertise and the fact that the latter worked on Lisp projects at Apple). Rather, I believe Apple’s departure has to do with Steve Jobs’ return. Apple was an unfocused beacon of innovation in the 1990s, with many competing visions for the future of the Mac and the company. When Steve Jobs returned, the vision became unified under him: the technical underpinnings of the Mac were based on NeXT technology, and other competing visions (such as OpenDoc) were discarded.

hajile 3y ago

The saddest thing to me is that Brendan Eich didn't do a scheme like he intended. If that had happened, the web would have been fast 15 years earlier. Things like Flash wouldn't have ever happened. ES2015 would have never been necessary. HTML would have gone away. CSS would have never existed. Declarative web frameworks would have become a reality decades ago. WASM wouldn't have happened. Even stuff like the App Store likely wouldn't have happened because Scheme would have been fast enough that Jobs would have stuck with his initial web app idea.

BrendanEich 3y ago
I don't agree with this counterfactual, much as I love Scheme among languages I've barely used in my career. Chez Scheme was fast but would not fit in the browser especially on Windows 3.1, which still had the largest share when I started JS in 1995, if memory serves -- it was certainly important to Netscape because Microsoft started bundling IE into later Windows versions, as default browser in Windows 98. Petit Chez Scheme was not fast, and I'm not sure I would have had time to use it in those ten days (I never looked at the code). Guile was out because of the GPL, not my choice (same as with Make It Look Like Java order) and probably no time to embed, or just no way with 64K segments. If you know of another fast-in-1995 Scheme that might have fit, links welcome.
- hajile 3y ago
  I guess I'll start by saying that JS is my absolute favorite among all the top languages out there (StandardML, Rust, Scheme, and CL probably being the others in my top 5). Thanks for making it! Of course, everything said is hypothetical as we can't actually wind back the clock. You could have rolled your own Scheme instead of adopting a then-fast implementation. The Scheme would certainly have been faster from the very start if for no other reasons than integers are faster than floats and real arrays are faster than hashtables. Scheme would likely have been a bit faster from the start, but the real question would be the trajectory from there. JS needs inline caches and hidden classes to be fast. I don't see how all that could have possibly run on typical systems of the 90s. In contrast, there's a lot of Scheme optimizations that would work perfectly well on those machines before resorting to the really heavyweight stuff. Considering that JS with many millions in investment is generally slower in typical code than something like Gambit or Chez (both of which have very little financial backing) leaves me assuming that the Scheme trajectory would always be better. This just leaves the hypotheticals of Scheme's other effects. Anyone who's used basically any lisp for web work would understand why HTML would become effectively subsumed. S-expressions make dynamic manipulation of the raw trees very easy as that's what a lisp is designed to do. React revolutionized frontend development in 2013, but a huge part of what people like most about it would have been obvious to web developers years earlier. XML may well have never happened either. While JSON was apparently only obvious in hindsight, the idea of sending S-exp over the wire then parsing out the data is very in-your-face with lisps. CSS is a much more simple matter. One of the major syntax proposals used S-expressions and their easy integration into Scheme would have all but guaranteed their adoption. WASM likely wouldn't be needed because as has been shown with Common Lisp, you can already get very low level with just lisp (and even lower if you allow stuff to optionally handle its own memory). Asm.js got really complicated to the point that WASM made more sense, but with performance already being very good, it becomes a lot less necessary (even without those lower-level changes). Flash was a bit hyperbolic. It would probably still have existed for a variety of reasons, but probably wouldn't have become a separate language and ironically would probably still exist today as a development layer over the browser's features. Steve Jobs was very open that he didn't want an app store, but instead wanted web applications. There was an issue with the browser's capabilities, but the biggest issue was that JS engines were still just too slow in the late 2000s (part of what killed off the very amazing webOS). Scheme would likely have been quite fast by that point making the web app argument much more appealing and possibly saving the world from fractured ecosystems. Of course, there's the counter-argument that the world would never accept a scheme and it would have either been replaced or moved everyone into the nightmare of Java applets. There are certainly a lot of alternative universes where the world would be far worse if we'd wound up with Scheme rather than Javascript.