7 ms·

"From the perspective of 2024 though, I think that the most appropriate reaction is to marvel at the ambition of the UC Berkeley team, commercially successful o

"From the perspective of 2024 though, I think that the most appropriate reaction is to marvel at the ambition of the UC Berkeley team, commercially successful or not, and to be equally impressed by how relevant (with the possible exception of LISP) the ideas in SPUR would become decades later." I thought it was pretty widely accepted in the programming language community that Lisp has had a massive influence on the development of programming languages in general. I know it's not the only game in town, as it were, and that there's been lots of other interesting developments, but still. To imply that it hasn't been "relevant" seems like an uninformed comment to me.

linguae 2y ago
The influence of Lisp is widely known among PL researchers and practitioners (such as compiler writers), but there are many people in computing who are unaware of PL research and who have little exposure to Lisp except for Emacs users and maybe a few exercises in Scheme during college. Thus, the contributions of Lisp are constantly rediscovered by those who just come across it. Over the decades mainstream programming languages have incorporated features from Lisp, and there are still Lisp features that haven’t made its way into mainstream programming languages. Lisp is by no means the final word on programming languages, but its flexibility from its S-expression syntax to macros to its metaobject protocol makes it easier to bend the language to fit the problem rather than the usual approach of making the problem fit the implementation language, and this flexibility remains an enduring trait that continues to attract people.
JonChesterfield 2y ago
Dynamic typing and garbage collection didn't really catch on
- mepian 2y ago
  I guess nobody is using Python or Java.
- cmrdporcupine 2y ago
  Yeah, and REPLs. Totally not a thing :-) Remember when it was highly controversial for Java (and then C++) to get lambda expressions and many treated us as egg-headed academic nerds for wanting those things? I sure do.
  - dfox 2y ago
    In java lamdas are just a syntactic sugar for anonymous inner classes, with the same resulting limitations, so one can either argue that java always had lamdas, but with weird verbose syntax, or that java does not really have lambdas (in which case C++ and Python also do not have lambdas, as the semantics are similar).
    - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
      Yeah, I moved on from Java before lambdas were standardized, so can't comment much but what was painful was watching just how bloody long it took to get them into the language.
    - trealira 2y ago
      The point of a language feature is to have support in the syntax and in the compiler for it. Going down that lane, you could say that C has always had object-oriented polymorphism, because you can manually insert pointers to tables of functions in your data structures, and call it just verbose syntax for the virtual methods featured in C++.
    - lmm 2y ago
      Or syntax actually matters. Which ironically is where the lisp people went wrong.
      - kazinator 2y ago
        Syntax does matter. That's one area where the Lisp people went right. Lisp syntax is nice to work with irrespective of everything else, which was quite a discovery, which came as a surprise. The Lisp project itself didn't expect it; Lisp was supposed to be programmed in M-expressions. Furthermore, there was a second generation project, Lisp 2, that provided an Algol-like syntax over top of the Lisp internals. Because syntax matters, M-expressions and Algol syntax for Lisp fell by the wayside. Other subsequent attempts also faced very limited success.
- abecedarius 2y ago
  Gosh. Emblematic event: the journal Lisp and Functional Programming changed its name to drop Lisp, around early 90s iirc. So much of Lisp is super mainstream since before some programmers were born, now, that those aspects are no longer linked with it. And dynamic typing and GC are fucking ubiquitous compared to their status in the 80s.
  - blast 2y ago
    I was annoyed at first but I think JonChesterfield was joking
    - abecedarius 2y ago
      Oh, thanks! Very thick of me.
    - JonChesterfield 2y ago
      It's an obvious joke from the perspective of javascript or literally true for rust enthusiasts. It's fascinating that various different branches of the language tree agree that lisp did some things right and completely disagree about which things those were.

linguae 2y ago

The influence of Lisp is widely known among PL researchers and practitioners (such as compiler writers), but there are many people in computing who are unaware of PL research and who have little exposure to Lisp except for Emacs users and maybe a few exercises in Scheme during college. Thus, the contributions of Lisp are constantly rediscovered by those who just come across it. Over the decades mainstream programming languages have incorporated features from Lisp, and there are still Lisp features that haven’t made its way into mainstream programming languages. Lisp is by no means the final word on programming languages, but its flexibility from its S-expression syntax to macros to its metaobject protocol makes it easier to bend the language to fit the problem rather than the usual approach of making the problem fit the implementation language, and this flexibility remains an enduring trait that continues to attract people.

JonChesterfield 2y ago

Dynamic typing and garbage collection didn't really catch on

mepian 2y ago
I guess nobody is using Python or Java.
cmrdporcupine 2y ago
Yeah, and REPLs. Totally not a thing :-) Remember when it was highly controversial for Java (and then C++) to get lambda expressions and many treated us as egg-headed academic nerds for wanting those things? I sure do.
- dfox 2y ago
  In java lamdas are just a syntactic sugar for anonymous inner classes, with the same resulting limitations, so one can either argue that java always had lamdas, but with weird verbose syntax, or that java does not really have lambdas (in which case C++ and Python also do not have lambdas, as the semantics are similar).
  - cmrdporcupine 2y ago
    Yeah, I moved on from Java before lambdas were standardized, so can't comment much but what was painful was watching just how bloody long it took to get them into the language.
  - trealira 2y ago
    The point of a language feature is to have support in the syntax and in the compiler for it. Going down that lane, you could say that C has always had object-oriented polymorphism, because you can manually insert pointers to tables of functions in your data structures, and call it just verbose syntax for the virtual methods featured in C++.
  - lmm 2y ago
    Or syntax actually matters. Which ironically is where the lisp people went wrong.
    - kazinator 2y ago
      Syntax does matter. That's one area where the Lisp people went right. Lisp syntax is nice to work with irrespective of everything else, which was quite a discovery, which came as a surprise. The Lisp project itself didn't expect it; Lisp was supposed to be programmed in M-expressions. Furthermore, there was a second generation project, Lisp 2, that provided an Algol-like syntax over top of the Lisp internals. Because syntax matters, M-expressions and Algol syntax for Lisp fell by the wayside. Other subsequent attempts also faced very limited success.
abecedarius 2y ago
Gosh. Emblematic event: the journal Lisp and Functional Programming changed its name to drop Lisp, around early 90s iirc. So much of Lisp is super mainstream since before some programmers were born, now, that those aspects are no longer linked with it. And dynamic typing and GC are fucking ubiquitous compared to their status in the 80s.
- blast 2y ago
  I was annoyed at first but I think JonChesterfield was joking
  - abecedarius 2y ago
    Oh, thanks! Very thick of me.
  - JonChesterfield 2y ago
    It's an obvious joke from the perspective of javascript or literally true for rust enthusiasts. It's fascinating that various different branches of the language tree agree that lisp did some things right and completely disagree about which things those were.