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It is my understanding that what this paper describes was never actually shipped and instead the StarLisp was significantly lower level affair, on par of the ot

by dfox 2y ago

It is my understanding that what this paper describes was never actually shipped and instead the StarLisp was significantly lower level affair, on par of the other Star-something languages for the CM, or rather the frontend of it (CM is essentially an equivalent of modern GPU, not a general purpose computer).

ma2t 2y ago
"significantly lower level affair, on par of the other Star-something languages for the CM" I'm not sure what this means. C* and CM Fortran weren't particularly low-level, unless C or Fortran 90 are "significantly low-level". For low-level fun, you'd drop to Paris (or to CMIS for "breathtakingly heart-stoppingly low-level"). For the curious, a great archive of documentation for stuff that actually shipped is here: https://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/ https://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/
Qem 2y ago
> it is my understanding that what this paper describes was never actually shipped This reminds me of an interesting talk by David Beazley where he discuss the early days of Python, when IIRC he was a student at a national lab, and they managed to run the Python REPL in an connection machine 5 that people had a hard time programming in lower level languages. It seems the work they did back then, writing modules that allowed the Python interpreter to interoperate with scientific code was one of the foundations for it to snowball many years later. So I wonder if what this paper describes had shipped in time, if that would lead us by butterfly effect into the alternative timeline where Lisp dominates scientific computing, instead of Python. See https://youtu.be/4RSht_aV7AU?si=jVZzxa93svZ5oEXL https://youtu.be/4RSht_aV7AU?si=jVZzxa93svZ5oEXL
- pjmlp 2y ago
  At CERN, back in 2000, Python started to slowly take over as the build scripts, something like scons, CMT was the name. And as REPL for CERN libraries, instead of ROOT. Unfortunately while Python has taken over Lisp's domain, we are still far from Lisp capabilities to generate native code. EDIT: CMT docs are still around, https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Main/LearningAthena https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Main/LearningAthena
pmcjones 2y ago
More StarLisp items: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/parallel#Connection_Machine_*Lisp_(StarLisp)_ https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/parallel#...

by dfox 2y ago

ma2t 2y ago

"significantly lower level affair, on par of the other Star-something languages for the CM" I'm not sure what this means. C* and CM Fortran weren't particularly low-level, unless C or Fortran 90 are "significantly low-level". For low-level fun, you'd drop to Paris (or to CMIS for "breathtakingly heart-stoppingly low-level"). For the curious, a great archive of documentation for stuff that actually shipped is here: https://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/ https://people.csail.mit.edu/bradley/cm5docs/

Qem 2y ago

> it is my understanding that what this paper describes was never actually shipped This reminds me of an interesting talk by David Beazley where he discuss the early days of Python, when IIRC he was a student at a national lab, and they managed to run the Python REPL in an connection machine 5 that people had a hard time programming in lower level languages. It seems the work they did back then, writing modules that allowed the Python interpreter to interoperate with scientific code was one of the foundations for it to snowball many years later. So I wonder if what this paper describes had shipped in time, if that would lead us by butterfly effect into the alternative timeline where Lisp dominates scientific computing, instead of Python. See https://youtu.be/4RSht_aV7AU?si=jVZzxa93svZ5oEXL https://youtu.be/4RSht_aV7AU?si=jVZzxa93svZ5oEXL

pjmlp 2y ago
At CERN, back in 2000, Python started to slowly take over as the build scripts, something like scons, CMT was the name. And as REPL for CERN libraries, instead of ROOT. Unfortunately while Python has taken over Lisp's domain, we are still far from Lisp capabilities to generate native code. EDIT: CMT docs are still around, https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Main/LearningAthena https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/bin/view/Main/LearningAthena

pmcjones 2y ago

More StarLisp items: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/parallel#Connection_Machine_*Lisp_(StarLisp)_ https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/parallel#...