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The transcription is slightly crazy in parts: "Prologue", "girdle numbers" (my favourite), "picks my curiosity" … . Unfortunately, McCarthy seems to misunderst
by parenthesis 17y ago
The transcription is slightly crazy in parts: "Prologue", "girdle numbers" (my favourite), "picks my curiosity" … .
Unfortunately, McCarthy seems to misunderstand Kent Pitman's question about dynamic vs. static typing as having to do with dynamic vs. static (lexical) variable scoping.
The most interesting thing, for me, was the idea that it was because McCarthy never tried to be the 'boss' of Lisp that there has always been so much diversity and innovation in Lisp(s).
- mahmud 17y agoHe never tried to be the boss, but that doesn't mean he didn't put his foot down when he needed to. He pretty much killed ISO ISLisp, International Standard Lisp, a competing Lisp standardization effort that was a subset of Common Lisp just about the same size and flavor of Dylan. The ISLisp guys where mostly European lispers who were excluded from the Common Lisp ANSI standardization process, which was mostly an American venture backed by the DoD. McCarthy didn't see technical merit to their claim for a separate standard, and he barred them from calling it "Standard Lisp". The wounds healed and the community reunited, but still, if the Europeans had a seat at the table we might have gotten a layered language, with a tiny kernel and several higher-level extensions, where vendors could advertise adherence to a Lisp "level" (e.g. "CL0" being a tiny Lispy VM with GC and LAP assembly, CL1 being primitive datatypes and special forms, and so on.)
- delano 17y agoWell, hey. That's a coincidence. I just transcribed that part about not attempting to be the boss. It's too bad they didn't continue that discussion a bit further. (It's not clear whether JM heard the question or just was interested in talking about it.)