3 ms·

For the lazy, this is a good write-up of Lisp's JPL history: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html Since I'm postin

by Jach 13y ago

For the lazy, this is a good write-up of Lisp's JPL history: http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html http://www.flownet.com/gat/jpl-lisp.html Since I'm posting that link for people looking into the history I might as well also recall Naughty Dog (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Game_Oriented_Assembly_Lisp) using their own lisps (GOOL and GOAL) in their games until Sony acquired them... And ZIL (http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/ZIL http://www.ifwiki.org/index.php/ZIL) was used by InfoCom for their text adventure games. (The ZIL manual linked on that wiki is amazing.) And of course T's interesting history... (http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html) Finally a quote by Kent Pitman I like: "Please don't assume Lisp is only useful for Animation and Graphics, AI, Bioinformatics, B2B and E-Commerce, Data Mining, EDA/Semiconductor applications, Expert Systems, Finance, Intelligent Agents, Knowledge Management, Mechanical CAD, Modeling and Simulation, Natural Language, Optimization, Research, Risk Analysis, Scheduling, Telecom, and Web Authoring just because these are the only things they happened to list." You're right about fashion and politics. Social issues, those are the problems a lisp really faces.

hga 13y ago
Yep, it's that JPL account I was too lazy to look up. Just like the AI Winter, a convenient scapegoat. To acquisitions dumping LISP you could also add our host's Viaweb, right? ZIL is derived from MDL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language) which has a critical place in the subsequent development of things like Scheme. And, yeah, Zork was written in it. I had a lot of fun with Adventure on a Version 6 UNIX(TM) back in 1978, so Zork on MIT-DM in 1980 or thereabouts was simply amazing. T was my favorite in the mid-80s or so, when VAXes were very available to me. Extremely elegant, and one of the inspirations of Clojure per http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Bookshelf/lm/R3LG3ZBZS4GCTH http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Bookshelf/lm/R3LG3ZBZS4GCTH Finishing, by fitting into the wildly successful and very useful Java ecosystem, Clojure avoids one set of political issues (heck, Java made the world safe for GC language in general). And with a number of success stories, and to my very limited knowledge no major horror stories yet, another. But when we're talking about fashion and politics that sort of bourgeois truth doesn't matter. But we'll see.

by Jach 13y ago

hga 13y ago

Yep, it's that JPL account I was too lazy to look up. Just like the AI Winter, a convenient scapegoat. To acquisitions dumping LISP you could also add our host's Viaweb, right? ZIL is derived from MDL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MDL_(programming_language) which has a critical place in the subsequent development of things like Scheme. And, yeah, Zork was written in it. I had a lot of fun with Adventure on a Version 6 UNIX(TM) back in 1978, so Zork on MIT-DM in 1980 or thereabouts was simply amazing. T was my favorite in the mid-80s or so, when VAXes were very available to me. Extremely elegant, and one of the inspirations of Clojure per http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Bookshelf/lm/R3LG3ZBZS4GCTH http://www.amazon.com/Clojure-Bookshelf/lm/R3LG3ZBZS4GCTH Finishing, by fitting into the wildly successful and very useful Java ecosystem, Clojure avoids one set of political issues (heck, Java made the world safe for GC language in general). And with a number of success stories, and to my very limited knowledge no major horror stories yet, another. But when we're talking about fashion and politics that sort of bourgeois truth doesn't matter. But we'll see.