@screwtape I was doing some listening to back episodes of your Lispy Gopher show on AnonRadio, and I had a couple of supplementary remarks to add to the remarks you made about Lisp history, while recounting what you got out of my Untold Story paper. Far too detailed for on-air but this seemed a useful forum to flesh some of that out. You asked about the back story of the lisp manual I wrote where I lost money (and got a hard life lesson in intellectual property). Yes, that was my Maclisp Manual, the Pitmanual (originally published in hardcopy at MIT, and later webbed at https://maclisp.info/pitmanual/index.html). Detailed history here: https://maclisp.info/pitmanual/history.html Dave Moon (usually just called Moon) was a Multics Maclisp implementor and author of the first manual. Maclisp had evolved and changed a lot by time I wrote mine. I was mostly a Maclisp user, not implementor. I wrote a macro library or two. But I shared an office with Guy Steele and JonL White, Maclisp implementors, so I accumulated a lot of trivia that needed not to get lost. And I was having fun playing with Knuth's TeX. In Maclisp, I wrote a special-purpose Maclisp-manual-making language that compiled into TeX. The Pitmanual was written in that, a kind of tabular plain text, and my tool produced the TeX for the typeset book as output. I should also note, to avoid confusion, that Maclisp was a pre-Common Lisp dialect that ran on the Digital Equipment Corporation (DEC) PDP-10, which was pretty much comparable to the DEC20 (which was really mostly a later and more commercial PDP10, though it ran a very different operating system). Maclisp was so-named NOT because of the Apple Macintosh, which it long pre-dated, but because it was named after Project MAC (a multi-targeted acronym that meant things like Machine-Aided Cognition, Man and Computers, and other things like that if I recall). But it was an MIT project in using computation generally and had zero overlap with what Apple made. Eventually there as a lisp for the Apple MacOS system, but it was not Maclisp. More remarks will follow as a separate attachment. #lisp #maclisp #gopher #LispyGopher (πŸ”) (⭐) (πŸ”–) Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 00:33:17 ―――――――――――― 3 ⭐ | 13 πŸ” | 2 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @screwtape The PDP10 was a 36-bit architecture. Note well: NOT a power of 2. As I heard it, DEC was trying to make it be a lisp-friendly instruction set, so kind of an early lisp machine even though we referred to commercial vendors as "stock hardware". It had a fun instruction set. While the PDP-11wΜΆaΜΆsΜΆ ΜΆ3ΜΆ2ΜΆ-ΜΆbΜΆiΜΆtΜΆ ΜΆ was 16-bit [1], the PDP-10 was 36-bit. These OS's did not go in order. The PDP-10 (a.k.a, "the 10") was not superseded by the PDP-11 (a.k.a. "the 11"). They were different projects. While the 11 was stack-oriented, the 10 was VERY different. And the 11 was byte-oriented but the 10 wasn't; it was word-addressed with 18-bit pointers, so 256Kwords or about 1.25 MB if you're thinking 7-bit bytes of text (though mostly we didn't; we just said 256K, words was implied). The 10 I used had a megaword of memory (4x what could be addressed), which was good because disks were slow and when a job (process) blocked, another was in memory and ready to run. And I heard Moon once say that megaword, called a "moby" cost $1M. Yikes. But back to the word size, the 18 bits per half-word, was perfect for a cons. There were instructions to get one or the other half-word. And ASCII was 7-bit back then, so you could get 5 7-bit characters in a word, with one bit left over (sometimes wasted, sometimes used interestingly). There were ways to extract those efficiently. The first emacs originated in that environment, but not in lisp, in a language called TECO. But yeah, weird and fun 36-bit architecture. People can see here if that piques their interest: http://pdp10.nocrew.org/docs/instruction-set/pdp-10.html The HLRZ instruction ("Half-left to right padding with zeros", I think it stood for, was the CAR function). Howard Cannon, inventor of Flavors, the Lisp Machine / Zetalisp precursor to CLOS, had a license plate of HLRZ on his car. Probably few people in the real world understood, but it seemed cool. There were a few other instructions on the PDP10 that were directly Lisp instructions. Obviously HRRZ. I'll leave you to work that out. Speaking of strange word sizes, Multics was a 72-bit architecture. I was told some address bits would never be non-zero because no one could ever afford that much physical memory. It was a Honeywell machine, not DEC. So I guess it's just coincidence it was twice the number of bits of the PDP-10. Multics was respected for being HIGHLY secure, long before its time, so not appreciated. Just as its primary language, PL/1, was not appreciated for its complex type casts. History is harsh to ideas that arrive too early. You can learn more about it here: https://www.multicians.org/ Dave Moon's earlier Maclisp manual (the Moonual), which predated my Revised Maclisp Manual (a.k.a. Pitmanual), was very Multics-leaning is preserved here: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/Moon-MACLISP_Reference_Manual-Apr_08_1974.pdf #Lisp #maclisp #LispyGopher [1] Thanks to @larsbrinkhoff for correcting my memory downthread: The PDP-11 was a 16-bit, not a 32-bit machine. Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 00:34:57 ✍ 2023-10-15 07:22:26 ―――――――――――― 0 ⭐ | 7 πŸ” | 5 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @screwtape You also had mentioned the original CLTL book and wondered if it was an ANSI standard. It was not. It was a "de facto standard", that is, it was just a popular book. But it was designed by a committee with purpose. The so-called "gang of 5" who put most of it together, with Guy Steele at the helm, allowed a number of others (eventually myself included, though I joined after it began, as told in my Untold Story paper and as you related on your show). It was after we (meaning Steele) published CLTL that we realized we had no process for evolving things and we turned to ANSI to help us make an actual standard. There was a CLTL2, but it was (by its own admission, somewhere in the roman-numeraled front matter) not a committee work, not proofread by the committee and not even consistent with the final standard. It was Steele's snapshot of work in progress. It was important in its time as a bridge and approximate view of what might come, but it is also probably responsible for the confusion that the 1994 output was a aecond standard. It was a second official language revision, but more like an unintentional competitor with ANSI standard. No one minded Steele doing this, but it created some conceptual confusion. So the 1994 thing was the first and only ANSI standard. It had many drafts leading up to the final work, all of which were labeled dpANS something, meaning "draft proposed American National Standard". The final work, in 1994, was an "ANS" (American National Standard). Also, the dpANS sources are effectively (see Untold Story for better detail on what "effectively" means) public, while the actual standard is (narrowly) controlled by ANSI. It's a distinction without a difference, though, because the body content of both documents is the same. They differ only in frontmatter and headings. But as a legal matter, there are some issues. I did get permission from ANSI to make the HyperSpec be a derivative of the actual standard but most public documents base themselves on the final dpANS to avoid the need for such permission. You also describe me as a leader, and I think that's fair, but it's important to say that it was a group effort of many people (see the credits for a sense of the complexity of contributions http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Body/00_.htm). But I was the second of two editors. Kathy Chapman, of Digital Equipment Corporation, was not a Lisp programmer, but she did an able job of taking Steele's CLTL and putting it in a format more like a standard. Even before taking over from her, I contributed a lot of what became a 60-page glossary, but she laid out a lot of the structure and doesn't get enough credit. Also, the administrative process of voting and meetings was run by Guy Steele and there were several committee heads that did parts of the language. My job, as Project Editor, was to consolidate a lot of that and distill it into a document that was coherent and complete, though it was so large that I worried for a long time that we were leaving something out. In 1984, by coincidence, I had written an early Hypertext editor. I didn't know what hypertext was, I had to learn that word later. But I wrote it up here: ftp://publications.ai.mit.edu/ai-publications/pdf/AIM-829.pdf just in case anyone is curious. Periodically, people would ask me what some tables in the hardcopy were doing and I would say they were important as hyperlinks, which probably made no sense to anyone back then, and I only meant it metaphorically at the time, but later it was super-cool when I finally wrote the Common Lisp program that turned the TeX sources into HTML for the Common Lisp HyperSpec, after completing the standard, when the list of 978 symbols lit up with hyperlinks for every one of them, confirming that I'd actually documented all the things I claimed to have. I had a role in the condition system and in a lot of the cleanup items, but it's really important not to make it look like it was my thing alone. I really loved how collaborative it was, and people like Steele, Gabriel, Masinter, Fahlman, Loosemore, and others too numerous to mention here were really key, too. In fact, for many reasons I did not tell stories of a lot of things because I felt they were not my stories to tell. I am vocal about a lot of this, so I get a lot of attention, but I've found over time that some people are writers and/or storytellers and some are not. And I worried these stories would not be told at all. So at some risk of getting more credit than due, I tell many of these stories. But I hope in the process not to eclipse those who made quieter contributions. I've been fortunate enough to get to contribute in various ways, but even more fortunate in being in the right place at the right time to know a lot of amazing people, both personally and indirectly through their organizational and personal contributions. #lisp #CommonLisp #LispyGopher (⭐) Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 01:03:18 ✍ 2023-10-15 16:03:14 ―――――――――――― 2 ⭐ | 8 πŸ” | 2 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @screwtape And, finally in this little thread of historical supplements... In your show, you mentioned Algol (not in context of anything to do with me). You described it as somehow related to Fortran. Maybe, but that's not my memory. Algol is from the same era as Fortran, or close to, but is distinct. Algol doesn't seem Fortran-like to me, and Wikipedia doesn't cite Fortran as a special influence. It was a nicely block-structured language with lexical scoping, and Scheme is directly inspired by it in its push for lexical scoping, which (oddly) was very controversial in the Lisp community elsewhere until Common Lisp. We (computer people of the era generally) used to call any block-structured language an Algol-like language until people forgot what Algol was. I think for a while people referred to Pascal too, which came later. But now they attribute to C or Java, probably, as if those invented block structure. In fact, if you look at the Algol paper and the early RRRS papers, you'll see an attempt to mirror it, with reverent precision, down to the typography. See both the typography and the dedication on page 1 here in R3RS: https://standards.scheme.org/official/r3rs.pdf Compare to Algol 60 report in both style, down to the fact of a dedication: https://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/report/Algol60_report_CACM_1960_June.pdf #Lisp #Scheme #Algol #LispyGopher (⭐) Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 01:11:33 ✍ 2023-10-15 12:54:51 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 5 πŸ” | 2 πŸ’¬ @kentpitman @screwtape love learning Lisp and PDP history like this (⭐) synlogic (@synlogic@toot.io) 2023-10-15 00:52:36 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 0 πŸ” | 0 πŸ’¬ @kentpitman @screwtape I've programmed the 10 as well. Interesting beast. The hardware stack was a new idea. IBM and Xerox mainframes did not have it. the 8 did not have it (as you know) PowerPC did not have it (We used it at BSDi) PL/I was an attempt by IBM to save money by combining compilers for Fortran and COBOL. The compiler was deadly slow and baroque. Still PLM for embedded was quite ok. EMACS was originally a set of TECO (an editor) macros. prior to Gosling (yes that Gosling) emacs and RMS emacs. My background was in real-time/embedded so not LISP at all. (⭐) Dianora (@Dianora@ottawa.place) 2023-10-15 01:03:14 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 1 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @Dianora @screwtape Regarding the slowness of PL/1 (or PL/I, in case anyone is searching, since both were used), I wonder if that was platform dependent. Multics seemed as veritable a PL/1 machine. Everything revolved around PL/1, but it was the Multics PL/1 dialect, so maybe that mattered. It was from that, which had other features, that the Common Lisp condition system drew some inspiration, indirectly through the Zetalisp "New Error System" (NES) which purported to have been inspired by Honeywell Multics PL/1. See the frontmatter on http://www.nhplace.com/kent/CL/Revision-18.txt for my contemporaneous notes about that in my second paper on lisp conditions, Condition Handling in the Lisp Language Family https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/Condition-Handling-2001.html (⭐) Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 03:18:10 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 1 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @kentpitman @screwtape Remember "The Mythical Man-Month" Fred Brooks (dec.) He was not writing about PL/I but I'd guess it was what happened to PL/I at IBM as well. ;) (⭐) Dianora (@Dianora@ottawa.place) 2023-10-15 10:24:28 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 0 πŸ” | 0 πŸ’¬ @kentpitman @screwtape There were two versions of Algol Algol 60 and Algol 68. Both are very block structured unlike early Fortran. Attempts were made to make Fortran Block Structure. WATFOR (Waterloo Ontario) and RATFOR as examples. Modern Fortran has block structures and is much different and still in use. Historically one could argue 'C' was a failed Fortran compiler. As at one time Fortran pretty much served the same purpose as 'C' except for low level work. ;) The block structured part was brought in from 'B' and 'BCPL' from the Uk which had to have been influenced by Algol! Algol was much more popular in Europe and obscure over here. (⭐) Dianora (@Dianora@ottawa.place) 2023-10-15 01:17:19 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 1 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @Dianora @screwtape Interesting account, Dianora. For context of those who didn't live it, worth noting that hardware and software and what passed for a network was WAY more Balkanized back then by hardware, since C had not yet achieved the status of machine-independent implementation language--probably why, as you note, FORTRAN was sometime used for that, though I'm into rank speculation now. I always wondered why Crowther's original Adventure game [1] was written in Fortran, but it was probably for portability. So Algol 60, as I recall, was written originally for Burroughs hardware, and we had an Algol implementation at MIT in the spring of 77 when I was taking a computer science course that would later be re-vamped to be taught in Scheme. But my point was that just because a language was available on one hardware type, it wasn't necessarily on another, and there were a LOT of hardware types and operating systems back then. Lisp users these days sometimes question both the pathname and the logical pathname concept in Lisp, since pathnames are so similar now in string form between operating systems. But they were VERY different back in the day. And operating systems varied a lot more than just in that. All to say the success or failure of particular languages may have turned on the availability of hardware in this or that part of the not-really-adequately-globally-connected world. Even the work on CLTL (pre-1984) was hampered by how slow the communication was between the US and farther flung places. Individual machines connected to other machines but for a long time there was no network backbone other than specific nets of dozens or hundreds of computers, with bridges between them. For example, we'd have liked to have included people from Japan and from various places in Europe, but the turnaround time for email via uucp (unix-to-unix-copy, which pre-internet had to deliver mail that looked like x!y!z [2] over a lazy delay period that was sometimes days in way that was, to employ a metaphor, kind of like Mastodon, with sites coming and getting mail delivery from other sites as if the pony express was carrying news from town to town. It was just too slow for them to be included in the discussion, I heard people say, and so it wasn't until later that the full global community could even talk to one another, much less rely on each other to have compatible processors. C's job, among others, eventually became to become the de facto way to bootstrap tools on a new implementation, pretending everything was a PDP-11. Or so it seemed to me. I'm sure others would describe it a bit differently. (Java and others have tried to supplant that to various degrees of success.) Feel free to embellish or correct me on this, about which I don't claim to be an authority, just a passer-through of interesting times. Each of us saw this from our own ill-connected desks, and so it's possible none of us has a really global gestalt. But I pieced together clues from other things people would say and I share them as rebuttal accounts. [1] You can play old games like Adventure (a text-based game with one or two word commands involving Collosal Cave) and Zork (a next-generation variant, involving a more complex parser and many more rooms), all predecessors of later Muds, Mushes, and MOOs, at https://telehack.com [2] You can read x!y!z as a UUCP email address as "I know a guy named x who will know how to deliver the part after the first exclamation mark (or bang as they were called)." So x would know something called y!z, and so on. These could be long chains, and cycles were a risk. #LispyGopher #uucp #algol #zork #MOO (⭐) Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 01:52:26 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 1 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @kentpitman @screwtape Yes but Fortran became the lingua franca simply because manufacturers would compete to demonstrate how fast etc. their compilers for Fortran were. So it was logical to write a Fortran for any new system: https://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html "Thompson decided that Unixβ€”possibly it had not even been named yetβ€”needed a system programming language. After a rapidly scuttled attempt at Fortran, " Fortran's goofy syntax makes it hard. It's not a CFG by any means. I was on uucp email with a SUN 3/60 at home. Bill Bradford's (dec.) SAH list was helpful back then. But by then we had some Internet (and Datapac!) connectivity to help out. I always considered JAVA as a bit of smoke and mirrors product since we have always had machine emulation. IBM was famous for it. Emulate a 1401 on a 360 so you can run your old payroll system. ;) ZORK was originally written in something called ZDL ZDL was written in Fortran. Or something like that. (History on that is easy to find) (⭐) Dianora (@Dianora@ottawa.place) 2023-10-15 10:40:10 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 0 πŸ” | 0 πŸ’¬ @kentpitman @screwtape it was my fault for spuriously mentioning algol in commode during the show https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PS-algol (⭐) πš›πšŠπš (@rat@social.sdf.org) 2023-10-15 02:46:36 ―――――――――――― 2 ⭐ | 0 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @rat @screwtape I'm kind of new to that forum, but I'm not sure that spurious is a word I'd apply to any of the conversation I've seen there. It seems very equal-opportunity. :) (⭐) Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 02:50:39 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 1 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @kentpitman I had the confusion between influenced-by FORTRAN and FORTRAN-like! Thank you for these replies and first person commentary I will delve into. Often @rat @amszmidt and company gently correct me towards knowing what the past was actually like, myself being quite a late-comer to it! *The fortran wikipedia page says it influenced design of algol58 (⭐) screwtape (@screwtape) 2023-10-15 03:17:57 ✍ 2023-10-15 03:23:58 ―――――――――――― 3 ⭐ | 0 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @screwtape @rat @amszmidt Thanks for a place to hang a meta-comment about that, since I had thought about this when you said. I could go in and micro-optimize things you said, but history and community is not like that. We try to get true accounts on record, but people blur and confuse things. While at some level I think that it's good to fix things, I think it's most important merely to communicate that many were involved and that there are many points of view. I only started in here, really, because I felt I was being credited with more than I should have been here and there, and I wanted to include mention of some other people and other endeavors. I don't want people to think that history was about just one person, lest they feel their contributions in some corner of things doesn't matter, or lest they all jockey for some prominent position rather than just to do good works. It's almost a mark of success if not everyone sees things a certain way, if accounts differ. In a vibrant community, one simply cannot and perhaps should not try to correct everything. So I try to take it with a bit of sense of humor when things aren't as I remember them. I am finite and cannot spend my lifetime correcting things, and my memories are finite and may not even be perfect in the first place. Bottom line is that it's better to be talked about by many who do not fear being corrected than by only a few who have the time to be meticulous. Or so it seems to me in this moment. People could certainly differ on this. Maybe I will differ on another day. Carry on. :) (⭐) Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 03:23:46 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 1 πŸ” | 0 πŸ’¬ @kentpitman In 2024 it will be 30 years since the approval of ANSI Common Lisp (which month? I haven't found any details) and 40 years since CLtL1. Such a fat, round double anniversary would be a great opportunity to tell all those stories, maybe by putting together a virtual or actual panel with the major contributors. And/or by publishing a collection of short articles with the personal recollections or retrospectives of those contributors. @screwtape (⭐) (πŸ”–) Paolo Amoroso (@amoroso@fosstodon.org) 2023-10-15 07:31:22 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 2 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @amoroso @screwtape Hey, I love that kind of thing, so I wouldn't want to stop you if you were organizing such a thing, Paolo. :) On the other hand, there are venues that regularly find such things so if you don't want the same old group of us, you might have to track some people down and twist some arms. Speaking of existing venues, I'll be talking virtually at Lisp NYC on Dec 12. https://www.meetup.com/lispnyc/events/296163568/ It's been a pretty busy group. I know Masinter has spoken there (https://www.meetup.com/lispnyc/events/272754480/ with video at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x6-b_hazcyk) and probably others have (their meetup describes 141 past events, many of which it looks like you can find here: https://www.youtube.com/@lispnyc1039) And I've visited the European Lisp Symposium some years, and they're an active and fun group. Covid aside, that's generally more of an in-person thing, though you could perhaps talk conference organizers into a better remote option. I'd love to still be attending those, but I have some pretty severe hip-based arthritis these days that limits my walking-around mobility, and I wouldn't want to hold others back from whatever fun events they have planned. But check out https://www.european-lisp-symposium.org/ for information. There are other venues as well. The talk I'll be giving in December at LispNYC will be an updated version of one that I gave at Universidade do Minho in Portugal a few years back for SLATE'18 (https://slate-conf.org/2018/program). (Trivia: Getting to that venue was complicated, but was made easier by coordination work by AntΓ³nio LeitΓ£o. The event had very special personal significance to me because that university, UMinho, hosted--and still hosts--MOOsaico, a MOO where 2 dozen or so years prior I was honored to be invited to join as a feiticeiro--Portuguese for wizard--collaborating on a project to create a multilingual MOO, a text-based virtual reality, alongside Paulo Ferreira and Rui Mendes, who I never met in person until I was in the area for that talk. All of these endeavors are highly interconnected behind the scenes, in other words. Human connection works in many interesting ways, sometimes intentionally connected, sometimes just luck.) Anyway, my point is that no one has to wait for a venue if they have tales to tell. Venues exist. Step up. ... But I'm all for nudging others to speak who don't usually. (⭐) (πŸ”–) Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 08:49:06 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 2 πŸ” | 0 πŸ’¬ @kentpitman @screwtape my high school had a PDP-8 which was a 12-bit minicomputer when I was going half time to elementary school and high school; when I was high school age we got a VAX which was 32-bit like the 386 and the computer club got the PDP-8. DEC donated a PDP-10 to the Children’s Museum in Boston and I remember a high school in Milford, NH had a PDP-11 that was my favorite (⭐) Paul Houle (@UP8@mastodon.social) 2023-10-15 01:37:13 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 1 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @UP8 @screwtape Yup. You can still get a PDP-10 as an emulator, by the way, with the MIT ITS or DEC TOPS-10 operating system on it. http://klh10.trailing-edge.com/ In case you want to run Maclisp, for example, or if you want to see a TECO-based Emacs, from before there was Emacs-Lisp. Maybe there are emulators of those other machines, too, but if so I don't track them. (⭐) Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 01:58:38 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 1 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @kentpitman @screwtape well, LISPers thought BASIC was pretty yuck circa 1980 (... but unlike FORTH they never seemed to get LISP to fit comfortably on "8-bit" micros) but I have to admit I have a lot of nostalgia for RSTS/E on the PDP-11. As for modern programming languages I think there isn't anything more beautiful than AVR-8 assembly, at least for programs you can fit inside an AVR-8. If it wasn't for portability I think a macro assembler + theorem prover would be cooler than Rust. (⭐) Paul Houle (@UP8@mastodon.social) 2023-10-15 02:44:14 ✍ 2023-10-15 02:46:20 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 0 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @UP8 @screwtape http://www.edm2.com/index.php/MuLISP (⭐) Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 02:48:09 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 0 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @UP8 @screwtape Thanks for referring the PS-Algol link, by the way. I like the idea of persistent languages. I suppose SQL counts as that, though few actually program in SQL as a primary language. Personally, I quite enjoyed the MOO programming language, which was a kind of special-purpose text-based-virtual-reality-building language with a Lispy underbelly and Algol-like syntax (since we've re-popularized that term here in this conversation). But the reason I latched immediately onto Lisp is not mentioned in the following story, but you can imagine a paragraph in between my discussion of the story about Animal in BASIC and the story about Animal in LISP where I got to MIT and saw lisp and said, after inventing list structure on my own for my own purposes, "wow, they have that [tree structure] built into the language!" I was immediately hooked. My tree structures in BASIC were persistent, too, but I didn't appreciate the real importance and utility of that until much later. https://web.archive.org/web/20131102031307/http://open.salon.com/blog/kent_pitman/2010/02/25/am_i_evolving_into_a_gadget With thanks, as ever, to @brewsterkahle and Archive.org generally for the amazing Wayback Machine that hosts stories like this, and so much more, that would otherwise have been lost. #Lisp #OriginStory (my cobbled-together Lisp origin story, not Lisp's ... I'll write it more coherently another day, perhaps) (⭐) Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 03:07:16 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 2 πŸ” | 0 πŸ’¬ @kentpitman @screwtape The PDP-11 was 16-bit, not 32. It's successor VAX was 32-bit. (⭐) Lars Brinkhoff (@larsbrinkhoff) 2023-10-15 06:47:51 ―――――――――――― 3 ⭐ | 1 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @larsbrinkhoff @screwtape Oops. Duh. Good catch, Lars. Thanks! (⭐) Kent Pitman (@kentpitman@climatejustice.social) 2023-10-15 07:15:40 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 0 πŸ” | 0 πŸ’¬ @kentpitman @screwtape which episode was it? (⭐) blake shaw πŸ‡΅πŸ‡Έ ✌ (@rml@functional.cafe) 2023-10-15 23:18:24 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 0 πŸ” | 1 πŸ’¬ ⬇ @rml @kentpitman in general archived episodes of the #lispygopher show can be found here: https://archives.anonradio.net/#screwtape screwtape (@screwtape) 2023-10-15 23:21:13 ✍ 2023-10-15 23:27:09 ―――――――――――― 1 ⭐ | 1 πŸ” | 0 πŸ’¬