In this 1994 paper Richard Waters acknowledged the momentum of C and its implications for the Lisp ecosystem. He laid out a stretegy for the survival and growth of Lisp focused on the development of a critical mass of reusable software.
Three decades later the Lisp community has come a long way but, as Waters concluded back then:
"As long as we are a vibrant community [...] Lisp will hold its own."
👆 I posted the initial code and some notes on Insphex, a new hex dump tool in Common Lisp I'm writing under the Medley Interlisp environment. The program is similar to the Linux command hexdump.
Very excited about this book! Conway’s Game of Life is what got me out of blubberism almost three decades ago as I implemented it in php and started looking into more succinct implementations which brought me to #apl, #lisp and so #forth.
It's now available the paper of the Medley talk Andrew Sengul gave at the European Lisp Symposium 2024. It outlines the history of Interlisp, introduces the Medley revival project, and presents the main features and facilities of the environment.
@amoroso#lisp#interlisp#commonlisp
Thanks for the pointer! That's a very well written paper giving an excellent overview of the Interlisp revival project.
Petalisp is an attempt to generate high performance code for parallel computers by JIT-compiling array definitions. It is not a full blown programming language, but rather a carefully crafted extension of Common Lisp that allows for extreme optimization and parallelization.
Another lisp (lisps sometimes feel like weed: Leave a computing environment unpoliced for some for some time, sure as hell, a lisp has parachuted in and taken root)
What's beyond me, though, why almost everybody who makes their own (un-common, non-scheme) lisp, insists practically on their own vocabulary for defining (e.g.) functions. They avoid the time honored defun, the logical define and even the non- mutilated define-function. Instead they use defn.
How was your weekend? I love a rainy weekend in the Pacific Northwest corner of America, as it relieves my guilt of doing what I want to do ... staying inside. I read a little, wrote a little, hacked a little ... even played a classic #videogame from the 90s (Curse of Monkey Island on #ScummVM).
I also did a little math. Yeah, been thinking of taking the "Yes, and.." dice mechanics used for luck rolls in #rpg games (not sure who came up with it first), and fusing it with Mythic GM Emulator's Fate Chart, popular with the #solorpg crowd. Since I'm always playing with my notes written in #emacs on the screen, I hacked it in #lisp. Shared the details in case anyone wanted to do something similar in their favorite programming language.
;; Getting rid of explicit indexing was just step one.
-- After a few days/months/years, I now realize that it is more important and less buggy if I think only of the function to call (and whether I want to end up with a new (maybe pruned) collection, a single thing, or "both" (that's how I think of scans))