👆 I read the story of Don Estridge, the manager who led the development of the IBM PC. His decency is moving and long gone in the tech industry.
That story is worth reading not just for how Estridge pushed the boundaries of the computer industry, but also how he pushed the boundaries of humanity in business. Which these days is an oxymoron.
I just updated my Medley from the Medley Interlisp Revival project (https://interlisp.org/) to get improved CLtL2 compatibility ... and boom, CL (loop)! Now to work through some CL code I've written to see if I can get it into the environment and running. #lisp#retrocomputing
@elb In my early experiments with Common Lisp on Medley I tripped into reader issues when not evaluating XCL:DEFINE-FILE-ENVIRONMENT from an Interlisp Exec.
@RL_Dane Pretty much. Most of the times you have no idea what the program will look like when you start coding, and often the problem is not well defined either.
In Lisp you embrace these unknowns and let exploratory programming guide you to a solution by growing the code. This way you learn about the problem and design the program as you go.
@lispm It's possible to change the background to a pixel pattern, like the one in the screenshot, but not solid gray as Medley currently supports only black and white pixels.
I wonder how difficult would it be for newcomers to grok Lisp parentheses if they weren't implicitly supposed to find parentheses hard due to all the fuss and cliches around them.
As a complete Lisp newbie over three decades ago, to me parentheses "disappeared" within minutes of using my first Lisp environment, TI PC-Scheme, and have never been an issue since then.