He started the Cyc project, using Lisp Machines as a development environment. The project is roughly since 40 years ongoing. Cyc was the dream of a large-scale knowledge base of common sense knowledge. One that has many ways of reasoning and making inferences. It used SubL a variant of Common Lisp.
A few years ago I have created a visual overview of (mostly) Common Lisp related books... Good thing: even the older ones can be useful, given that the core language hasn't changed that much over the last years.
@amoroso already ten or more years ago the few available used versions were offered for several hundred dollars. I have a copy, looks like an investment. ;-)
@simon_brooke@jackdaniel okay, that is provided by any Common Lisp which runs its own IDE or inside some editor IDE (GNU Emacs + SLIME or SLY would be examples, Terminal and GUI). There exist improvements for pure terminal repls, but I had never a case to use them extensively.
Here we have the case of a new REPL running in a browser.
#pascal#modula2#oberon#lilith Niklaus Wirth passed away on 1st Jan 2024? I learned a lot by reading his books and by using Pascal & Modula 2 on the UCSD virtual machine on the Apple ][.
#lisp#lispmachine#symbolics#genera#pascal#niklauswirth Niklaus Wirth's PASCAL made it to unusual systems: Here is a screenshot of a Lisp Machine, browsing the original Pascal User Manual and Report, but in a hypertext browser, with a PASCAL implementation loaded...
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.
@simon_brooke@reddit_lisp#lisp in Lisp 1.5 OBLIST was a constant with a list of all symbols as its value. Later implementations switched to the variable OBARRAY. Data structures are then arrays, btrees, hash-tables.... Emacs Lisp has a variable OBARRAY, which is a hash table.
In CL this can be computed with (apropos-list ""), which returns a list with of 70k symbols in LispWorks and SBCL, in Genera a list of 180k symbols. GNU Emacs has 24k symbols.
I was cursious about Lucid Common Lisp but its remaining documentation is not under Lucid at @bitsavers because, of course, it's under Sun.
The product was a Sun branded implementation licensed from Lucid. It featured some interesting historical peculiarities such as the Flavors OOP system instead of CLOS, which in the mid 1980s was yet to come to the ANSI Common Lisp standardization effort.
@amoroso Lucic CL was available under that name from Lucid Inc. (incl. documentation), but it was also re-sold via OEMs like SUN, IBM, and several others. Sometimes they added things to it, like IDE or libraries. Later Harlequin acquired the rights of Lucid CL. It was then sold as Liquid Common Lisp, with newly added stuff like the CAPI GUI library and the Common LispWorks development environment. The manuals for Liquid CL are here: https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lcl.html
@simon_brooke@mapcar@screwtape@nytpu@zoerhoff@jackdaniel the first offering of ACL of windows was a bit different from their UNIX product (Franz started in the UNIX world). After some time in the market they improved the Windows version.
@simon_brooke@mapcar@screwtape@nytpu@zoerhoff@jackdaniel TI had some interesting customers and applications. But the end of life was a shock for them. I don't think TI offered them anything. Other companies managed to help the Lisp customers to survive. Xerox had Envos taking over Interlisp. Apple had Digitool taking over MCL. Harlequin LispWorks later went a new independent company...
"Common Lisp is not a beautiful crystal of programming language design. It's a scruffy workshop with a big pegboard wall of tools, a thin layer of sawdust on the floor, a filing cabinet in the office with a couple of drawers that open perpendicular to the rest, [...]"
"This historical baggage is a price paid to ensure Common Lisp had a future."
@lispi314@amoroso@simon_brooke a main problem at that time (decades ago) was that interpreted code and compiled code differed in bindings. Interpreter -> dynamic binding, compiler -> lexical binding, by default. That was changed by Scheme and later picked up by Common Lisp. Even in Common Lisp there are differences. When using an Interpreter, a macro can be evaluated at runtime and functions may get access to their source code and change it at runtime
@amoroso AI (and #Lisp history) in the new book by Masayuki Ida: "A Narrative History of Artificial Intelligence, The Perpetual Frontier of Information Technology"
