I didn't know much about John Allen, the author of the classic 1978 book Anatomy of LISP. This post by a researcher who knew him well tells a bit about Allen, his work, and his passion for Lisp and computing.
I didn't realize ACM makes available the full-ish archive of the LISP Pointers journal SIGPLAN published from the late 1980s to the mid 1990s. It contains most of the papers of most of the issues, an historical treasure of practical value.
The #game jam co-organized by Dave Thompson, CTO at @spritelyinst, starts today and are an excellent opportunity to test-drive the #Spritely#Hoot project's #Guile to #WebAssembly facilities.
Get inspired by last year's jam, and join the 10-day event..
There's now a long thread about what would make Lisp more successful. Nice idea, but it quickly turned into a good example of why this will never happen and why Lisp rarely fascinates new developers. I do not know if the term "lisplaining" exists already, but the thred is mosly lisplaining now. #lisp
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.