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.
I believe this makes me owner #2 of the #t3x programming language formal definition. My first inclination is to write a lisp for the tcode machine but given the author I feel this has already happened? Chapter 6 is very cool to see the variants of asm for each instruction for z80 8086 and ARMv6.
Real alphaville “are you gonna drop the bomb or not” vibes tonight. Fitting that I am deep diving into 68000 assembly so I can finally write the sega genesis game of my dreams on actual hardware. Of course via some sort of GOAL type approach mind you.
I used to own a stack of boxes of vintage Byte magazine issues from 78-82 as I wanted physical copies of the #smalltalk and #lisp articles (which at the time were not scanned/available). Anyway I couldn’t help but read almost all of them, mainly for the ads! Also some great #forth articles. Ultimately it was incredibly informative to learn about the hype cycle of tech. So every time I hear about crypto or LLM shit I imagine it (well what ever the aphantasia version of imagining is) in terms of half page glossy over produced vintage byte magazine ads.
@zep why is the #picotron monospace font not monospace? Maybe it is not meant to be monospaced and I just made that up? If so can we edit/create fonts directly in picotron?
Why did no one tell me that Westone had released Clockwork Aquario?? In the set of my favorite games of all time Wonderboy in MonsterWorld firmly established. This feels like as close we will ever get to a new game from that era. #westone#sega#wonderboy
Next time someone contends that clojure is not a lisp gently remind them that allowing the comma as white space actually proves direct descent from lisp 1.5. #clojure#lisp#drama#controversy#heresy#synthesis
Ok so I really do think Tesler may have invented the keyword for lisp. Lisp70 was based on exploration from MLisp and MLisp2 - neither of which had colon prefixed symbols. I wonder if it was inspired by the smalltalk selector syntax but in reverse? He was definitely involved with that and even further Alan Kay is thanked in the Lisp70 paper. Anyway I would be glad to be wrong if someone can point to prior art!