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Comment by strangetimes | Hacker News Reader

I was hoping Shel would talk about using Lisp in the early days of Amazon.

https://sites.google.com/site/steveyegge2/tour-de-babel#TOC-...

It was used only in the form of Emacs Lisp, as a set of tools for customer service folks to make replying to typical email easier for them. They pretty much built all that themselves (and they didn't start out as programmers).

There was more Lisp influence than just the CS macros you mention here. Eric Benson was a major contributor to Lucid Emacs and many early Amazon engineers had Lisp experience. SICP was practically issued to every new software engineer--it was that popular.

The template language for Amazon's website at the time (catsubst) was a Lisp-inspired prefix notation language with a relatively small number of functions. For example, there was an add macro but not a subtract macro, so to do A-B, you had to say ${add A -B}. I might have the exact syntax wrong since it's been 20 years.

EB and I both worked at Lucid, which produced a Common Lisp system, not to my knowledge a version of Emacs (though maybe so after I left in 1989?). Some other early employees knew and liked Lisp, but we didn't use it on any core functionality. The text substitution logic you mention, that I wrote, was really simple and not particularly Lisp-like. Though again, after I handed it off, who knows what happened.

Lucid Emacs is now XEmacs. Work would've begun right around 1989, so it's likely you just never crossed paths with it. =)

After leaving Lucid I was really not paying much attention to what they were doing. It wasn't long before things started going badly there and they were out of business a few years later. But indeed, I had forgotten what little of the Emacs history I might have known. Here it is: https://www.jwz.org/doc/lemacs.html

Didn't jzw work at Lucid as well? I'd love to see a list of famous programmers that works there.

If you are referring to Jamie Zawinski (jwz), yes, but after my time there.

My understanding from others (second hand) is that there was lots of Perl. (And that this persisted for quite some time). True?

Yes, there was a ton of Perl in the early days. This came about because Paul Davis was a Perl aficionado and did a lot of script writing with it early on, and the non-programmers, of which there were n-2, could pick it up much more easily than C (of course). Which is how some of them became programmers. Incidentally, we used C, not C++, though I liked OOP, because I had previously had less than great experience using C++ on large projects. We used a C++ compiler though because it could catch more errors than the C compiler could. This is one area where Steve Yegge was a bit off in that famous post.

Lucid Emacs -> Xemacs was mentioned in a sibling comment, but I remember people being in awe about EB working on those. There were many interesting employees back then--J. Chenault, J. Gehlen, R. Braumeller, F. Eiden, K. Sears, etc. I've lost touch with most of them but I learned a lot from them.

I started in October 1997 and did Perl work on backend systems, but I had a few friends who worked on the frontend. They used to talk about how Catsubst had a very small set of verbs and that everything was a function, even arithmetic, and that prefix notation was used for all macro calls. They thought it was Lisp-inspired, but they were also pretty junior programmers too. I never worked with Catsubst myself, so my information is second-hand, while yours is zero-hand since you wrote it. :-)

Thanks for all the work you did on Amazon's infra!

I don't think people have caught on who is commenting here.

How do you do, fellow Kaleidan [1]?

We worked together with Eric Benson and Dan Bornstein on ScriptX [2], which was basically Lisp with objects instead of parenthesis.

I found ScriptX quite useful for web programming [3]: "Link Globally, Interact Locally"!

ScriptX's legacy lives on: After Kaleida shut down, John Wainwright, the architect of ScriptX, created a very similar language called MaxScript [4] for 3D Studio Max, which I later used at Maxis for programming the character animation content pipeline for The Sims [5].

[1] http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/how-do-you-do-fellow-kids

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ScriptX

[3] http://www.art.net/~hopkins/Don/lang/scriptx/scriptx-www.htm...

[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Autodesk_3ds_Max#Features

[5] http://www.donhopkins.com/drupal/node/30

+1 for Don. Thanks for all your hard work on The Sims!

Tour de Babel is one of my favourite posts. I feel it's a pretty objective look at languages.

I was wishing for the same when I saw the title.

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