History of Lisp (1979) [pdf] | Hacker News Reader

History of Lisp (1979) [pdf]

jmc.stanford.edu

101 pointsalokrai11 comments

Reposting my earlier comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10502434 :

> Herbert Stoyan's historical work on early Lisp http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2010/07/29/185/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050617031004/http://www8.infor.... is probably worth reading if one is seriously interested. (I haven't read much of it myself yet.) McCarthy praised Stoyan's work as better than his own 1979 HOPL paper ( http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html ): "Stoyan's reading of the early LISP documents gives a more accurate picture than my own memories turned out to have given." http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/

> (As a side-note, I'm pretty sure that the broken, Wayback-beating link to "Lisp references according to Miller" on McCarthy's page is to this http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-site/alu/table/Lisp-Hist.... document by Kent Pitman and Brad Miller (see http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-site/alu/table/history.h.... ).)

BTW, if you want to learn/experiment with Common Lisp on mobile, there's a new horse in town ("new" at least for iOS):

http://cl-repl.org

(Sorry for the shameless plug, wouldn't have mentioned it if it weren't both free and open source).

Looks very cool, but where is the source?

Voila! (it's under 'examples/REPL'): https://gitlab.com/eql

I would really like to see an updated history that takes up where this left off. Highlights of the past 40 years: the formation of the Common Lisp specification, the role of Lisps in AI, Symbolics vs Lisp Machines Inc, their eventual demise in the AI winter, continued use in DSLs like Autocad and Emacs, and the small but growing resurgence in interest.

Here you go for a technical history

https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf

Some of it is described here: https://ai.stanford.edu/~nilsson/QAI/qai.pdf (THE QUEST FOR ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE - A HISTORY OF IDEAS AND ACHIEVEMENTS)

This is a really good book - I bought the Print version a few years ago.

HP Newquist, The Brain Makers from 1994. It matches my memories of the last AI boom quite well.

I remember being exposed to LISP in the late 80's after coming from Pascal and COBOL in my CS101 (C was a 200-level class.) It was such a complete mindf*ck. After learning procedural language patterns, switching to LISP uprooted everything, and in some cases the patterns were already burned in. In hindsight, I think it makes more sense to learn LISP first, and THEN procedural languages since the latter is a subset of LISP. When C++ appeared, my first thought was, "Hey, someone made C kinda act like LISP/CLOS."