Lucid – the origin story

billwadge.wordpress.com

58 points·rutenspitz··13 comments

In case others are wondering, this is about Lucid, the "dataflow programming language designed" [1], not the unicorn startup [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_(programming_language) [2] https://www.golucid.co/

And here I thought it was about the company behind XEmacs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XEmacs

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucid_Inc%2e

And here I was thinking about the automotive startup!

https://lucidmotors.com/

The Lucid Air is quite impressive:

https://www.motortrend.com/cars/lucid/air/2021/2021-lucid-ai...

It is quite an overused name.

TIL it literally means "shiny", so if one wished to name a company or project after the new shiny, it would be something like Novum Lucidum?

(Incidentally, the "new idea manure spreader" is a thing.)

from lux, Latin for light. Similarly, lucent, pellucid, lucifer (light bearer).

That was my first thought as well.

Same here, particularly with the latest release of GNU Emacs.

Lucid represents to me a huge untapped area of growth for new programming languages. It's been a huge inspiration on the DSP language I've been working on: https://intonal.io/ (currently working on more examples and documentation)

I encourage anyone interested to read Bill Wadge's book on Lucid: http://worrydream.com/refs/Wadge%20-%20Lucid,%20the%20Datafl...

and check out one of the implementations of the language https://code.google.com/archive/p/plucid/ or https://github.com/billwadge/pyLucid

It's an eye opening experience

Zélus is a modern language inspired in part by Lucid. I have been intrigued by this language, but have yet to get the time to try it out.

https://zelus.di.ens.fr/

Zelus is partly inspired by a language called Lucid Synchrone which is not the language discussed in the original article.

Lucid Synchrome was inspired by this Lucid

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