The History of Franz and Lisp | Hacker News Reader

The History of Franz and Lisp

ieeexplore.ieee.org

109 pointslisper17 comments

That was a fun read. Franz is a good company. My consulting customer a while back also hired them for a while - really smart people. Jans Aasman, mentioned in the interview, gave me funding to write a book that was partially on AllegroGraph (that book, very indirectly, led to my being invited to work on a knowledge graph project at Google).

For those interested, I recommend downloading the free version of AllegroGraph as a docker image, and the free version of their Common Lisp IDE. Their latest IDE is web based, with a background Lisp app. Neat idea.

Thanks for the comment. I downloaded both and I'm really impressed.

Didn't know about SDC/III Lisp 2

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LISP_2

- http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/lisp2_fami...

I think Fenaughty must have been involved with a much later project: the LISP 2 project at SDC (with III) started in 1963.

I used Franz Lisp on our student VAX 11/750 at university, maybe in 1985. I have no idea what kind of license the university had and how much they had paid for it. That wasn't a question you would ask yourself those days, all computers were worth millions.

Around those days the university also bought a Symbolics. But its capacity was well below the VAX so students didn't get to use it without working on any very specific project in just that Lisp group.

Original Franz Lisp was open source, your university could just download it from UCB.

I ported it to the Atari ST around that time.

Download in 1985? Doesn't sound too likely. I remember using internet at the university in 1989. Maybe employees had access a bit earlier. But I doubt 4 years. I used Bitnet in 1987, but that was elsewhere, to my understanding our university never had it or only later when various networks/protocols got more interconnected.

Sounds more like they ordered a tape or some employee brought it from a trip to a conference.

The distribution could be sent in parts by email if you didn't have FTP access. In the UK, you could connect via JANET to an ARPANET gateway at University College London to FTP stuff from the US, this was before 1985.

The franz-friends mailing list is probably archived somewhere with regular messages describing how to get the distribution.

At that point it was probably the free Franz Lisp that was included in BSD Unix 4.2 or 4.3, which had an interpreter and compiler (with basically MACLISP semantics so it could run Macsyma) on VAX and mc68k platforms. As an undergraduate in 1986 I ported it to the CCI Tahoe, which was a VAX clone with a slightly simplified instruction set (and the main platform on which the BSD 4.3Tahoe release was developed).

I used Allegro CL a lot at a previous job, but over the years it was replaced there with free Common Lisps, predominantly SBCL. I don't think there's much of a market anymore for a base CL implementation. So it should not be the least surprising that Franz is making their money from things layered on top of Allegro.

SBCL is a pretty good CL implementation, though

Indeed it is!

Maybe what we need is a commercial IDE to use with SBCL, ABCL, or CCL then.

Very funny. But I found some of the comments seemed a bit odd or blunt. You do not say something like that to your interviewee. It finally dropped when she said why she cannot use apple software since young… what!!! I missed the same surname in the first page. Her daughter she was.

Not to be confused with Franz Liszt

That’s how I read it too. According to the founder of Franz Inc. in OP, the language was “so named to induce feelings of false familiarity stemming from a wide awareness of composer Franz Liszt”.

Sounds the same if you have a lisp.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com