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Common Lisp (1986)

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101 pointsluu18 comments

Aug 27, 1986

https://groups.google.com/g/net.lang.lisp/c/GSaNSpmnKBU

lisp vs C

* >1) Is such flexibility and power a trait unique to lisp, or are the Symbolics > programmers simply very good (or both)? *

Some things never change.

I was curious about "3-lisp". It seems to be this

http://www.cofault.com/2022/08/3-lisp-infinite-tower-of-meta...

Discussed three months ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32614795

Gregor Kiczales, one of the guys behind the MOP, gave a retrospective on the MOP [1], in which he did touch on the influence of Brian C. Smith's Ph.D. thesis and 3-Lisp. One thing he said (as I recall - I'm paraphrasing here) was that 3-Lisp got quoting right, and if he'd read Smith's thesis a tenth (!) time he might have understood that in time to make the requisite changes to the MOP. I want to read the thesis myself, but it's something like 700+ pages.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20060821003818/http://bc.tech.co...

The bit I was thinking of starts around 29:45 in the audio linked above, runs to about 33:30. Note that the audio quality is somewhat bad - the retrospective was at a meeting in a restaurant with a band playing in the background.

The title should be: Olin Shivers on why Common Lisp doesn't suck [1986]

Shivers who was recently mentioned in the Verse news as part of the team with SPJ and others.

Don't miss the last paragraph...

... why Common Lisp doesn't suck all that much :-)

The arguments about lexical scoping that this is refuting were some of the same for elisp not originally including lexical scoping (It was added in 2012, and enabled by default in 2020).

I wish we wouldn't use Google groups, I don't want login just to read a post.

https://web.archive.org/web/20211017192956/https://groups.go...

I was able to view the content without logging in ... ?

Strange, I always get presented with a login page and no way to bypass. Maybe it's a chrome thing.

Disable JavaScript.

Is there some other publicly available historical USENET archive that you recommend? I'd rather not use Google too.

https://usenetarchives.com/view.php?id=net.lang.lisp&mid=PDE... is the post in question although they must either have excluded themselves from search engines or something because the domain does show up in generic SERP but not https://duckduckgo.com/?q=site%3Ausenetarchives.com+common+l... or https://www.google.com/search?q=site%3Ausenetarchives.com+co...

If you get an account on Bottomless Abyss BBS [0], the message base has a USENET archive, but it only goes back to 2019 for comp.lang.lisp. So, useless for historical research, but fun for reading recent stuff.

[0] https://bbs.bottomlessabyss.net/

This seems like a fun scene. Is there like an "awesome" list of BBSs somewhere?

Edit: Ooh, https://www.telnetbbsguide.com/bbs

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