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Comment by mncharity | Hacker News Reader

> Mozart/Oz [...] a bit of a tragedy it has been mostly abandoned

Agreed. But wow the documentation was a mess. So much language progress these last decades has been around increasing minimum expectations for ecosystem.

Poplog (integrated CommonLisp, prolog, ML, an a C-like; 1980's) is another on my list of roads regrettably not taken. Killed by commercialization. Which also zombied CL.

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Basically any Expert System Shell in Lisp in the 80s/90s was a multi-paradigm programming system (ART, KEE, KnowledgeCraft, KnowledgeWorks, Babylon, and many others). There were also a bunch of functional/relational languages like Relfun, AP5 in Lisp. There are/were also a multitude logic/relational languages in Lisp.

If you had a unix, and didn't have several hundred to thousand (adjusted) dollars, in the mid to late 1980's and early 1990's, there was... very little. Gcc and CMUCL eventually existed and later became usable. My very fuzzy recollection is Poplog was available early on and cheapish but barriered (have your academic department negotiate with ours for a site license), then commercial. Over those years, I repeatedly searched for an environment to live in, and repeatedly came up empty. And repeatedly thought: Poplog could own this space, could be the obvious no-competition language choice for non-commercial non-proprietary development... but is trading that potentially massive impact for unicorn dreams and subsistence funding. Imagine a different mid 1990's, with gcc, and then python and perl and C++, struggling TCL-like to gain traction against a widespread active accessible portable powerful poplog/CL/ML tooling and community.

Waldek Hebisch, who is the maintainer for the Fricas computer algebra software, also maintains a 64-bit version of Poplog for amd64/x86_64:

https://github.com/hebisch/poplog https://www.cs.bham.ac.uk/research/projects/poplog/freepoplo...

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