On picking one of the "Languages of the Gods" -- which and why

[liam_on_linux]

[Another repurposed comment from the same Lobsters thread I mentioned in my previous post.]

A serious answer deserved a serious response, so I slept on it, and, well, as you can see, it took some time. I don't even the excuse that "Je n’ai fait celle-ci plus longue que parce que je n’ai pas eu le loisir de la faire plus courte."

If you are curious to

Comments

[waistcoatmark]

It's very cute, but what can you to do with it? (as the elephant said to the naked man

[liam_on_linux]

> It's very cute, but what can you to do with it

[waistcoatmark]

OK so you are looking at a software environment sitting on top of an existing system, not a modern-day LISP Machine. That gets rid of many issues... Something like http://squeak.org... )

[liam_on_linux]

Um. Did you actually watch the talk, or at least read the script?

https://liam-on-linux.livejournal.com/77065.html

I did make a concerted effort to explain what, how, and why, and it seems you're not familiar with it.

[tpear]

Ah the 3Rivers PERQ - or in the UK the ICL PERQ... I once worked on a project where there was one particular piece of s/w needed that only ran on PERQs, so there it sat, rarely used. I had a demo once, but all I remember is that I had a demo. I have a sneaking feeling that with a particular set of microcode, it became a LISP engine (not sure

[liam_on_linux]

The PERQ was one of the machines I was planning to write about, but it seemed to have little lasting influence. That's a shame

[tpear]

The influence of the PERQ is difficult to interpret. I read that the Accent OS developed for it at CMU contains ideas they later progressed in the Mach microkernel: if so, there’s a line there from the PERQ (via NeXTSTEP) through to modern Macs... but that’s more about software than the workstation itself.

Very familiar with lists - they are generally a core data structure in many of the lambda style functional programming languages - fortunately words like head and tail (or even just pattern matching) replacing cadr and cdr- phew. Prolog too on the logic side made strong use of them and I daresay was heavily influenced by lisp on the data structure side (been too long since I saw any, but have a feeling that microprolog might even have stored its programs as lists too)

I have learned (and probably now forgotten) so many different programming languages over the years :-) It is sad that the one that 'stuck' in industry was C, but that’s the way it went.

[liam_on_linux]

Just in case they might grab you...

https://funcall.blogspot.com/2009/03/not-lisp-again.html

Long form:
https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=1039523

Short form:
https://michaelnielsen.org/ddi/lisp-as-the-maxwells-equations-of-software/