[Openmcl-devel] talk on CCL

Sun Jan 5 10:57:24 PST 2020

Interesting discussion … thank you!
One may also consider the various roles that Lisp plays in development, including prototyping.

My company SnapSoft developed for Apple using MacApp (object pascal) on early Macs.
Development was collaborative and spiral — we met with Apple every couple of months to review progress and plan forward direction.
(Embarrassing) I forget which Mac Lisp we had at the time (the one with Flavors), but here’s the point:  We included the entire MacApp world as foreign function library.
I prototyped in Lisp, fully integrated with the production code our Mac programmers were building.
This was an excellent realization of spiral development, made possible by Lisp on the Mac!

Martin

> On Jan 5, 2020, at 12:31 PM, Dan Corkill <corkill at cs.umass.edu> wrote:
> 
> That’s my recollection as well...  Macs and PCs were hobbyist Lisp tools at the time.
> 
>> On Jan 5, 2020, at 12:20 PM, Robert Goldman <rpgoldman at sift.info> wrote:
>> 
>> In my experience, thinking back to the 90s, it was not Macs or other stock PCs that killed the lisp machines: it was a combination of Lucid Common Lisp (and perhaps to a lesser extent, Allegro), and Sun workstations on the competitive front, and the first big AI Winter on the demand front.
>> 
>> There was a AAAI Conference in Seattle in 1987 where there was a huge blowout, and the winter came rushing in quite soon after that.  There was a huge contrast between the lavishness of AAAI-87, and the following conferences.
>> 
>>> On 4 Jan 2020, at 15:57, Craig Lanning wrote:
>>> 
>>> As someone that has used a Lisp Machine for over two decades and owns
>>> one (XL1201) even now, I would say that MBA's had more to do with the
>>> death of the Lisp Machine (specifically Symbolics as a company) than
>>> any specific Common Lisp implementation. Before you can talk about
>>> replacing LispM's you need to know what the hardware was capable of
>>> doing. A Mac is not even close. I developed a system on a Symbolics
>>> 3620 and then deployed that 3620 to the customer site. It was used by
>>> more than just our direct customer. I would not have attempted to
>>> deploy a Mac to do that job.
>>> 
>>> Symbolics had an interactive interface builder on their Lisp Machines
>>> for building Dynamic Windows interfaces. The builder application was
>>> called Frame Up.
>>> 
>>> Craig Lanning
>>> 
>>> P.S. I have actually find Clozure CL to be slower than even SBCL.
>>> Clozure CL is slower because it spends most of its time in the GC.
>>> 
>>>> On Sun, 2018-10-21 at 21:31 -0700, Chris Hanson wrote:
>>>> As someone who’s studied their history, I seriously think that
>>>> CCL/MCL is an under-acknowledged participant in the death of Lisp
>>>> Machines: When you could use a Macintosh for development nearly as
>>>> effectively as a Lisp Machine for barely a tenth the cost (or even
>>>> less), and deploy on Macintosh as well, why spend all that money on
>>>> specialized hardware? Especially since by the 1990s the Lisp Machines
>>>> were falling far behind on performance.
>>>> 
>>>> -- Chris
>>>> 
>>>>> On Oct 19, 2018, at 8:55 AM, Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>> " an intrepid band of hackers formed a little company called Coral
>>>>> Software. And Coral Common Lisp was their product that they managed
>>>>> to put together, and it came out in 1987, and … they had a Common
>>>>> Lisp (it didn’t have CLOS, so it was CLTL1), [which] ran on a 1MB
>>>>> Macintosh Plus, this incredibly weak hardware. So that was a real
>>>>> accomplishment.”
>>>>> 
>>>>> Not only did they have a CL that ran on a 1MB Mac Plus, it had an
>>>>> IDE!  And not only did it have an IDE, it had one of the best IDEs
>>>>> ever.  You can still run it on emulators today, and it is still
>>>>> usable — even competitive — today.  It had an interactive interface
>>>>> builder that is still to this day superior to anything I have seen
>>>>> anywhere.  I still miss it.  (I used the original CCL to do my
>>>>> masters thesis back in 1987 and it spoiled me on IDEs for
>>>>> life.  I’ve been a grumpy old man ever since.)
>>>>> 
>>>>> I would rank the original CCL as a technical achievement on a par
>>>>> with the Macintosh itself.
>>>>> 
>>>>> rg
>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>> On Oct 18, 2018, at 5:12 PM, R. Matthew Emerson <rme at acm.org>
>>>>> wrote:
>>>>> 
>>>>>> I was invited to give a talk at this year’s European Lisp
>>>>>> Symposium in Marbella, Spain.  It was a great conference.  I
>>>>>> highly recommend that you try to attend next the next one if you
>>>>>> possibly can.  It will be in Genoa, Italy.  See
>>>>>> https://european-lisp-symposium.org.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> Anyway, I prepared a web site that contains a video of the talk
>>>>>> and also a written transcript with slides included in the text in
>>>>>> the appropriate places.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> The link is http://thisoldlisp.com/talks/els-2018/
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> It’s not really very technical in nature (it’s meant to be
>>>>>> entertaining and encouraging), but maybe some of you would enjoy
>>>>>> it.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> 
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>>>>> 
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>>>> 
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