[Openmcl-devel] A personal outline of the history of Coral Common Lisp

[David McClain]

Hi All,

Just my 2c as a relative latecomer to the Lisp world. 

I have long admired the work of several of the people you mentioned , and read the books from Andrew Shalit. I have never had the opportunity to work with Mac MCL, but spent lots of time with Dylan in the early years. 

I did discover Lisp in earnest around 1989 and began a long duration involvement with Lisp, starting with Harlequin Common Lisp and a bit of Franz Allegro Lisp. I have played a few times with Closure Common Lisp. My main use cases have always been scientific data analysis, and control of laboratory instruments. And while none of my Lisp code ended up aboard any space vehicles, all the footwork to prepare them have a long list of Lisp code bases behind them from my working groups in Aerospace.

By now I recognize the names of all the people mentioned above, but probably never met any of them. But I am deeply grateful for all of your work because it and the knowledge gained surely filtered across to other implementations and the wider community.

Thanks to all of you!

- David McClain


> On Jul 21, 2024, at 12:37, Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> wrote:
> 
> 
>> On Jul 21, 2024, at 11:22 AM, Bill St. Clair <billstclair at gmail.com> wrote:
>> 
>> I remember Jeremy giving me a 1 megabyte floppy, around 1988, plugging it into my Mac Plus, and being amazed that there was a real Common Lisp that ran on that little toy computer.
> 
> Not just Common Lisp, but also an IDE and an interactive GUI interface builder that is *still* better than anything I've seen before or since.
> 
> rg
>