Common Lisp: The Untold Story

Great article. At first I thought "What a nice read for my morning coffee". But it certainly has gotten me thinking about my own experience with standards and committees and working groups. I should note now, I've never been a big player in any of these, but have participated - so my experiences are a bit different than Kent Pitman's, but related. I think a big takeaway from this should be: if you are interested in a subject and get…

Interesting to hear an insiders perspective of the ‘Lisp Wars’. My outsider’s perspective, at the time, was disappointment. I really liked InterLisp-D on my Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine. That said, Xerox provided a Common Lisp implementation that still had the UI wonderfulness and I think they still supported DWIM. I now have about 35 years of frequent Common Lisp use/experience, and my latest project/product is written in Common Lisp (http://kgcreator.com).

Nice first person view of history that affected me. Early on, Common Lisp was a bummer for me since my underpowered Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine ran very nicely with InterLisp, but was slow after the Common Lisp upgrade. I came around to appreciating Common Lisp and the first book I wrote, that Springer-Verlag published, was a Common Lisp book. Except for doing occasional consulting projects, mostly machine learning and NLP, I am mostly retired now. In retirement I have considered…

I am probably putting a huge subjective quality on this, but I think computer science departments divided into two: ones who did serious work in lisp, and all the others, who had a functioning lisp compiler and nobody willing to teach it seriously. York, where I studied in 79-82 had just had Wirth in residence on a sabbatical, was totally committed to pascal, was backing one of the strawmen languages for the ADA selection committee, and had a hard core…