
Lisp 1 Programmer's Manual (1960) [pdf] - austinz
http://history.siam.org/sup/Fox_1960_LISP.pdf
======
krig
"The current basic LISP system uses about 12,000 of the 32,000 [sic] memory of
the 704."

12k is pretty impressive for a complete interpreter, including standard
library. I don't really have anything useful to add to that, other than that I
like it. It'd be nice if the java VM was 12k as well.

Also, I hadn't seen the Flexowriter before, that's a pretty awesome piece of
hardware. It looks like it comes straight out of the Fallout universe.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friden_Flexowriter)

~~~
diego

      |It'd be nice if the java VM was 12k as well.
    

Why would that be nice? You surely know how complex the JVM is, and how
different it is from a basic, single-threaded LISP interpreter running on bare
metal on proprietary IBM hardware.

~~~
krig
Well, this is a tangent, but...

I do know how complex the JVM is, and I don't like it. Yes, clearly 12k won't
get you the JVM. I do think there is a smaller, leaner runtime for java
possible. Having everything under the sun in the standard library is not a
feature to me.

~~~
coldtea
> _Having everything under the sun in the standard library is not a feature to
> me._

Having stuff in the standard library sounds like the definition of a feature
-- well, actually multiple features.

Plus, it's not like those are loaded into memory when not used.

Lastly, there are several stripped down java vms, some are even used for real
time / embedded work.

~~~
timdiggerm
Here, "feature" meant "a thing I want", not "a thing some users want"

~~~
AnimalMuppet
But see, I don't want it. Then, one day, I do, because I'm working on
something a bit different (or on the same thing, just with a different
approach).

All those libraries buy me the freedom to do a bunch of different things. That
freedom has some value, even if I never use it.

------
mastazi
Page 88: "In the local M.I.T. patois, association lists [of atomic symbols]
are also referred to as "property lists", and atomic symbols are sometimes
called "objects"."

This is often cited as the first known usage of the word "object" in computer
science.

~~~
mastazi
Alan Kay, one of the fathers of OOP, on the Meaning of “Object-Oriented
Programming”:

"[...] The second phase of this was to finally understand LISP and then using
this understanding to make much nicer and smaller and more powerful and more
late bound understructures."

[http://userpage.fu-
berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay...](http://userpage.fu-
berlin.de/~ram/pub/pub_jf47ht81Ht/doc_kay_oop_en)

~~~
pjmlp
Yes, Smalltalk and Lisp do overlap quite a bit.

