
History of Lisp (1979) [pdf] - taylodl
http://jmc.stanford.edu/articles/lisp/lisp.pdf
======
kroger
"The Evolution of Lisp" by Guy Steele and Richard Gabriel is also a good
related paper:
[https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf](https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/HOPL2-Uncut.pdf)

~~~
jchassoul
Both are awesome papers, I found this very interesting:

"In 1975 Gerald J. Sussman and Guy L. Steele Jr. began experimenting with some
interpreters in an attempt to understand the consequences of the Actor model
of computation. This led to the publication during 1976–1978 of a series of
papers describing a new dialect of Lisp called Scheme. Scheme was one of the
first languages to have taken seriously the implications of lexical scoping
and first-class functions. Namely, Scheme correctly treated closures—a closure
is a function along with the local environment within which it was defined."

I heart Richard Gabriel once saying that the goal of Scheme was implement Carl
Hewitt's Actor model but they discover closures instead, got hyped and forget
about the original mission.

Later history repeat itself twice, Robert Virding a true Lisp Hacker implement
LFE his own LISP for the BEAM ecosystem and accomplish the original Scheme
goal and probably without even know or care much about it, in the similar way
that once Mike Williams, Joe Armstrong and him build Erlang the best
implementation (in my opinion) that we got from the Actor model without know
nothing about it existence at the time of the development of Erlang.

~~~
rvirding
No, I did not know of Scheme's original goal, and we had never heard of the
actor model when doing Erlang. And we wouldn't have cared either. :-)

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hajile
You know a programming language (family) is old when someone wrote a history
about it almost 40 years ago.

~~~
nicetryguy
its a shame that there isnt any more history on the family....

thats how it goes w all tech history tho

take for instance gary "gates" kildall, no one knows, its a shame

~~~
itsbruce
Some information about the early years is gone; people were often too busy to
write down what they were doing. But there's enough still around that it's
even gone recursive
[http://kameken.clique.jp/Lectures/Lectures2010/NLP2010/relat...](http://kameken.clique.jp/Lectures/Lectures2010/NLP2010/relatedDocuments/docNo1.pdf)

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pmcjones
For the source code and more:
[http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/](http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/)

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nicetryguy
do ....i ....have deja vu?

seems like modern languages make the same mistakes.

i could be wrong....

~~~
drmeister
You aren’t wrong - they did and keep doing it. ;-)

IMHO that’s why Common Lisp is decades ahead of other languages. Lisp made its
mistakes in the 60‘s and 70‘s and largely corrected them in Common Lisp in the
80’s.

~~~
nicetryguy
i mean, that garbage collection was fucking abysmal!

You seem much more knowledgable than me....

We talking turbo pascal levels or what?

