Byte was my favorite magazine of all time - even better than Computer Shopper. ;)
I remember the last page article - Stop Bit. One particularly memorable one described how various professionals would search for an elephant. Some I recall are.
- A C programmer would start at the southernmost point in Africa and travel east until they got to the ocean and then move north and head west to the opposite shore, repeating until they had covered all of Africa. An assembler programmer would follow the same strategy but do it on their hands and knees.
- A college professor would prove the existence of an elephant and leave it as an exercise for the students to actually find one.
- A marketing executive would paint a rabbit gray and call it a desktop elephant.
The "You can do surprising things when you have 64 kilobytes of fast RAM" ad made me realize how little we appreciate the abundant resources we are lucky to have these days...
Mainstream consumerism lowers the average. It goes from a craft of people with a little bit of insights to a social status toy lost in brands and appearances. Sadly it's self sustaining, since users only care about "fast", but the average program isn't made for that, giving the opportunity to offer more ram and more GHz to satisfy the needs of the customer (freemarket ftw).
yeah, lisp is cool, but I'd need a computer to run it on... I'm seriously considering one of those 8070 Series I Business System..... it has dual floppies, 591K bytes of storage a 19" color display, a 60 cps impact matrix computer, and!! they say at twice the price it would be a bargin, so at $7000 it seems the way to go
though I might need to get one of those fake wood veneer quad capacity two sided recording north star mini drives with 360,000 bytes per diskette!! but it has 4 drives so you can accesses over 1.4 megabytes of information.......
also I will need some more memory for all the brackets I plan on using in my lisp code.... but Morrows MemoryMaster bank select logic memories are only 2cents a bytes! so only need 20 million dollars for a gigabyte of memory... nice :)
In "About the Cover" on page 4, the editor invites the reader to examine the monolith and "identify the textbook from which these S-expression fragments were taken, and the purpose of the program."
My first issue was in 1984 (Forth Issue). I couldn't live without it, then. Until the end of Byte. We had no equivalent source of info in France. It was a fantastic and eclectic source of programming hints, ideas, whatever.
I'm now 66 and retired as a Sysadmin. Very good memories.
--
cmic
So how did they make magazines back then? Answer: Paper mockups made with IBM composers (typewriters that automatically justified), pasted-in paper photos, color separation negatives, and aluminum printing plate positives (one per color per page (or group of pages)). And an offset press. And folding machines, signature gatherers, binders and trimmers. No computers necessary.
Heh. It's gotten better but, as I can tell you from finishing up laying out a book in Word, it's still a frustrating layout tool.
Unfortunately the market has bifurcated into word processors that aren't really very good layout tools for something as complicated as a book and programs like InDesign that are complex and expensive. (Haven't looked at Scribus recently but I assume the complex point stands.)
> It's gotten better but, as I can tell you from finishing up laying out a book in Word, it's still a frustrating layout tool.
That's... dedication.
InDesign is probably the best I've used, but it is expensive.
Inkscape is actually flexible enough to do it well, and incredibly simple on the surface, though a few quirks.
Scribus can talk to Krita, and some Photoshop stuff, which can lift the burden with some image-heavy things. Complexity wise, it looks a lot like InDesign, but can't do quite a few things it can.
But, for most people, any of the above will fit the bill.
I've never heard of using Inkscape for layout. I think of it just as a vector drawing tool.
InDesign is certainly the standard.
Things got complicated because I needed to output an interim version of the book and wanted a format collaborators could work in. Plus I thought I'd save having to re-layout the book after editing. Which of course didn't happen that way.
Lesson for next time is either live within Google Docs limitations or do layout in a proper tool only when content editing is 99.9% complete.
Around 2003 I used KWord for laying out a school magazine. I didn't have any experience, but it was easy to do for 12-16 pages. It wasn't until I entered the corporate world a couple years later that I found out the dominant word processor (MS Word) sucked badly at layout.
By 1979, you would often have been using computer typesetting equipment. (Source: I did even at school newspapers) But writers/editors would still have been using typewriters. The edited story was then manually typed into the computer typesetter.
As you say, the output of this along with photos and so forth had to then be assembled by hand.
This, Creative Computing, Dr Dobbs, and Antic were my monthly computer education. I was a little ticked with what languages my Atari 400 with 48k (3rd party board) could run. I did dream a lot of some of the machines in the ads.
My favorite was Micro Cornucopia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Micro_Cornucopia). My local bookstore carried it and I eagerly awaited it every month. I was bummed when it shutdown in 1990 but by then I was in college and had real systems to play with.
BYTE had some great cover illustrations too, and IIRC, even some of the articles had great diagrams or drawings. IIRC there was an artist called (Robert?) Tinney who did many of the best looking and most famous covers, including maybe for the Smalltalk issue - which I think had a multicolored balloon on the cover - just searched and this is it:
Byte was my first too (and later on NET and Computerworld -- great education deriving from both).
Yeah, LISP was a bit much -- but hey! it also included an article with assembly code examples for the Z-80 Spectrum; I wish I had this magazine back in the day...
A thing I noticed: so many practical examples and code excerpts; I also spotted some math, sporting a Riemann integral no less :) - today's magazines are kindergarten-level by comparison. Of course, today's magazines are not aimed to the technical hobbyist anymore, so it's understandable... Btw: who are today's magazines targeting? Second question: what magazines?!
What's the difference (if any) in your URL and the one in the parent comment to yours (other than that yours ends with -rescan)? I could check both, but don't want to in case they are both huge pages (since someone else said 256 MB) just to find out. Is the -rescan one better quality maybe?
I've got a collection of 1988-90 AI Expert magazines on LISP, Prolog & Co. with interesting design features such as lino-cut-style artwork for (periodical) columns and a special Elite condensed type face for code. Does anybody know if it's ok to put these on a web site with credit when I can't get in touch with the original authors and artists (does archive.org have or need special permission from BYTE)?
Btw, I'd love links to 1986-1996ish articles on SGML and markup technologies.
AI Expert - interesting. I recall purchasing a few issues. But that's about it.
One magazine I wish I could find a complete collection of (PDF or paper, I don't care) is Robotics Age. About the only thing I have found on it is a book that was published (picked up a copy of that), but nothing else as far as the magazine is concerned.
It was kinda the Byte magazine for robotics of the 1980s era. So you had a mashup of articles for both industrial and research robotics, as well as articles and such for hobbyist robotics. It's a shame that it seems to have disappeared.
My dangerous advice (relative badness depends on jurisdiction): scan them, host them, and wait to see if anyone tells you to stop.
For over a decade I have been hosting scanned copies of various in-copyright, out-of-print books as PDFs on my web site. I haven't heard a peep from the rights holders. I don't know if it matters, but I have no advertising on my site. The books and everything else are just hosted for the enjoyment of people who share my interests.
Get in touch with archive.org. They're probably interested in hosting, would know about the legal side, and likely can also advice about scanning and preservation.
I know it's totally local to french speakers, but does anyone remember Hebdogiciel or Pom's ? Both were great. The former was crazy and had lots of code in it and a very "free speech" nature (think Charlie Hebdo but for computers) and the latter was all about Apple (2, 2+, 2e, 2c; not the i-thing you're looking for)
When I come across magazines from the past such as this, I keep wondering why and when did we stop writing such beautifully crafted technical articles for the masses and instead turned to advertisement-like pieces on consumer electronics. Look how empowering those articles were by treating you as a creative being, and how passivizing the current articles are in encouraging perpetual consumption.
I understand (I think), what you are saying. But I'd also argue that, back in the day, Byte & similar magazines were targeted at a fairly small subset of the population.
Today, I think equivalent magazines are Make, Adafruit's blog, internet & all the resources available online. So, I think such magazines / content still exist & they still have an audience (if not a larger audience, thanks to MOOCs & Arduino / Pi, etc.)
If you are making an argument that, in general, most magazines today publish trash, and somehow, the magazines published in the past were more content rich.. I'd challenge that with two points:
a) Content heavy magazines / websites still exist --> Economist, Ars Technica, etc. They have a strong audience.
b) The pool of people reading has gotten larger; and more magazines are catering to a more diverse population, some of which, as you imply, are drivel.
But to say that such content is no longer published, or is accessible, I would think, is incorrect. I'd argue such content is much easier to access today than ever before.
This really hit home. I was born too late to be involved with these magazines when they were in their "heyday". But I grew up in the early days of the Internet, and there have always been places on the Internet and the Web with content like this. The best part is that most of it is now free, and has been for 20 years or longer.
I keep a working Apple 2e on my hobby bench. It's fun to do things with. So open. It's amazing.
To me, Jobs did us a favor. I use my phone, nice laptop, a mix of Apple, Android, Linux, Windows to do amazing things, talk with people around the world, etc...
Total win.
Stuff we take for granted today... science fiction made real. No joke.
What I think should have happened is Woz continued with the Apple 2 line. Jobs didn't need to kill it to get his vision out there.
I got a GS to to tinker with, but haven't hooked it up yet. Too much going on. But, it hints at what would have come.
Today, people are always doing what Woz did. It's fun to build or run a little micro. One can get right to the bits, control things.
It may well be that Apple could have continued right along, a parallel to the PC, and had that happened, we may well have seen the product of that being the reference, or standard hack / hobby platform.
Now, we do have the Raspi. It's not bad, but it's also not easy to make effective use of it low level.
Something with roughly that amount of compute power, but accessible in that open Woz way, would be just perfect.
The best BYTE for me was the one where they published the entire source code of a Pascal compiler, written in Basic. Up till then I was completely mystified how a compiler worked. In figuring out every line of that compiler, I felt like somebody turned the lights on.
Later on, I was using a Pascal compiler on the PDP-11. I'd write bits of code, compile them, and look at the assembler. I was especially impressed with the clever way nested functions worked (the static link pointer). Nested functions in D are implemented the same way :-)
And BYTE itself turned into an "advertisement-like piece on consumer electronics" in its later years. Basically computer magazines (BYTE, Creative Computing, Dr. Dobbs, etc.) in the 1970s and early 1980s were for hobbyists by hobbyists. But then by the late 1980s computers were big business and the media shifted. Dr. Dobbs was longest hold-out, but by the mid 1990s it had pretty much shifted into a corporate Microsoft Windows developer magazine, although in the 2000s it returned a bit to open source geekery before dying in 2014.
Yeah, and in BYTE's case specifically, its always somewhat eclectic mix of mostly microcomputer-based topics worked OK for the hobbyists and early practitioners who tended to have pretty eclectic and wide-ranging interests themselves.
But, as you say, the whole space got generally more corporate and more specialized and BYTE's lack of a real identity showed. I recall being invited to a press event when they were trying some sort of reboot in the aughts but it obviously didn't work.
That eclectic mix of content made BYTE by far my favorite of the early computer magazines. (And I worked for Compute! Magazine.) "Dr. Dobbs" was a close second. And "Creative Computing" had the best BASIC games of the S-100 bus era.
"Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar" was one of my favorite columns in the early BYTE. I tried to build some of his designs (and maybe one actually worked) and really enjoyed Steve Ciarcia's self-published book. It might seem weird to have this column in a computer magazine, but this was not long after the era of homebuilt computers (in the first year of his store, my dad used to actually offer to build computers when people bought them) so knowing your way around a soldering iron wasn't unusual for 1979 computer hackers.
While my early computer experiences came later (my first machine was a TRS-80 Color Computer in 1984, when I was in the 5th grade), Byte Magazine and "Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar" were both things I enjoyed then and later.
The same with all the other magazines you mention, including Compute! (for some reason, your name seems familiar to me). I still have most of those magazines from then; and I still peruse them from time to time. One of my favorite issues of Creative Computing was focused on graphics, and it had an article on fractal terrain generation, along with a BASIC code implementation for the Apple IIe and IBM PC. I ended up converting it to run on my Color Computer.
As far as Byte Magazine and "Ciarcia's Circuit Cellar" is concerned, I never built any of the circuits described, but I did love to read about them. Once I became an adult, and got my old computers back from my parents (still have 'em, they all work!) - I recalled these articles, and some research led me to the books. I eventually collected all the books (and a few back issues of Byte). Reading thru them brought back memories of being a kid.
At one point - I think it was the article about how he automated his home with this custom computer system (probably based around a Z80 or something, I don't recall) controlling a heap of relays to switch circuits in his house - I decided to see if he was still around. I found his email, and sent out a message.
He eventually got back in contact with me; I had wondered about his home automation system and his lab, etc. He sent me some recent pictures of his home and workshop. Different of course, but still some of it stayed the same. IIRC, he had replaced the home automation system with something newer, but it was still something he tinkered with on occasion.
I don't know what it is - maybe nostalgia or something? - I tend to like to contact these "greats" of the past (and present) to tell them how I have appreciated their work from the past, and how it helped me to become the software engineer I am today. Sometimes, I'm too late, unfortunately. But these men were my heroes and inspiration toward my present career path. I never intended for software engineering to be my career; it was something I kinda fell into. But I have always been programming in some manner or another, ever since getting my first computer.
I enjoyed Circuit Cellar although mostly vicariously. You were entering a period when doing interesting electronics projects tended to require more dedication and effort than I was really willing to put into it although I played around for a time.
You were getting past the time when Heathkits and so forth were really practical, surface-mount was becoming common, etc. but obviously well before the current wave of Arduinos, Raspberry Pis, and so forth.
I don't think surface-mount was a thing yet in 1979. I built a Z-80 machine in 1980 -- yes, hand-soldering some of the chips onto the boards -- and I don't recall there being any surface-mounted components. Though I guess I wouldn't be surprised if the IBM PC had some, and that was only a year later.
There's a picture in that article showing flatpack SMT ICs - note that's from 1966.
Of course, that machine was bleeding-edge state-of-the-art for the time period, and anticipated hobbyist machines of the late 1970s.
If you're interested in this kind of stuff, it is fascinating to review the history of electronics. Things were pretty much strictly vacuum tube for a long time, but even there were a lot of innovation. When transistors came on the scene, things got weird quickly.
A great way I found to explore this, from a "contemporary interested layman hobbyist" perspective - is to go on google books, and look up Popular Science magazine. They have virtually all the issues scanned and available to read. Start from about 1940, and just peruse the issues. Plenty of great articles on interesting technology of the past eras, along with electronics projects and such using the "latest tech" of the period. You'll find some interesting things in there that you likely never knew about.
For instance - toward the end of the vacuum tube era, in a "last ditch" effort to keep them relevant, vacuum tubes went "solid state" - if you saw some today, you would think they were large metal-can transistors from the 1960s or 70s, but they were actually miniature metal-can vacuum "tubes" using similar construction and materials as those transistors; they had to be assembled inside a vacuum chamber! Most of them went into a few brands of high-end transistor televisions, but needed some tube components for their power-handling capabilities. So, hybrids developed...
Probably right. I was talking more mid-eighties timeframe. (Which Wikipedia confirms is when it became widely-used though IBM first demonstrated in 1960 or so.)
I used to get BYTE from circa 1983 until the very end. What was noticeable was how physically thin BYTE had gotten near the end. Lifting just a year's worth of early BYTE magazines could almost put your back out :)
That said, even at the end, it was still a cut above most other computer magazines on UK newsracks.
I saw an archive of an issue on C, and I was shocked by two things- the enormous length- that one ran on over 300 pages, and even more-so, that a lot of the articles were still absolutely relevant today!
It seems like a piece of history I was a little late to the party to. By the time I first picked one up, it had become a thin magazine not a whole lot better than PC Magazine.
PC Magazine itself hit something like 800 pages at some point in the 80s at which point it went from monthly to bi-weekly. It was quite good at its peak. For example, it had regular assembler and power user columns. I was certainly more corporate and product-oriented than BYTE with some massive product comparisons. I subscribed to both for a long time.
How about another - do you remember Computer Shopper?
That was the go-to magazine if you were building your own machine. It's heyday was sometime in the early 1990s, when PCs were starting to branch out and become consumer-oriented items. But in the 386-486 era - that was an insane magazine to peruse (big too!).
Really, one could say it marked the end of a particular era - that of hobbyist machines. While it was a technically oriented magazine, it did cater to those who wanted to build their own systems (maybe not from the component level). Once the PC became something you could easily pick up just about anywhere, it started to get thinner and thinner, then finally disappeared.
That was also the end of the "mom-n-pop" style PC computer parts stores. There are a scant few that linger on today (mostly they sell used machines refurbed or rebuilt - though some have gotten into building and selling retro machines, sometimes for steep prices).
Computer Shopper was awesome, but calling it a "magazine" is a bit of a stretch. It was more like a shared catalog in which companies could rent space. :-)
If I remember right, it had just enough editorial material to squeak past the line that divided the less-expensive postal rates for literature from the more-expensive rates for advertising.
Yep. Monstrous. Even if you didn't start building your own, whatever you had was too slow so you were always looking to upgrade components.
Also the Ken Gordon Computer Shows.
I actually upgraded/built a system a few days ago but even I'm pretty much out of doing that sort of thing. Wouldn't have done it if it wasn't a Linux server thing and I already had a number of parts.
BYTE was a niche magazine for a niche audience. BYTE was never for the masses.
Perhaps your location in Armenia separates you from the actual popularity of BYTE magazine back in the day. I remember 1990s brick&mortar bookstores like Barnes & Noble and Borders would carry more popular magazines like "PC Magazine"[1] and "PC Computing"[2] but they didn't have BYTE on the shelves. You had to subscribe to BYTE by mail. How did someone subscribe to BYTE if they weren't on the retail racks in the first place?!? By mailing in the BYTE subscription card (advertisement) that was placed inside of PC Magazine!
Also as trivia, BYTE was the last magazine I ever paid a subscription to (circle 1998?) because I felt cheated after paying up for a full year and after 1 issue, they shut down the operation. I got a form letter saying they would substitute with something else (Dr Dobbs? can't exactly remember) but they didn't honor their word and didn't send me a pro-rated refund for the unsent issues. Looking back, BYTE stealing my money was a godsend because it saved me from spending any $$$ on magazines for the last 20 years haha.
Gosh, that's not how I remember it. When I started reading BYTE in the 80s, I had no trouble buying it at regular bookstores even in my small southern college town.
I eventually subscribed anyway, but it was absolutely a staple of bookstore shelves up until it became a pale shadow if its former self (much like PC Mag and others).
> Also as trivia, BYTE was the last magazine I ever paid a subscription to (circle 1998?) because I felt cheated after paying up for a full year and after 1 issue, they shut down the operation. I got a form letter saying they would substitute with something else (Dr Dobbs? can't exactly
remember)
Same happened to me! Renewed for 2 years after being a subscriber for many years, and then they just stopped publishing a few issues later. And they offered 'Windows Magazine' as a substitute - ugh, no thanks...
Not at this stage. In 1979 is was a hobby zine for computer builders. By the mid-90's it was trying to compete against IT rags that were definitely for "mass" consumption. But early Byte was absolutely targeted at electronics experts, with a strong assumption of solid software skills.
>By the mid-90's it was trying to compete against IT rags that were definitely for "mass" consumption.
Yes, I agree that BYTE eventually expanded (or diluted if one chose that viewpoint) their coverage into areas that overlapped with PC Magazine etc. But they still had more of a niche audience. Here's an example issue from 1994.[1] If one flips through the pages, it has stories about CISC/RISC and Object-Oriented COBOL. It also has ads for a disk hex editor and Watcom C++ compiler. The typical computer enthusiast that's playing around with WordPerfect/Lotus and games like Microsoft Flight Simulator didn't care about geekier topics like that.
My first IT director was a programmer and even he didn't subscribe to BYTE. He did subscribe to PC Magazine and ComputerWorld.
My local public library branch and high school library (LA County; San Gabriel Valley) carried BYTE and you could easily find it in computer and book stores in the 1980s. By the 1990s it was on its way out, but it was as mainstream as any other computer pub of its time.
>, but it was as mainstream as any other computer pub of its time.
We remember differently. Yes, the libraries had BYTE but again, I'm talking about relative popularity. As another datapoint, the 1980s grocery stores' magazine section which of course would be much smaller than Barnes & Noble would have PC Magazine and Computer Shopper but they never carried BYTE. BYTE was always more niche than PC Magazine which lowered the number of retail outlets where it could be purchased.
PC Magazine covered applications (Lotus 123, MS DOS, etc) and games which was relevant to a larger population. BYTE was never a magazine for the "masses".
I have what might be a stupid question, in your second paragraph you typed "circle 1998", what does circle mean in this context? Did you mean circa? Is circle an english version of that term?
English isn't my main language and haven't seen this term before. Thanks!
My elementary school library in rural Alberta Canada carried BYTE back in the early 80s. At one point they dumped all their old copies on me. I remember combing through the amazing ads for S-100 bus systems back in 83, 84, just salivating. I learned a lot.
Yeah I was born in the early 80s, so when I was a teenager, too late for these magazines (all PC magazines were already as you said) and too early for the internet (there was a nascent internet but without much resources available online). Probably the main reason I picked up programming late.
I think the solution should come from school. Kids should learn basic coding like they learn basic math and physics. Then it's up to them whether they want to go further but that will give them the basics to be more than a passive user with these machines and will give them a chance to dive into it if they like it. It's often the most basic concepts that's are the biggest barrier to entry.
For this generation in the UK we were lucky in that the BBC Micro computers from the BBC Computer Literacy Project[1] were still physically in our primary school classrooms (early 90s). I have a very memorable young memory of programming LOGO on a physical turtle to get it to navigate a maze in the school hall, and an even earlier memory (perhaps aged 5) of playing Granny's Garden[2].
There were also a lot of the 8-bit micros cheap 2nd hand in the 90s, all of which booted to a BASIC command prompt. For me, I was also very lucky and stumbled across a set of INPUT [3] magazines at a school Fete.
At secondary school, we had PCs, whose programming languages were locked down to stop us playing games on them.
I totally agree with your central point. These small interventions at a very early age through school initiated a curiosity, and totally changed internalisation of future concepts in Maths and Physics.
The generation after me lost out, as the primary schools had got rid of the 'obsolete' BBC Micros, and programming lessons were replaced with 'workplace-orientated' IT tasks (spreadsheets, letter writing).
Wow.....I'd forgotten about INPUT magazine. I was ~17 at the time it was published and had every copy, along with BYTE, PC World (the UK one), Your Computer and a whole heap of other regular monthlys. What a blast from the past.
I actually got to play with Turtle in France. But these machines were already antiquated at that time, and I didn't think it was that useful.
I agree with you, computer literacy doesn't start with coding. It starts with typing, understanding basic internet protocols and software (text editor, spreadsheets, slides) and then a little bit of coding. Just enough to be useful, to be able to automate basic tasks. It's important that it is very practical, first to be useful, but also to catch their interest. Like creating a website.
It pretty much ended in the 1980's but its worth mentioning that Byte never was 'for the masses', it was for the relatively geeky subset of the tech community (my absolute favorite mag from about '80-86 or so). Sure, there were some holdouts into the 90's but the enthusiast scene had faded significantly by the late 80's as computing went mainstream. And then died completely in the early-to-mid 90's as Windows took off. Unfortunately it's a reflection of the computing audience: In the 70's it was largely hardware hackers, in the 80's it was largely software hackers, in the 90's it was largely (business) software users, since the 00's it has been mostly consumers. (I'm exaggerating a bit as there have always been all types in every era, but this is what I remember the main focus as being)
In the 70's and 80's these types of magazines were economically viable as people were willing to pay (gasp) for content like this and even so I don't think it was ever a spectacularly good business as the audience wasn't terribly large. Today, it would be at best extremely difficult to (profitably) run a web site targeting the same audience. Sure, the audience is at least 1-2 orders of magnitude larger but they are also far less willing to spend money and their attention is diluted by all the noise in the space. You could point to things like github but notice that the bulk of the 'content' on those sites are produced by the users of the sites who are not even the customers of those sites. This is why we can't have nice things...
How does LWN make its living?
LWN is primarily supported by its readers, through subscription fees. We also bring in a small amount of money through advertising, but that is typically less than 10% of our revenue stream.
Look how ineffectual the social critique in terms of consumption is. Being a consumer is surely not a bad thing; it's wonderful to have comforts. "Consumption" then is not a negative, but a formal dialetheia. There seems to be a kind of sense that refusing material comforts is a kind of asceticism, but accepting them is like "selling out;" so in practice people don't think about it.
From word origin, a dialetheia is a combination of a truth (aletheia) and a contradictory falsehood (letheia); letheia is Greek for forgetfulness. A dialetheia is a truth the telling of which makes you forget.
Try to think of the truth as a function defined on a manifold. The definition of the function allows mostly true statements and mostly false to be very near in the distance measure of the manifold. Increased curvature comes from energy applied to some point in the manifold. The construction of the appearance of a dialetheia comes from a point with very high curvature where truths and falsehoods are very close together. If a singularity could exist in this space, it would be a dialetheia, a limit point the approach to which could be made from either truths or falsehoods.
While Godel's theorem is not a dialetheia, it appears like a dialetheia in everyday terms because we freely pass from the statement "the thing is proved" to "the thing is true," that is we assume consistency in discourse.
Dialetheias only have the appearance of true concepts, and can't exist in actuality. The concept of dialetheias is itself a dialetheia. When positing apparent dialetheias, it's important to show where the contradiction is and why it is a formal contradiction.
The point of this argument being that, "consumption" and other dialetheias are self-contradictory concepts designed to control people. Dialetheias probably also play some role in existence. In other words, a dialetheia is the appearance of something out of joint in things, a state of affairs that can't exist in the presumed exactitude of the Platonic realm. This out-of-jointness sets the world apart from the ambient Platonic realm, making it "step forward" and exist. It's like a slave leaving his caste under the rule of an absolute caste system. He says, "Certainly I am a slave, but nevertheless, I won't be a slave."
In one indues of the magazine from January 1987[1], there's a great, in depth overview of QuickBasic 2 starting on page 285. It includes lots of examples and sample code. After this article, there's one about writing a fairly complex directory and file management utility - and it includes a complete listing of the asm code needed to write the program. The code is very well documented and is a real pleasure to read.
I wonder if modern audiences would even be receptive to articles like these. I'm sure some would, but I think many people have a tl;dr attitude and would abandon ship early on.
As a side note, I find old computer magazines to be great for coming up with fun side-project ideas. This same issue of PC Mag has lots of ads for things like database and spreadsheet applications that use a natural language interface. One could probably combine ideas like these with modern speech recognition and AI to come up with some fun and interesting projects and products.
Related: what is the legal status of the magazine as it appears on archive.org? Was it put into the public domain at some point? I can't find any mention of copyright, licenses, etc. on archive.org, the Byte Wikipedia page, etc.
I haven't seen all ads in the magazine, but I notice that most (all?) of the companies are no longer around. Except one.
The ad had a bit of a prophecy in it too:
"You can't outgrow Apple."
Would be interested to know if these articles are worth reading to learn about the language; i.e. ~40 years later, has the language changed too much to make the content here useful for learning purposes?
Code in Lisp in 1979 should be compatible with the current Common Lisp implementations.
However, Common Lisp (1994 ANSI standard) has interesting features that were not easily available (or standarized) on the Lisp implementations of 1979, for example the CLOS object system.
And today, with tools like Quicklisp or Alexandria, Lisp programming is really friendly. There are also some interesting recent books available, like Practical Common Lisp, and Land of Lisp.
These are all Common Lisp resources. There is also the classic "The little schemer" to learn Scheme.
I am not a Lisp guy, but Lisp as I understand it hasn't really changed a whole lot over time. Awhile back someone posted a Byte issue about C and I was shocked at how relevant the articles were today. If anything, it will give you a deeper historical perspective on the language and the fundamentals certainly haven't changed.
I wish I could say I'm nostalgic for it, but it predates my existence. What's it called when you yearn for the style and typography shortly before you were born?
I wrote an article on hobby robots (I was working for Unimation at the time, the company that invented robots). Sadly I can't seem to find the issue online.
Lisp is the only high-level programming language that has no syntax. In Lisp, s-expressions are used to encode both form (data structures) and function (algorithms) of computer programs. Since code and data are seen for what they are (two sides of the same coin) the distraction of a real PL syntax is eliminated, and the programmer is able to think more coherently.
Of course Lisp has syntax! Do you write a list as [1, 2, 3] or as (1 2 3)? Only the SYNTAX of the language can tell you.
I think we all know what you meant and that the way you said is a common way to say it, but being common doesn't make it correct. I wish people would rephrase that as "Lisp has a simple, fairly uniform syntax" or something like that. At any rate that's not the important point! What matters is the other thing you said: that programs in Lisp are represented in terms of the convenient, built-in data structures, the famous 'homoiconicity'.
Lisp has built-in syntax for example in the form of special operators.
LET is an example. LET provides bindings for variables:
LET
a list of bindings
a sequence of declarations
a sequence of expressions
(LET ((a 1)
(b 2)
c)
(declare (integer a))
(declare (type (integer 0 100) b)
(setq c (+ a b))
(expt c 2))
The EBNF syntax for LET is:
let ({var | (var [init-form])}*)
declaration*
form*
DECLARATION and FORM have more syntax.
If Lisp sees a LET form which does not use above syntax, then it is a syntax error. A compiler or interpreter will tell you that. The compiler will detect that at compile time.
The following forms are all errors:
(let a 10 (+ a 10))
(let (a 10) (+ a 10)) ; 10 is not an identifier
(LET (((A) 10)) (+ a 10)) ; (a) is not an identifier
(let ((a 10)) (+ a 10) (declare (integer a))) ; declaration at wrong place
(let ((a = 10)) (a + 10)) ; Lisp has no infix operators...
Forth is written as a syntax tree in exactly the manner of Lisp. There are two differences, neither of which affects the fact that you express the AST directly:
1. Lisp is written preorder; Forth is written postorder.
2. The number of children a node in your Lisp AST has is marked explicitly, by parentheses, whereas the number of children a node in your Forth AST has is defined externally.
There is no difference between a Lisp-style
(+ (* 3 5 8) (+ 4 1))
and a Forth-style
3 5 8 * * 4 1 + +
except that the * in Forth-style can't take a variable number of arguments. But if you added parens to Forth, it could:
> Lisp is the only high-level programming language that has no syntax.
Hogwash.
What's the difference between a list and a cons pair? That simple "." makes a HUGE world of difference when trying to parse S-expressions. That's syntax.
Why is there a difference between macros and reader macros? That's also syntax.
About as far as you can go is that "In Lisp, code and data have the same syntax." And even that is a bit dicey.
What is dicey about code and data having the same representation? You use the word 'syntax' rather than representation but s-expressions is not a syntax per se.
defun function-name argument-list declarations/documentation forms
Above is syntax.
An example of a function using a lot of syntax:
(defun foo (n &optional (a 10 a-p))
"This is the function FOO"
(declare (type (integer 0 *) n a))
(declare (ignore a a-p))
(loop for i from 0 below n by 10
sum i into s1
sum (expt i 2) into s2
finally (return (/ s1 s2))))
Lisp has complex argument lists with required, keyword and optional arguments.
It has syntax for a bunch of declarations.
It has macros like the LOOP macro which implement a lot of syntax. Actually the syntax of LOOP is quite long.
Well... But to be fair, LOOP is something of an oddity within Lisp... The Marmite (or Vegemite) of Lisp, due to exactly that: introducing a COBOL-like language for iterating.
PS: I like all your coments on Lisp, Rainer. Very informative.
(LOOP FOR X FROM M TO N DO (PRINT X) WHILE (PRIMEP X))
Warren's greater idea was to have a very forgiving syntax for Lisp, with spell checker and DWIM (do what I mean) support. Write expressions in different order, with spelling errors, etc. Lisp will figure out what you mean.
DEFINEQ((UNION (LAMBDA (X Y)
(IF ~X THEN Y
ELSEIF X:1 MEMBER Y THEN UNION X::1 Y
ELSE <X:1 !(UNION X::1 Y)>]
In MLISP:
EXPR UNION (X,Y)
IF ¬X THEN Y ELSE
IF X[1] ε Y THEN UNION(X↓1,Y)
ELSE X[1] CONS UNION(X↓1,Y);
In CGOL (Algol syntax on top of Lisp)
define x "UNION" y, 14, 13;
if not x then y
else if member(car x, y) then cdr x union y
else car x . cdr x union y <>
or CGOL with extended character sets:
define x "∪" y, 14, 13;
if ¬x then y else if αx ε y then βx ∪ y else αx . βx ∪ y <>
'Conversational' syntax elements were for example often used in some AI systems as user interfaces into knowledge based systems. Rules were often written in similar expressions, example from KEE:
(IF (THE SWITCH OF LIGHT IS ON)
(THE LOOK OF LAMP IS NO.LIGHT)
THEN (DELETE (THE STATUS OF LAMP IS WORKING))
(THE STATUS OF ROOM IS DARK))
Though I'd think the main purpose of LOOP is to have an example that Lisp can incorporate a wider range of embedded syntax variants and to make the language purists run away...
Perhaps, but there's no hard evidence that lack of syntax leads to better results. All else being equal, most programmers seem to prefer at least some syntax. Is a long s-expression containing multiple nested parentheses easy to think about?
Well, many languages like Ada/Pascal or even SQL try to reduce the number of parentheses/braces. But you can manipulate their AST in Lisp easily; that's what makes working with DSLs easy.
if foo.validate() {
println!("{} is the right answer", foo);
}
This has less parentheses (unless you count the placeholder in the format string). Putting the condition in parentheses like C and friends do is redundant if you use braces for the block anyway.
less parentheses, but not less bracket-like characters. If you count parens and curlies, it is exactly the same. Yours has 4 parens and 2 curlies (not including the format string), and the original lisp code has 6 parens.
Think about? Maybe, as it's completely unambiguous.
Edit? Oh hell yes. Once someone groks paredit (a weekend to get fluent), every other language is painful. It's because you're editing in terms of complete forms, rather than in units mismatched to the actual code.
Remember your first text editing experience? You probably spent a long time editing in terms of characters. Then remember what a revelation it was when you learned a programmers editor and started being able to manipulate larger portions of text such as words, lines, and even paragraphs?
Paredit is like that, but the next level, because you're working at the level of arbitrary syntactic forms.
I would heartily agree that some syntax is preferable to none ... when you're writing code in general. However, little or no syntax is a huge advantage when you're writing code that writes code. That's what makes Lisp so powerful.
Should have said "Lisp has no REAL syntax" and left the definition of REAL to further discussion. Since I did not do that, all comments here are kind of missing that subtle but important distinction.
You're better off with jokes about stolen source code to [big program, e.g missile defense], that it's written in LISP, and here's the last few lines as proof that you have it
It was if err != nil {return err} rewritten in if err != nil {return err} Go, and if err != nil { return nil } this is way if err != nil {return err} more readable now.
I remember the last page article - Stop Bit. One particularly memorable one described how various professionals would search for an elephant. Some I recall are.
- A C programmer would start at the southernmost point in Africa and travel east until they got to the ocean and then move north and head west to the opposite shore, repeating until they had covered all of Africa. An assembler programmer would follow the same strategy but do it on their hands and knees.
- A college professor would prove the existence of an elephant and leave it as an exercise for the students to actually find one.
- A marketing executive would paint a rabbit gray and call it a desktop elephant.
I wonder if I could find that article. I'll have to see if Archive.org is searchable. Or maybe I can find it by searching today: https://www-users.cs.york.ac.uk/susan/joke/elephant.htm :D