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Practical Common Lisp https://gigamonkeys.com/book/





Didn't exist back then. Likewise SICP first edition was 1996.

I did have a copy of "LISP: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic Computation" by Touretzky in 1986. It wasn't really that much better than any of the articles. It never explained why using Lisp would be so much easier than anything else even for simple programming tasks.

Had some of the Lisp hackers deigned to do stuff on the piddly little micros and write it up, things would look a whole lot different today.

Maybe there was a magazine somewhere doing cool stuff with Lisp on micros in the 1980-1988 time frame, but I never found it.


Generally I agree with what you are saying. I live outside the US and so this stuff from the end 70s / early 80s was very remote. Gladly we had then a well connected university where I got in contact with some of the more interesting stuff mid 80s.

The book I found most useful in the early times as an introduction to Lisp and programming with it was LISP from Winston & Horn. The first edition was from 1981 and the second edition from 1984. I especially liked the third edition.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_(book)

Lisp on microcomputers in the early 80s was mostly not useful - that was my impression. I saw a Lisp for the Apple II, but that was very barebones. Next was Cambridge Lisp (a version of Standard Lisp) on the Atari ST. That was more complete but programming with it was a pain. Still, I found the idea of a very dynamic&expressive programming language and its interactive development style very interesting. The first useful implementations on smaller computers I saw were MacScheme and Coral Lisp, both for the Macintosh, Mid 80s...

There were articles about Lisp in the Byte magazine early on, but having access to the software mentioned was difficult.

The early use cases one heard of were: computer science education, functional programming, generally experimenting with new ideas of writing software, natural language processing, symbolic mathematics, ... This was nothing which would be more attractive to a wider audience. David Betz Xlisp later made Lisp more accessible. Which was then used in AutoCAD as an extension language: AutoLisp.

Luckily I had starting mid 80s access at the university to the incoming stream of new research reports and there were reports about various Lisp related projects, theses, etc.


The first edition of SICP came out in the fall of 1984 (a year after these Hofstadter columns). This fall is the 40th anniversary!

I stand corrected on that. Thanks.



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