The Evolution of Lisp. Guy L Steele Jr. & Richard P. Gabriel
from the Second ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages
COnference (HOPL-II) April 1993.
in the lisp repository at:
ftp.cs.cmu.edu:/user/ai/lang/lisp/doc/history/Evolution_of_Lisp.ps.gz
And also at:
ftp.cs.umbc.edu:/pub/Memoization/Misc/Evolution_of_Lisp.ps.Z
There is also another interesting Lisp article in the lisp
repository at cmu:
ftp.cs.smu.edu:/user/ai/lang/lisp/text/gabriel/gabriel.tar.gz
Lisp: Good News, Bad News, How to Win Big. by Richard P. Gabriel
( January 4, 1994 )
Which is a more personal appraisal of Lisp's problems and
pluses - if any of you are following Comp.lang.dylan, I
would recomend this paper: he doesn't mention Dylan, but
I would compare his comments on "the Next Lisp" to the
Dylan design rationale.
He has some comments on two different system design strategy:
The MIT approach or "the Right Thing" ( the Scheme language would
probably be the canonical example - "the Diamond Like Jewell" )
and the NJ approach or "Worse is Better" ( Unix/C ), and despite
his long association with the former school of thought, he
comes down in favor of the NJ approach of: get 80% of what's
needed out the door ASAP and build on that, 'cause designing
'the Right Thing" is an infinite project! ( except that he thinks
that the problem with C++ is that it is only a 20% solution! )
I have put both papers on uvaarpa.virginia.edu:/public_access/Lisp -
it may be more convenient to fetch them from there.
Back to your regularly scheduled Python...
- Steve Majewski (804-982-0831) <sdm7g@Virginia.EDU>
- UVA Department of Molecular Physiology and Biological Physics