Rainer Joswig

That's one of the funniest and most enlightening classic AI Koans, originally from the ITS file "AI:HUMOR;AI KOANS".

Here's another Moon story from the humor directory:

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/humor/moon's.ghost

Moon's I.T.S. CRASH PROCEDURE document from his home directory, which goes into much more detail than just turning it off and on:

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/moon/klproc.11

And some cool Emacs lore:

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/doc/eak/emacs.lore

Reposting this from the 2014 HN discussion of "Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine":

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878679

http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7879364

eudox on June 11, 2014

Related: A huge collections of images showing Symbolics UI and the software written for it:

http://lispm.de/symbolics-ui-examples/symbolics-ui-examples

agumonkey on June 11, 2014

Nice, but I wouldn't confuse static images with the underlying semantic graph of live objects that's not visible in pictures.

DonHopkins on June 14, 2014

Precisely! When Lisp Machine programmer look at a screen dump, they see a lot more going on behind the scenes than meets the eye.

I'll attempt to explain the deep implications of what the article said about "Everything on the screen is an object, mouse-sensitive and reusable":

There's a legendary story about Gyro hacking away on a Lisp Machine, when he accidentally trashed the…

One of the things that fascinates me about the history of the Newton is that if it weren't for complaints from those advocating C++ that escalated to John Sculley (who ruled in their favor), we may have ended up with mass-market machines that ran a Lisp operating system. There's a wonderful interview between lispm and Mikel Evins, two regular contributors on Hacker News, that can be found at http://lispm.de/lisp-based-newton-os.

I'm quite fascinated by pre-1997 Apple's projects. Before Jobs' return, Apple was an unfocused beacon of innovation; in its attempts to find a successor to the classic Mac OS, it explored various paths, but none of these paths led to a successor until Apple bought NeXT. Apple's more radical explorations during this era seem to have a profound Xerox PARC influence. Xerox PARC is probably most famous for Smalltalk and its GUI. However, there are many people who don't know that Xerox developed its own Lisp environment, Interlisp, which was known for its GUI (not all Lisp innovations came from MIT). These explorations ended once Apple committed to NeXT technology for its foundation in 1997, and today Apple has been pursuing its own direction (e.g., the iOS human interface guidelines, Swift, the gradual inclusion of iOS UI/UX elements and practices in macOS) that is distinct from the Xerox PARC, classic Macintosh, and NeXT traditions.

How I see it, Lisp 1.5 was Lisp, but as time went on and many 'versions' of Lisp for different systems with different capabilities came into being, there was no longer really a singular Lisp. Then there was a great unification that spit out Common Lisp, and that became Lisp. So if Lisp 1.5 was released today as something new, it wouldn't be Lisp, but merely another Lisp-like. It's too different. No one today thinks that if you drop "Lisp" in a conversation you really mean Lisp 1.5. (Maybe if you write it as LISP...) It's either going to mean Common Lisp, or maybe a reference to the vague Lisp Family. I don't think Lisp will ever be synonymous with "Scheme".

Maybe you'd appreciate some Lisp history, to also answer your question about "what other dialect[s]"?

http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html

http://lispm.de/30ycltl

Hi,

I read this article on your site:

http://lispm.de/why-lisp-is-different

Quote from it:

[ When in doubt design software to be introspective.

when in doubt design software to be reflective. ]

What is the difference between introspective and reflective? I've used introspection in Python and know about and used (a bit) reflection in Java earlier, but thought they were roughly the same sort of thing. Please explain the difference if possible.

I just noticed that a sibling comment has a link to Rainer Joswig's archive of the Dylan book (Dylan, an Object Oriented Dynamic Language, the book I referred to above).

Here's the link again for reference in context:

http://lispm.de/docs/prefix-dylan/book.annotated/

I should have known Rainer would have it.

Even better: he's also archived the design notes:

http://lispm.de/docs/prefix-dylan/design-notes/