Paul McJones preserves computing history, with archives and writing on Lisp, SQL, System R, Prolog, and early operating systems.
HN links it for historical source material, such as the Lisp 2 project and background on John Allen's Anatomy of LISP.
Reposting my now very old comment https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10502434 :
> Herbert Stoyan's historical work on early Lisp http://www.mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2010/07/29/185/ https://web.archive.org/web/20050617031004/http://www8.informatik.uni-erlangen.de/html/lisp-enter.html is probably worth reading if one is seriously interested. (I haven't read much of it myself yet.) McCarthy praised Stoyan's work as better than his own 1979 HOPL paper ( http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/lisp/lisp.html ): "Stoyan's reading of the early LISP documents gives a more accurate picture than my own memories turned out to have given." http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/history/
> (As a side-note, I'm pretty sure that the broken, Wayback-beating link to "Lisp references according to Miller" on McCarthy's page is to this http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-site/alu/table/Lisp-History.html document by Kent Pitman and Brad Miller (see http://www.ai.sri.com/~delacaze/alu-site/alu/table/history.htm ).)
From 2015-2018, "The Mysteries of Lisp -- I: The Way to S-expression Lisp" by Hong-Yi Dai https://arxiv.org/abs/1505.07375 ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31153702 )
> Despite its old age, Lisp remains mysterious to many of its admirers. The mysteries on one hand fascinate the language, on the other hand also obscure it. Following Stoyan but paying attention to what he has neglected or omitted, in this first essay of a series intended to unravel these mysteries,…
To a programmer, sure, but SQL was designed as a natural language[0] for non programmers and the syntax reflects that i.e
I need eggs, flour, sugar and vanilla from the supermarket.
Vs Yoda
From the supermarket eggs, flour, sugar and vanilla I need.
The original use case has long failed, but here we are with SQL stockholm syndrome. I don't hate it, but strictly speaking it is a bit odd.
Edit: there was a linguist in the group that developed SQL to help with the goal of making it easier for non programmers.
[0] https://www.mcjones.org/System_R/SQL_Reunion_95/sqlr95-System.html
There were academic systems that (a) didn't use the SQL langauge (b) came before Oracle, but wasn't commercialized as quickly as Oracle.
Oracle's biggest business decision was standardizing on IBM's standards, according to Ingres founder Mike Stonebraker. Hugh Darwen and Paul McJones have all had stories about this. One source is: http://www.mcjones.org/System_R/ DB2 was also only funded by IBM on the premise that DB2 would increase disk storage sales: http://www.informationweek.com/news/software/database_apps/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208403005
Dusty Decks? First thing that popped into my head when I saw your name. I bookmarked it on one of my web pages back in 2004. Dang, between that and your other works, a computing rock star in our midst!
Dusty Decks: Preserving historic software https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/
And a follow-up post is "GTL is a LISP 2 implementation" https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2018/06/04/1001/ . Which I note only because it's easily overlooked if one doesn't scroll down far enough.
And here's some interesting background info on the late John Allen which I just stumbled upon:
John Allen (1937-2022) and Anatomy of LISP
https://mcjones.org/dustydecks/archives/2024/04/11/1249/