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0 pointsjhbadger6y ago0 comments

Only because Common Lisp has been around so long that people have forgotten what Lisp was like before it. Old school Lisp hackers like Rodney Brooks were not fond of the dialect, which they felt was bloated (see Brooks and Gabriel, "A Critique of Common Lisp", 1984).

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lispm6y ago· 2 in thread

Do you know the rest of the story, too?

Brooks/Gabriel developed an implementation for stock hardware (typically Unix systems with RISC CPUs: SUN SPARC, IBM POWER, MIPS, PA-RISC) which largely debunked their own earlier critique: Lucid Common Lisp.

See this paper: Design of An Optimizing, Dynamically Retargetable Compiler for Common Lisp, Rodney A. Brooks (Massachusetts Institute of Technology Lucid, Inc.), David B. Posner, James L. McDonald, Jon L. White Eric Benson, Richard P. Gabriel (Lucid, Inc.), 1986 http://rpgpoet.com/Files/cp.pdf

They even founded a company (Lucid, Inc., 1984), which sold this Lisp very successful for several years. Many companies used it during that time for deployment of Lisp applications.

Richard P Gabriel even co-developed the Common Lisp Object System standard and published the spec in 1988: http://rpgpoet.com/Files/concepts.pdf and http://rpgpoet.com/Files/Functions.pdf

Rodney Brooks also developed a specialized tiny variant of Common Lisp called L, which he then used in many research and commercial robots. 1995

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/2949173_L_--_A_Comm...

jhbadgerOP6y ago

I'm not sure Lucid was a great example of Common Lisp success because they eventually converted to being a C++ IDE supplier (albeit one based on Emacs, so still Lisp-related but not CL). I hadn't heard of L, but that seems in line with Brooks' earlier criticism that the language was too big.

lispm6y ago

> because they eventually converted to being a C++ IDE supplier

They followed the market. The Common Lisp product was great.

> but that seems in line with Brooks' earlier criticism that the language was too big

Lucid CL implemented all of Common Lisp and more.

L is a Lisp for embedded systems. It's a subset of Common Lisp - nothing unusual.

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