Lisp

Lisp

[sergio hernandez]

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Hi people, I have a concern of the use of a language derived of scheme how
Lisp or Guile. Why GNU uses this languages for develop many of the software
like mcron, emacs, freetalk, etc?  Thanks for your answer.

-- 
Lic. Sergio Hernández Reyes


*Desarrollador de Software8111939182 - sergio.hdzreyes@gmail.com
<sergio.hdzreyes@gmail.com>*

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Re: Lisp

[Eric S Fraga]

http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/introduction-why-lisp.html
-- 
Eric S Fraga via Emacs 28.0.50 & org 9.3.7 on Debian bullseye/sid

Re: Lisp

[tomas]

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On Wed, Jul 08, 2020 at 07:58:02PM -0500, sergio hernandez wrote:
> Hi people, I have a concern of the use of a language derived of scheme how
> Lisp or Guile.


It's the other way around. LISP (written in all caps, it*s *that*
old) is the grandmother. Born around 1958 [1], it is one of the
oldest programming languages around. Nevertheless, it's still
young, having adapted to almost every change of its environments
(and those has changed a lot, believe me).

If you want to get a first impression on LISP, have a look at [2],
which is a paper book, but perhaps some library around you carries
it. The web site is funny, though :)

Scheme [3], OTOH, is kind of the '70ies LISP's hippy daugther (I'm not
saying that in any dismissive way: on the contrary, I'm seriously in
love with Scheme, but hey, I'm /that/ generation). If you want to get
an impression on Scheme, SICP [4] is the book for you, available online
(for free) or as a physical book.

Scheme is a lot like Javascript, because actually, Javascript began
as a kind of Scheme in Brendan Eich's head (somewhere early 1990s,
I think), but then he had to force it into COBOL's -- uh -- Java's
clothes for marketing reasons. Or something like that.

> Why GNU uses this languages for develop many of the software
> like mcron, emacs, freetalk, etc?  Thanks for your answer.

Most probably for historical reasons. The time GNU was born, Lisp
Machines [5] were just the sexiest things around, and, although
proprietary, they embodied one of the core ideas of GNU, that is
that you can reach into every nook and cranny of your system at
any time and change it, ideally while it's running, and see the
effects immediately. You, the user, are at the same time the system
administrator and the programmer. You are the boss.

There is a lot in Emacs which resembles such a Lisp machine. You
can ask the help system about a function, and it will take you to
the source (be it Lisp or C), and you can /edit that source/ see
what effects that has (OK, OK: you'll have to re-load, in the case
of C you'll have to recompile, so there are still a few hurdles
to take, but with some determination you'll finally get there).

Cheers

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LISP
[2] http://landoflisp.com/
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scheme_(programming_language)
[4] https://mitpress.mit.edu/sites/default/files/sicp/full-text/book/book.html
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_Machine

-- t

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(Correction: Re: Lisp)

[tomas]

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On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 10:49:55AM +0200, tomas@tuxteam.de wrote:

[...]

> It's the other way around. LISP (written in all caps, it*s *that*
> old)

Actually that was a little exaggeration. People these days
tend to write "Lisp". Perhaps to make it a bit less scary :-)

But don't fear. It might be your language, and if it is, you
shouldn't miss on it.

Cheers
-- t

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Re: Lisp

[tomas]

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On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 09:31:01AM +0100, Eric S Fraga wrote:
> http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/introduction-why-lisp.html

Nice one. Thanks for reminding me :)

Cheers
-- t

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Re: Lisp

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > Most probably for historical reasons. The time GNU was born, Lisp
  > Machines [5] were just the sexiest things around, and, although
  > proprietary, they embodied one of the core ideas of GNU, that is
  > that you can reach into every nook and cranny of your system at
  > any time and change it, ideally while it's running, and see the
  > effects immediately. You, the user, are at the same time the system
  > administrator and the programmer. You are the boss.

I was on the team that developed the Lisp Machine operating system,
but that is not why I love Lisp.  It's the other way around: I did
that because I love Lisp.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: Lisp

[Mingde (Matthew) Zeng]

> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]
>
>   > Most probably for historical reasons. The time GNU was born, Lisp
>   > Machines [5] were just the sexiest things around, and, although
>   > proprietary, they embodied one of the core ideas of GNU, that is
>   > that you can reach into every nook and cranny of your system at
>   > any time and change it, ideally while it's running, and see the
>   > effects immediately. You, the user, are at the same time the system
>   > administrator and the programmer. You are the boss.
>
> I was on the team that developed the Lisp Machine operating system,
> but that is not why I love Lisp.  It's the other way around: I did
> that because I love Lisp.

So, why did you love Lisp in the first place? ;-)

--
Mingde (Matthew) Zeng

Re: Lisp

[Jean Louis]

There will be nice references from history of programming languages. If I am not mistaken LISP is the second programming language after FORTRAN, and many other programming languages have been derived from LISP.
Scheme, including Guile is derived from LISP, it is considered LISP dialect.

GNU Emacs has decades of development, its development started before many new programming languages that came to existence and became popular. Thus there are historical reasons for LISP. One need to review the history of LISP development and programming language developments to understand it all.

There are practical and programmatic reasons for LISP beside historical reasons. I am of opinion that programmatic reasons played the major role. 

Here is one reference for you:
http://www.gigamonkeys.com/book/introduction-why-lisp.html

Here is more reasons for Emacs Lisp:
https://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/eintr/Why.html

Myself, I like the extensibility of Emacs Lisp, it gives me environment to handle almost all my business needs. In my opinion, the years from 1980-2000 were interesting years, people were more interested in programming and purchasing a computer brought many people into programming. Especially in earlier years, computers were delivered with books for programmnig languages. And I remember companies were designating one person to learn and do whatever software was necessary for the single company. I have seen those companies, visited them and visited programmers, even when I was a boy. They had output on the printer, there was no monitor for big computers. I have seen accountants sitting late night and studying the program and making new programs for invoices and other business  calculations. And I have worked with a teacher who programmed anything necessary for pupils to learn better. Programming was in. Almost everybody I knew at that time, including colleauges of my parents, including teachers, and boys and girls who went into comput club, was aware that anything we wanted, we could program ourselves. Games were harder to do, yet we programmed even games, it was more fun playing one's own game then commercial games. So I come from the period of time which taught me that anything I need can be programmed, so I do programming for me and my business myself.

Emacs Lisp offers me already the environment, like menues, it gives me key functions, it gives me foundation, so I can extend it as I wish, doing any possible business or private tasks, accounting entries into database are conducted through Emacs for multiple companies, projects and tasks are managed by Emacs, sending SMS and receiving SMS recently I do by Emacs, all notes, SMS, faxes, emails are recorded into database by using Emacs, and  I can extend it with few minutes or hours as I wish. As everything is related to writnig, Emacs Lisp becomes my best choice. All entries, all text is related to text editing, so that is very proper to have as foundation or environment that may be further extended and integrated with other life and business tasks.

For example, in Dired file manager or directory editor, I just press SUPER-M to mail the file or files to specific person, Emacs Lisp function asks me for name of person, I choose one email among others, and files are sent quickly, wthout launching separate software or email reader. Similar integration is within Android or Replicant operating systems. You can click on files and easier share them.

That is example, anything can be done and extending new functions to well prepared foundation helps me in life.


Am July 9, 2020 12:58:02 AM UTC schrieb sergio hernandez <sergio.hdzreyes@gmail.com>:
>Hi people, I have a concern of the use of a language derived of scheme
>how
>Lisp or Guile. Why GNU uses this languages for develop many of the
>software
>like mcron, emacs, freetalk, etc?  Thanks for your answer.

Re: Lisp

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Mingde (Matthew) Zeng wrote:
> RMS wrote:
>> I was on the team that developed the Lisp Machine operating system,
>> but that is not why I love Lisp.  It's the other way around: I did
>> that because I love Lisp.
>
> So, why did you love Lisp in the first place? ;-)

Not to answer for RMS', but to add a bit of historical context.

Emacs, Lisp, and the Lisp Machine all came from the MIT AI lab.  The
predecessor to the lispm was Maclisp running on ITS, which also hosted
the TECO editor used to build the first Emacs.  Many AI researchers and
ITS hackers used Maclisp, and many prominent Lisp features first saw the
light of day here.

Re: Lisp

[tomas]

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On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 11:56:02PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:

[...]

> I was on the team that developed the Lisp Machine operating system,
> but that is not why I love Lisp.  It's the other way around: I did
> that because I love Lisp.

Thanks for sharing this tidbit!

Cheers
-- t

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Re: Lisp

[Arthur Miller]

<tomas@tuxteam.de> writes:

> On Wed, Jul 08, 2020 at 07:58:02PM -0500, sergio hernandez wrote:
>> Hi people, I have a concern of the use of a language derived of scheme how
>> Lisp or Guile.
>
>
> It's the other way around. LISP (written in all caps, it*s *that*
> old) is the grandmother. Born around 1958 [1], it is one of the
> oldest programming languages around. Nevertheless, it's still
> young, having adapted to almost every change of its environments
> (and those has changed a lot, believe me).
>
> If you want to get a first impression on LISP, have a look at [2],
> which is a paper book, but perhaps some library around you carries
> it. The web site is funny, though :)

Just as a curiosa, I am currently reading a book about early Lisp
history, by K. Majorinc, title roughly translated into English "As
Powerful as Possible". Page 38, has some quite detailed history bits.
Below is an excerpt together with some bibliography:

"McCarthy and Minsky, then working at american MIT, started in September 1958.
work on project ARTIFICAL INTELLIGENCE (47). The work was relatively well
documented with numerous articles and presented at conferences and in interne
documents, Artifical Intelligence Memo (AIM), Research Laboratory of Electronic,
Quaterly progress report (RLE QPR) and by student works. "The Uncle" (48, 49),
McCarthy was, following the examples of projects LOGIC THEORY MACHINE - *IPL** and
GEOMETRY THEOREM MACHINE - *FLPL*, intended to develop an "expert system", ADVICE
TAKER (50), and a programming language for "manipulation with symbolic
expressions" in which the system would be written (51). After the presentation
to the public, despite McCarthy not abandoning the ADVICE TAKER, the work died
out and is barely mention in numerous intern and published documents (53, 54).
The programming language, was on contrary, intensely developed.

In the beginning described just as "an algebraic language for the manipulation
of symbolic expressions" (55) and "symbol manipulating language" (56), the
language soon got name "LISP (List Processer)" (57), and somewhat later, "LISP
(List Procesiing) ..."

47 Stoyan, Early LISP history (1956-59), 1984., p. 304.
48 Levy, Hackers, 2010., p. 36.
49 “The teacher was a distant man with a wild shock of hair and an
   equally unruly beard — John McCarthy. A master mathemati­
   cian, McCarthy was a classically absent-minded professor; stories
   abounded about his habit of suddenly answering a question hours,
   sometimes even days after it was first posed to him.” 
   Levy, Hackers, 2010., p. 11.
50 McCarthy, Programs with common sense, 1959., p. 75-92.
51 McCarthy & Minsky, Artificial Intelligence in RLE QPR 052, 1959., p. 129.
52 McCarthy, Situations, actions and causal laws, 1963., p. 1.
53 “The main problem in realizing the Advice Taker has been devising
   suitable formal languages covering the subject matter about which
   we want the program to think.”
   McCarthy, A basis for mathematical theory of computation, 1963., p. 69.
54 Stoyan je nezavisno rekonpuirao Advice Taker in Programmiermethoden der
   Künstlichen Intelligenz, 1988., p. 193-231.
55 McCarthy, An algebraic language ..., AIM-001, 1958., p. 1.
56 McCarthy, A revised definition of maplist, AIM-002, 1958., p. 1.
57 McCarthy, Revisions of the language, AIM-004, 1959., p. 9.


Some links to mentioned papers. Can't find aim-002:

[1] https://monoskop.org/images/c/cb/Majorinc_Kazimir_Mocan_koliko_je_god_moguce.pdf
[2] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/AIM-001.pdf
[3] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/MIT/AIM-004.pdf

FLPL:

https://www.informatimago.com/articles/flpl/flpl.html

And some more Lisp history:

http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/

Re: Lisp

[tomas]

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On Fri, Jul 10, 2020 at 03:22:34PM +0200, Arthur Miller wrote:

[...]

> Just as a curiosa, [...]

Nice, thanks :)

Cheers
-- t

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Re: Lisp

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > Emacs, Lisp, and the Lisp Machine all came from the MIT AI lab.  The
  > predecessor to the lispm was Maclisp running on ITS, which also hosted
  > the TECO editor used to build the first Emacs.

That is mostly true but not 100%.  Lisp was invented in 1958, or close
to that.  The AI lab and Project MAC were started in the 1960s.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: Lisp

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

  > So, why did you love Lisp in the first place? ;-)

Programs are data, so programs can operate on data.
Data types are general and fundamentally different in their properties.
Simple syntax.

That is what I recall now.

-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: Lisp

[Richard Stallman]

[[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
[[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
[[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

Bernie Greenberg's Multics Emacs was written a in Maclisp for Multics.
It demonstrated that Lisp was a very good language for users to write
their own editing commands in.  When I developed GNU Emacs, I followed
that example.


-- 
Dr Richard Stallman
Chief GNUisance of the GNU Project (https://gnu.org)
Founder, Free Software Foundation (https://fsf.org)
Internet Hall-of-Famer (https://internethalloffame.org)

Re: Lisp

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Richard Stallman wrote:
>   > Emacs, Lisp, and the Lisp Machine all came from the MIT AI lab.  The
>   > predecessor to the lispm was Maclisp running on ITS, which also hosted
>   > the TECO editor used to build the first Emacs.
>
> That is mostly true but not 100%.  Lisp was invented in 1958, or close
> to that.  The AI lab and Project MAC were started in the 1960s.

That is true.  There was some kind of "AI group" started in the late 50s
By McCarthy and Minsky, but I don't know to which extent it was a formal
entity.  I wanted to simplify things by lumping this project together
with the formal AI lab.

But maybe we're getting off topic for this mailing list.

RE: Lisp

[Drew Adams]

> That is true.  There was some kind of "AI group" started in the late
> 50s By McCarthy and Minsky, but I don't know to which extent it was a
> formal entity.  I wanted to simplify things by lumping this project
> together with the formal AI lab.

I think you're talking about Project MAC.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIT_Computer_Science_and_Artificial_Intelligence_Laboratory#Project_MAC

I recall McCarthy - it may have been Minsky, or
it may have been both - giving a talk and demo
at Cornell in the mid sixties.

The main (only?) thing they presented was the
ability to use a teletype to log in remotely
to a computer at MIT, using the phone lines
(modem).  The whole timeshare / individual
login-with-password thing, and an ensuing
human-machine demo dialog with the computer
acting more or less like a personal calculator
(this was before portable calculators), was
looked at as revolutionary.

It's possible (likely, I think) that the
interaction used Lisp; dunno.  They probably
intended to showcase not only interactivity
and remoteness, but also some idea about AI.
What stuck with me, and I think most others,
was the remote, time-sharing, individual-use
thing.  I was a kid at the time.

Re: Lisp

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Drew Adams wrote:
>> There was some kind of "AI group" started in the late 50s By McCarthy
>> and Minsky
>
> I think you're talking about Project MAC.

No.  The AI project, before becoming the "AI lab", was formed before
Project MAC.  This paper is a detailed history of the beginning of the
AI group, how they joined Project MAC, and later split off.

http://worrydream.com/refs/FoundingOfTheAILab.pdf

Re: Lisp

[Lars Brinkhoff]

Richard Stallman wrote:
> > So, why did you love Lisp in the first place? ;-)
>
> Programs are data, so programs can operate on data.  Data types are
> general and fundamentally different in their properties.  Simple
> syntax.

Maybe more here?

https://www.gnu.org/gnu/rms-lisp.html

Perhaps notable is the PDP-11 Lisp rms created at Harvard, before
working with Maclisp and Lisp machines at MIT.  I believe the code has
survived to this day:

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/src/rms/lisp11.265

RE: Lisp

[Drew Adams]

> >> There was some kind of "AI group" started in the late 50s By
> >> McCarthy and Minsky
> >
> > I think you're talking about Project MAC.
> 
> No.  The AI project, before becoming the "AI lab", was formed before
> Project MAC.  This paper is a detailed history of the beginning of the
> AI group, how they joined Project MAC, and later split off.
> 
> https://urldefense.com/v3/__http://worrydream.com/refs/FoundingOfTheAIL
> ab.pdf__;!!GqivPVa7Brio!Ix2lXvk8H5rpyIQcCMipdWRTVua-
> onGhmwhcfQX9WK38NQ2_C91_atdXBCBThc6s$

Great; thanks.  The Wikipedia article says only this:

  An "AI Group" including Marvin Minsky (the director),
  John McCarthy (inventor of Lisp) and a talented community
  of computer programmers was incorporated into the newly
  formed Project MAC.

But the article you cite makes clear that the relation was
never simply "incorporation".

Even the abstract of the article you cite makes the relation clear:

  From the very beginning of Project MAC, the AI Group
  represented a significant portion of the project, receiving
  roughly one third of its total funding from ARPA. However,
  due to a number of reasons including differences in mission
  and culture, the AI Group and the rest of Project MAC never
  became bound to each other. By 1970, they depended on each
  other only minimally and they were not relevant enough to
  each other to necessitate being part of a single entity.
  The 1970 decision of the AI Group to split from Project MAC
  was due to a confluence of issues and only formalized a split
  that had already existed between the two groups for a
  considerable time.

This is maybe the best part of that article, of which there
are lots of good parts:

  'Why did you make the net random?' and I said, 'Well, I
  didn't want it to have preconceived misconceptions', and he said,
  'Well it has them, its just that you don't know what they are.'

Re: Lisp

[Yuri Khan]

On Sun, 12 Jul 2020 at 00:28, Drew Adams <drew.adams@oracle.com> wrote:

> This is maybe the best part of that article, of which there
> are lots of good parts:
>
>   'Why did you make the net random?' and I said, 'Well, I
>   didn't want it to have preconceived misconceptions', and he said,
>   'Well it has them, its just that you don't know what they are.'

ESR (citing Danny Hillis) retells this story differently:

    In the days when Sussman was a novice,
    Minsky once came to him
    as he sat hacking at the PDP-6.

    “What are you doing?”, asked Minsky.

    “I am training a randomly wired neural net
    to play Tic-Tac-Toe”,
    Sussman replied.

    “Why is the net wired randomly?”, asked Minsky.

    “I do not want it to have any preconceptions of how to play”,
    Sussman said.

    Minsky then shut his eyes.

    “Why do you close your eyes?”,
    Sussman asked his teacher.

    “So that the room will be empty.”

    At that moment, Sussman was enlightened.

http://www.catb.org/~esr/jargon/html/koans.html

Re: Lisp

[황병희]

tomas@tuxteam.de writes:

> On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 11:56:02PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
>
> [...]
>
>> I was on the team that developed the Lisp Machine operating system,
>> but that is not why I love Lisp.  It's the other way around: I did
>> that because I love Lisp.
>
> Thanks for sharing this tidbit!

Me too. Thanks for richard and tomas!

Sicnerely, Byung-Hee

-- 
^고맙습니다 _地平天成_ 감사합니다_^))//

Re: Lisp

[sergio hernandez]

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Many thanks for your answers, I know now that LISP is great language for
many things not only for Emacs. I'll consider to learn it.
Thank you so much!

El sáb., 11 de jul. de 2020 a la(s) 21:04, 황병희 (soyeomul@doraji.xyz)
escribió:

> tomas@tuxteam.de writes:
>
> > On Thu, Jul 09, 2020 at 11:56:02PM -0400, Richard Stallman wrote:
> >
> > [...]
> >
> >> I was on the team that developed the Lisp Machine operating system,
> >> but that is not why I love Lisp.  It's the other way around: I did
> >> that because I love Lisp.
> >
> > Thanks for sharing this tidbit!
>
> Me too. Thanks for richard and tomas!
>
> Sicnerely, Byung-Hee
>
> --
> ^고맙습니다 _地平天成_ 감사합니다_^))//
>
>
>

-- 
Lic. Sergio Hernández Reyes


*Desarrollador de Software8111939182 - sergio.hdzreyes@gmail.com
<sergio.hdzreyes@gmail.com>*

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