From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 Path: news.gmane.org!not-for-mail From: "Pascal J. Bourguignon" Newsgroups: gmane.emacs.help Subject: Re: member returns list Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2015 08:16:07 +0200 Organization: Informatimago Message-ID: <87egi45fiw.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> References: <87bndfauey.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> <87wpw0e58f.fsf@robertthorpeconsulting.com> <87si6n822t.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> <87oaha9a64.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> <87twr1pycd.fsf@debian.uxu> <87zj0s5yc8.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> <87r3m45r7a.fsf@kuiper.lan.informatimago.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: plane.gmane.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: ger.gmane.org 1442038833 14824 80.91.229.3 (12 Sep 2015 06:20:33 GMT) X-Complaints-To: usenet@ger.gmane.org NNTP-Posting-Date: Sat, 12 Sep 2015 06:20:33 +0000 (UTC) To: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org Original-X-From: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Sat Sep 12 08:20:30 2015 Return-path: Envelope-to: geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org Original-Received: from lists.gnu.org ([208.118.235.17]) by plane.gmane.org with esmtp (Exim 4.69) (envelope-from ) id 1ZaeAn-0004YQ-FM for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sat, 12 Sep 2015 08:20:29 +0200 Original-Received: from localhost ([::1]:59647 helo=lists.gnu.org) by lists.gnu.org with esmtp (Exim 4.71) (envelope-from ) id 1ZaeAm-0005QT-NE for geh-help-gnu-emacs@m.gmane.org; Sat, 12 Sep 2015 02:20:28 -0400 Original-Path: usenet.stanford.edu!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail Original-Newsgroups: gnu.emacs.help Original-Lines: 51 Original-X-Trace: individual.net yaiG5SXf1ywjGqMzcJqCow7OLxSrFIeCJ0M0A7sDMiPJa7z7dT Cancel-Lock: sha1:OTA0Nzc1MjUwNjE5ZWU1ZmQzYTg4ZDM4NzY5NDUzY2UwMjIwZDEzOQ== sha1:RGE0rRTVYfYg3xUrVYRdWyzixPM= Face: iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUgAAADAAAAAwAQMAAABtzGvEAAAABlBMVEUAAAD///+l2Z/dAAAA oElEQVR4nK3OsRHCMAwF0O8YQufUNIQRGIAja9CxSA55AxZgFO4coMgYrEDDQZWPIlNAjwq9 033pbOBPtbXuB6PKNBn5gZkhGa86Z4x2wE67O+06WxGD/HCOGR0deY3f9Ijwwt7rNGNf6Oac l/GuZTF1wFGKiYYHKSFAkjIo1b6sCYS1sVmFhhhahKQssRjRT90ITWUk6vvK3RsPGs+M1RuR mV+hO/VvFAAAAABJRU5ErkJggg== X-Accept-Language: fr, es, en User-Agent: Gnus/5.13 (Gnus v5.13) Emacs/24.3 (gnu/linux) Original-Xref: usenet.stanford.edu gnu.emacs.help:214888 X-BeenThere: help-gnu-emacs@gnu.org X-Mailman-Version: 2.1.14 Precedence: list List-Id: Users list for the GNU Emacs text editor List-Unsubscribe: , List-Archive: List-Post: List-Help: List-Subscribe: , Errors-To: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Original-Sender: help-gnu-emacs-bounces+geh-help-gnu-emacs=m.gmane.org@gnu.org Xref: news.gmane.org gmane.emacs.help:107173 Archived-At: Stefan Monnier writes: >> Also, I didn't show the transitivities, but: >> No Smalltalk -> no Objective-C -> no NeXTSTEP >> No Lisp -> no Interface Builder -> no NeXTSTEP >> No NeXTSTEP -> no MacOSX -> no iOS -> no iPad/iPhone. > > FWIW, history usually shows that most inventions don't depend on one > particular person inventing that thing, but rather on a particular > context making that thing desirable/reachable/useful, at which point > some (set of) people usually invent similar things around the same time. > > So while the world might look a bit different if > Smalltalk/Lisp/younameit hadn't been invented, it probably wouldn't be > all that different since someone else would have invented something > similar anyway. You bet! Given how accepted and mainstream lisp is, I can perfectly imagine a universe where it would be totally ignored and where we'd lose all its offsprings. For example, Backus, of BNF and Fortran frame, wrote a paper about functional programming in 1959! You can bet it would still be ignored if lisp hadn't shown the path with a garbage collector and high order functions, and if it hadn't existed to develop ML and from this all the functional programming language to Haskell nowadays. If you want to argue that lisp wasn't essential, then explain the delay between 1959 and ML which has been developed only in 1970! Similarly for the web. Without lisp and the interface builder (a macintosh program written in lisp originally, and therefore doubly dependent on lisp (from the lisp->smalltalk->parc->apple->lisa->mac and from the lisp->dynamic-programming->UI paths), you wouldn't have had nextstep where it was easy, obvious and trivial even, to develop html and WWW server/browser, given the building blocks available. The alternative at the time was Xanadu on the hypertext side, SGML on the document side, and gopher on the client/server side. They could have spend tens of years trying to mix two or three of those into something vaguely ressembling the www, without lisp and NeXTSTEP. -- __Pascal Bourguignon__ http://www.informatimago.com/ “The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.” -- Carl Bass CEO Autodesk