[HN Gopher] Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
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Byte Magazine: LISP (1979)
Author : PaulHoule
Score : 124 points
Date : 2022-08-05 18:03 UTC (4 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
| FullyFunctional wrote:
| Ah I miss the old Byte Magazine (like people miss the NES or PS1
| etc). The ads looks completely insane with 2022 glasses on -
| who'd buy a random 64 KB ram extension for an S-100 bus? What was
| the market for this? Couldn't have been large.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| The S-100 bus was popular with an early generation of machines
| with 8080 or Z-80 processors that ran CP/M, though there were a
| few counter examples.
|
| By the time I started reading Byte at the public library (1980)
| there were a few computers that were mass market like the
| TRS-80, Apple ][, Commodore PET, TI-99/4A, etc. Mass market
| computers were talked about a lot in the editorial in Byte but
| Byte was also full of ads for more exotic machines aimed at
| OEMs, for instance to build a cash register system for a
| supermarket. Cromemco, for instance, advertised harder than
| anybody, but it was rare to see Cromemco and other exotics
| talked about in the articles.
| bluedino wrote:
| Can you imagine cutting off the bottom 1/4 of a magazine page,
| writing your name and address on the order form, putting that
| in an envelope with a check and then waiting 6-8 weeks for your
| new memory card to show up in the mail?
| reaperducer wrote:
| Imagine? No. Remember? Yes.
|
| And this in an era where there was no such thing as package
| tracking. You got your stuff when you got your stuff.
|
| I've ordered a few things mail order this year because they
| were not available any other way. The wait doesn't bother me.
| Order confirmation comes when the bank tells me the check has
| been cashed. But the lack of package tracking causes mild
| anxiety.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| Wow, what can you still order by mail but not online?
| benj111 wrote:
| Yeah, I mean who could possibly need more than 64kb of ram?
| LesZedCB wrote:
| from the conclusion:
|
| > We do not want to give the impression that all interesting uses
| of computers are centered around LISP. Some of the most
| innovative work was done by the Learning Research Group at Xerox
| Research Center in their development of the Dynabook and the
| Smalltalk language.
|
| and the rest is history
| susam wrote:
| The second article in this issue of BYTE has a delightful mention
| of Logo (the programming language). On page 20, it says,
|
| "LOGO is, up to surface structure, more or less equivalent to
| LISP."
|
| It further says,
|
| "The LOGO system supports two different (by no means _disjoint_ )
| environments: the Turtle, Graphics and Musicbox world (ie:
| peripheral devices which are controlled by a command language)
| and the LISP world."
|
| And then in a later bullet point on page 22,
|
| " _Our experiences_ , especially with young students, indicate
| that programming in LOGO may serve as a _bridge_ between natural
| language communication and reasoning and the formal and abstract
| symbols and reasoning in mathematics and programming languages. "
|
| This bullet point ends with,
|
| "Our findings can at least be partly explained by the cleanliness
| by which the basic computational ideas are embodied in
| LISP/LOGO."
|
| In my own life, I was fortunate to have stumbled upon Logo as my
| first computer programming language. The simplicity and elegance
| of Logo had a powerful effect on me at a very young age. It
| immediately turned me into a computer programmer for life!
| PaulHoule wrote:
| People at MIT like Seymour Papert were aghast that BASIC became
| the dominant programming language for education in the 8-bit
| age, they were hoping they could push out LOGO as a new
| standard but it did not get a lot of traction.
|
| Three years later Byte ran a special issue on LOGO which I
| thought was one of the best issues of Byte ever
|
| https://archive.org/details/byte-magazine-1982-08
|
| in particular it had some great reviews of LOGO implementations
| for different home computers some of which were pretty strange
| like the TRS-80 Coco and the TI-99/4A. It was very close to the
| cultural peak of the 1980s before Michael Jackson dropped off
| the charts, the Atari 2600 went down without being immediately
| replaced (unless you count the C-64), etc. Byte was a lively
| magazine so long as the market was split up between a wide
| range of computers but it never really found it's niche in a
| world dominated by the IBM PC at the high end and the C-64 at
| the low end.
|
| Speaking of which, LISP never really caught on in the 8-bit
| era. This issue has some articles about how you would do so but
| it didn't seem to shoehorn so well into a tiny machine (like
| the 1k of RAM on the Sinclair ZX80) as BASIC did. From the
| viewpoint of a kid who just learned BASIC, FORTH seemed to
| offer a lot of what LISP did and it was very available, even if
| it was a few weeks of assembly coding to write a FORTH.
| mark_l_watson wrote:
| Pegasus Lisp for the 6502 Apple II was pretty god - I really
| enjoyed it.
| kogus wrote:
| My first experience programming was with a LOGO turtle in third
| grade. I remember the lab full of Apple IIs, and the joy of PEN
| DOWN, UP 10, PEN UP style commands.
| ylee wrote:
| >The second article in this issue of BYTE has a delightful
| mention of Logo (the programming language).
|
| Hacker News discussion of _BYTE_ 's special Logo issue:
| <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28603556>
|
| >In my own life, I was fortunate to have stumbled upon Logo as
| my first computer programming language. The simplicity and
| elegance of Logo had a powerful effect on me at a very young
| age. It immediately turned me into a computer programmer for
| life!
|
| I well remember the epiphany I felt while learning Logo in
| elementary school, at the moment I understood what recursion
| is.
|
| While I have never worked as a professional software developer,
| computers have been a hobby all my life. I don't think the fact
| that the language I have mostly written code in in recent years
| is Emacs Lisp is unrelated to the above moment.
| rekttrader wrote:
| A
| jldugger wrote:
| Just this week while going through the book _Ideas That Changed
| the World_ I read the original paper on LISP[1]. I have to say
| this magazine article reads a bit cleaner. But that's kind of the
| fun of the book -- learning to decode the excited yet formal
| language of computational innovation over time.
|
| The book traces out what are effectively conversations across
| decades (or centuries if you include Aristotle). So when you see
| McCarthy name drop Church's lambda calculus, you know how it ties
| into a conversation about Hilbert's decidability problem, and
| that self-reference ("recursion") is a fundamental tool.
|
| And from the perspective of now, you see that this is the first
| encounter with automatic garbage collection, describing a simple
| mark and sweep algo. The BYTE magazine covers a more advanced
| garbage collector, Lambdino, which assumes a massive amount of
| familiarity with LISP and internals than the previous article
| comparing LISP and LOGO.
|
| [1]: http://www-formal.stanford.edu/jmc/recursive.pdf
| kazinator wrote:
| The article about the Lisp interpreter written in 6809 machine
| language describes a stackless garbage collector which uses the
| pointer-reversal trick for traversing the heap.
|
| > "The author's system uses the pointer reversal method, and he
| will testify to the unlimited number of obscure problems which
| can appear during the debugging phase of its implementation."
|
| :)
| zanethomas wrote:
| Memory Lane!
|
| Page 177 had an advertisement mentioning Alpha Micro Systems,
| where I worked at the time.
| tombaugh wrote:
| Eighties computer magazines were amazing. Is there anything that
| comes close?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I think you have to go all the way back to the 1920s- and
| 1930s-era radio magazines for a comparable vicarious-zeitgeist
| vibe.
|
| Conveniently, some of those are on archive.org as well, e.g.
| https://archive.org/details/Radio-Craft . (Cheat code for
| search purposes: _gernsback_.) March 1949 is especially
| awesome, with articles by Sarnoff and De Forest on the Next Big
| Thing of the day (television) and, as an afterthought towards
| the back, an article on NIST 's first atomic clock.
| laxd wrote:
| Hacker News. It's worse because it's better.
| musicale wrote:
| It's amazing that this magazine issue is still (somewhat)
| relevant and interesting 43 years after its initial publication.
|
| (I note that HN frequently has posts on Lisp as well as 8-bit
| systems.)
|
| Other than HN, is there anything equivalent to BYTE in the modern
| era?
|
| I do like magazines like Linux Format and RasPi, but they're
| focused on Linux and Raspberry Pi whereas BYTE seems to have
| covered all "small systems" from microcontrollers to multiuser
| systems (so both Linux and Raspberry Pi systems would be in
| scope, as would Arduino as well as Apple/Microsoft/Android/etc..)
| This issue also included a wide range of contributors from
| enthusiast developers to industry professionals to teachers and
| researchers.
| projectramo wrote:
| Love these ads. There were almost as many computer companies back
| then as there are crypto currencies now.
|
| For a mere $1595, you got a 16k computer with microsoft basic but
| the best part is that it comes with 2 Z80 chips. Not sure how
| much a Z80 chip cost but surely the user would prefer an extra 8k
| or whatever. Best part is that you get to learn how the computer
| works by building it.
|
| You can see why user testing is so important.
| KerrAvon wrote:
| There are things I don't miss about the era -- good riddance to
| floppy disks and hard drive crashes -- but the PC world pre-IBM
| had so much latent possibility and sometimes just plain weird
| stuff:
|
| http://www.landley.net/history/mirror/cpm/IMSAI_pre-history....
|
| > A major advance was announced in a press release dated
| October 25, 1975 in which the young specialty firm offered a
| relatively new and promising concept. The Hypercube was
| advertised as a four dimensional arrangement of dual 8080
| processor "nodes" configured in 2x2x2x2, 3x3x3x3, and 4x4x4x4
| arrays, with each node capable of communicating, via shared
| memory, with 8 adjacent nodes. This arrangement provided for
| the first processor in each node to handle system overhead and
| communications tasks while the second was left free to execute
| user code. The operating code was to be stored in ROM, and the
| total system promised unparalleled processing power at a
| fraction of the cost and overhead of mainframe machines from
| IBM, Honeywell, Boroughs, and other giants of the period. The
| advertised price of these three offerings was $80,000 for the
| Hypercube II, $400,000 for the Hypercube III (about 1/10th the
| cost of an IBM 370-168), and $1,280,000 for the Hypercube IV
| which was to be released in the second quarter of 1976. The
| concept was legitimized by publication in the December 11, 1975
| issue of ELECTRONICS magazine. Ultimately, the U.S. Navy
| ordered a Hypercube II for installation in Huntsville, Alabama.
| galaxyLogic wrote:
| What next? Smalltalk?
| nomendos wrote:
| Interesting model of the brain https://archive.org/details/byte-
| magazine-1979-08/page/n69/m... Proving that scarcity forces you
| to think ahead. Could be very useful for AI/ML models today.
| browningstreet wrote:
| I had something like the Northstar Horizon advertised on page 20
| of this issue, and I ran ZCPR/3 on it, because it had a hard
| drive. This is after I graduated from my Osborne 1.
| dang wrote:
| Related:
|
| _Byte Magazine - LISP (1979)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20008908 - May 2019 (67
| comments)
|
| _BYTE Magazine 's Lisp issue (1979) [pdf]_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15033439 - Aug 2017 (151
| comments)
| susam wrote:
| The first article in this issue of BYTE has a very interesting
| characterization of Lisp that I have not come across before. I
| mean, famous quotes like "Lisp is a programmable programming
| language" by John Foderaro and "The greatest single programming
| language ever designed" by Alan Kay are often mentioned in
| articles about Lisp. But in this issue of BYTE, the article "An
| Overview of LISP" by John Allen at page 10 has something very
| interesting to say. Excerpt from the article:
|
| "The best description of the LISP programming language is that it
| is a _high level machine language_. That is, it shares many of
| the facets of contemporary machine language --the necessity for
| attention to detail and the freedom to manipulate the machine 's
| data and programs without restriction-- yet LISP is high level in
| that the language contains the expressive power and convenience
| of traditional high level languages. The _contradiction_ is
| resolvable: a LISP machine is just a higher level machine whose
| data items are organized differently from the binary bit patterns
| of most machines, and the LISP programming language is the
| _assembly language_ for this machine. "
|
| Consider the Emacs Lisp (Elisp) interpreter for example. Elisp
| interpreter is the Lisp machine. It understands Elisp symbolic
| expressions, the language of this machine. With enough code
| written in this machine's language, we get this fine editing and
| productivity software known as Emacs!
| aap_ wrote:
| This exactly matches my thoughts. It seems that machine
| language and LISP are the only two languages (that i know
| anyway) where code and data are fundamentally the same kind of
| thing.
| mauriciolange wrote:
| Forth is the exact same thing.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Prolog and Clojure (effectively a LISP dialect) probably also
| qualify, and more modern: I think that in a way JSON also
| qualifies.
| goto11 wrote:
| JSON is not a programming language.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| There are many languages that are dynamic and let you
| generate code and run it inside the program. For instance in
| Java you can generate bytecode for a class and run one of the
| methods. In FORTH you can write new "words" (roughly
| functions) that are the same as the built-in words.
|
| It is mainly languages built around AOT compilation like C,
| Pascal, FORTRAN and such that completely separate code and
| data. (I guess though you can make a C program that writes a
| C program, runs "cc" on it, makes a shared object file, loads
| the library dynamically, and calls a function from it.)
| hatmatrix wrote:
| I'm aware of a discussion about what homoiconicity should
| be defined as after Julia claimed to be a homoiconic
| language. It (and many others) have ways to manipulate the
| AST with its own language, but requires basically a
| different set of functions and tools to manipulate it that
| is different from those that manipulate the data, so that
| claim was eventually withdrawn.
| JonChesterfield wrote:
| Code is data isn't just about emitting and running code.
| It's also traversing your code as the data structure it is
| and changing it as you see fit.
| taeric wrote:
| As a sibling post said, code is data is a different thing.
| https://taeric.github.io/CodeAsData.html is a fun blog I
| wrote on this once.
| zozbot234 wrote:
| Even "languages built around AOT compilation" are
| increasingly blurring the phase distinction between "ahead-
| of-time" and "at runtime", via increased use of
| metaprogramming and constant evaluation facilities. We may
| end up with a state of things where even some "AOT-
| language" programs are written to do much of their work at
| compile time, perhaps adding more and more of those
| facilities that were formerly allowed only at "runtime".
| mgdlbp wrote:
| No one's said the magic word: homoiconicity
| nextstepguy wrote:
| The first Scratch applet was a LISP runtime implemented in
| Java.
| abecedarius wrote:
| I have fond memories of Allen's book _Anatomy of Lisp_. I guess
| there are only historical reasons to read it now, but at the
| time it felt like an introduction to wizardry.
| rileyphone wrote:
| Starting on page 154 a now-familiar new product is introduced,
| and compared to Lisp as such:
|
| > Returning to the LISP theme of our current issue, Visi- Calc is
| an example of a tree-oriented parallel data struc- turing problem
| for which LISP is a most appropriate lan- guage of expression.
| Due to a lack of availability of LISP as a software development
| tool for personal computing hardware, its authors did not use
| LISP. They also had to make a number of compromises and tradeoffs
| as a result of the small size (eg: 16 K to 48 K bytes) of the
| main memory of personal computers. But they did use many of the
| tree concepts of artificial intelligence research. This provides
| us with the ultimate example of the relevance of LISP-like
| languages and approaches to personal computing: one of the most
| generally useful new user software tools for small machines,
| Visi-Calc, tackles just the sort of problem for which LISP is an
| appropriate tool of expression.
| TMWNN wrote:
| And, in turn, whenever Joel Spolsky's "You Suck at Excel" video
| comes up, people discuss how Excel (and spreadsheets in
| general) is a functional programming language
| (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12448545&p=2#12454400>).
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| I looked through the rest of the magazine. From the preview of
| the Motorola 68000:
|
| > Coupled with the new low cost, high density memory devices with
| 64 K bit capacity and with even greater density coming, the
| personal computer will attain or exceed the power of an IBM 360
| Model 30 within the next decade.
|
| Wow. We've come a _long_ way...
| housel wrote:
| I have a hard copy of this issue; it predated my subscription to
| Byte by a couple years, but I was able to purchase it as a back
| issue some time in the early 80s.
| protomyth wrote:
| I loved the old Byte issues with the fun covers (I still want to
| buy prints of a couple like the AI and Smalltalk covers). This
| particular one was a bit funny because my mom thought it was more
| of that D&D crap[1]. Thinking about it, reading the DMG and
| articles about Lisp, might make me think she had a point.
|
| 1) I should point out that my parents never bought into that
| whole D&D is evil craze. Star Frontiers was "cute" though.
| nrp wrote:
| Amazingly enough, you can! Robert Tinney was the illustrator
| for many Byte covers from the 70s and 80s (though not sure if
| he did this one, based on the style). He used to have a website
| up, but if you check archive.org you can still find his email
| address. If you send him an email, he'll let you know what
| cover prints are available and you can order them directly from
| him. I recently ordered 5.
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