[...] olympics

Well yeah I mean come on

almost forgot about this! will be participating to work on a transpiler like coffeescript over C. did some preliminary work, calling it raptor for now.

xyzzy this is so much nicer than plain C syntax. Any hope of making parens optional, too?

(Totally understand if that's a non-goal. Just advocating for the 'minimal' syntax I'm most fond of.)

Ivan Reese Heh currently syntax is actually a non-goal 😅 I want to effectively replace cpp with python and provide syntax extensions for templates, entities, prototypes, heredocs and defer, garbage collection with any working syntax before I finalize on a better syntax. I want to aim at web developers, game developers … so I am thinking along those lines. I want to increase parens in one case so that you can write code like or(and(x,y),z) which would translate to ((x && y) || z) to improve readability.

Which parts? I like RPG's writings, but with this one I've always had a hard time ignoring all the AI-winter stuff.

Ooh, this is an interesting statement I hadn't noticed before:

continuations remain an ugly stain on the otherwise clean manuscript of Scheme.

It's not clear to me why he cares about continuing the Common Lisp standardization process if most of section 3 is about the successor to Common Lisp. Though this too is about the time the article was written in, so not that important.

Most relevant probably the parts about IDEs.

The part about "the right thing" vs. "the worse is better" and how to get best of both worlds is pretty interesting to me too.

Comparing his points about "future Lisp" with Clojure "the Lisp that could" is pretty curious. Also I'm thinking about Racket which kinda successfully lives in a sorta parallel universe.

As long as the article was written even before ANSI Common Lisp, finishing standardising that was paramount. Then making it international, which didn't happen as a standard AFAIK. After that it starts to make sense to devise a "better Common Lisp". Which again never happened, and I'd be curious to know why exactly.

Besides I was surprised how much AI winter influenced Lisp.

Also,

The largest criticisms of Symbolics in the article are that Symbolics believed AI would take off and that Symbolics mistakenly pushed its view that proprietary hardware was the way to go for AI.

It's kinda funny how relevant it sounds. 🙂

Oh, I love "worse is better". I forgot that this is the article that has it. FYI my favorite summary of "worse is better" (also by RPG) is in page 219 of https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/PatternsOfSoftware.pdf:

It is far better to have an under-featured product that is rock solid, fast, and small than one that covers what an expert would consider the complete requirements.

By "parts about IDEs" do you mean 3.2?

As long as the article was written even before ANSI Common Lisp, finishing standardising that was paramount. Then making it international, which didn't happen as a standard AFAIK. After > that> it starts to make sense to devise a "better Common Lisp". Which again never happened, and I'd be curious to know why exactly.

The process of standardizing Common Lisp was so arduous was that the people who migrated in to it have forever been hostile to anybody and anything outside it. It's like, "I just finally got all moved in. What do you mean you want me to move out? And you're trying to poach my neighbors?! Enemes FOREVA!" Maybe I have the benefit of hindsight, but it doesn't make sense to gate something on a standard if it's going to be incompatible with it anyway.

For someone who hasn't been keeping up with this... what is it about this chip that makes it different from all the other stuff going on elsewhere with hardware? (In particular, with respect to the aspects that Kay identified as lacking.)

Loved it! I even made some fanart.