Comments on: An Interview with Lutz Mueller, Creator of newLISP

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http:// — Fri, 08 Jun 2007 02:46:34 +0000

Great article Rob.

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http:// — Sun, 29 Apr 2007 08:27:00 +0000

Hi John, Although I don’t intend to continue in what I suspect would be a pointless exercise, I do want to complement you on the civil tone of your last post, John. Thanks. m i c h a e l

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http:// — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 17:23:35 +0000

I’m coming at this from a practical viewpoint, not an academic one. I get paid for programs that work and not for writing papers about programming languages. Thus it’s critical that the tools I use are the best they can be. When I talk about what Lisp is I refer to what Lisp had evolved into in the late 70’s (roughly 30 years ago). This was the time of the Lisp/Scheme split as well. What if you had a great screwdriver that you used at your job every day and someone came along and changed the bit, put big plastic safety shields all over it and changed the handle to something that required two hands to hold. You complained “this isn’t a screwdriver”. The reply was “it certainly is, I just changed a few things on it and added a few things”. The point is that to the layman Lisp and Scheme look identical. To the expert they are vastly different, more different even than C and Pascal. I heard too often someone disparaging Lisp and saying that they used it once in a course in college and that it was impratical for doing serious work. Upon questioning them I find that they had used Scheme instead. There’s no one out there protecting the name Lisp. You can bet that if someone created something unlike Java and called it newJAVA they would get a call from Sun’s lawyers. I don’t know Lutz Mueller but I have no doubt that he’s a gentleman and a scholar. But even the best artists create some bad works. I’m criticizing his work and not Mueller. Yes, I’m trying to be a detective as well. I’m trying to figure out why something he calls a Lisp is so much more like Scheme than Lisp. I though initially that he just misunderstood what made Lisp so good. Now I’m thinking that he was using a Scheme system and mistakenly believed that Scheme and Lisp were two names for the same thing.

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http:// — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 17:13:07 +0000

> (apply new-tricks old-dog) nil

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http:// — Tue, 24 Apr 2007 09:17:03 +0000

Thank you for you quick response to my question, John. > The key feature of an program language that claims to be a Lisp is > that: nil is the same as () and it is used to represent false. > A second feature of Lisp is that it has separate namespaces for > functions and variables. At the bottom of page one in “History of Lisp” (McCarthy, 79) begins a list of ideas that characterize a LISP, and nowhere in those fifteen ideas do I see mention of the two features you cite here. > It’a similar in power to the feature of the C programming language > that 0 is false. Then I wonder why C99 added a boolean type? > Note that Scheme doesn’t have this feature and thus this is a good > way to tell a Scheme variant from a Lisp variant. I remember reading a person’s post somewhere that passionately and with excruciating detail explained why you should never, ever, ever say that Scheme is a Lisp. I found it strange that someone should care so much. Clearly, Scheme, like Common Lisp and Emacs Lisp, is a dialect of Lisp. To argue that newLISP should be viewed more as a Scheme than a Lisp is like saying you shouldn’t say you’re from your paternal grandfather’s side of the family, only your mother’s. > and in fact the way that newLISP’s cons function works is so bad > that even Scheme people would be horrified (and they are used to > very terrible stuff). This and the earlier post’s insults (here you manage two in one sentence!) are what I find strange. newLISP and even Lutz himself (who does not profit monetarily from selling the language or anything relating to it) are being disparaged by someone who has been doing just that for some time now. m i c h a e l P.S. For anyone wondering about those fifteen ideas characterizing LISP, they are: 1. Computing with symbolic expressions rather than numbers. 2. Representation of symbolic expressions and other information by list structure in computer memory. 3. Representation of information on paper, from keyboards and in other external media mostly by multi-level lists and sometimes by S-expressions. It has been important that any kind of data can be represented by a single general type. 4. A small set of selector and constructor operations expressed as func- tions, i.e. car, cdr and cons. 5. Composition of functions as a tool for forming more complex functions. 6. The use of conditional expressions for getting branching into function definitions. 7. The recursive use of conditional expressions as a sufficient tool for building computable functions. 8. The use of ?-expressions for naming functions. 9. The storage of information on the property lists of atoms. 10. The representation of LISP programs as LISP data that can be manip- ulated by object programs. This has prevented the separation between system programmers and application programmers. Everyone can �im- prove� his LISP, and many of these �improvements� have developed into improvements to the language. 11. The conditional expression interpretation of Boolean connectives. 12. The LISP function eval that serves both as a formal definition of the language and as an interpreter. 13. Garbage collection as the means of erasure. 14. Minimal requirements for declarations so that LISP statements can be executed in an on-line environment without preliminaries. 15. LISP statements as a command language in an on-line environment.

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http:// — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 21:52:53 +0000

The key feature of an program language that claims to be a Lisp is that: nil is the same as () and it is used to represent false. Also (car nil) and (cdr nil) return nil. This is crucial to making the code easy to program and to make the code handle a wide variety of arguments. It’a similar in power to the feature of the C programming language that 0 is false. Note that Scheme doesn’t have this feature and thus this is a good way to tell a Scheme variant from a Lisp variant. In this respect newLISP is not a Lisp and in fact the way that newLISP’s cons function works is so bad that even Scheme people would be horrified (and they are used to very terrible stuff). A second feature of Lisp is that it has separate namespaces for functions and variables. This is not nearly as distinguishing a feature as the first one but still the fact that most Lisps have two separate namespaces for functions and variables makes them better suited to serious practical programming.

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http:// — Mon, 23 Apr 2007 15:30:41 +0000

GPL is an unfortunate choice since I cannot embed nLisp into an application without making the application GPL as well.

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http:// — Sun, 22 Apr 2007 02:45:54 +0000

> what it is in Lisp that makes it still the most powerful programming language around. Could you please explain to us what “it” is, John? > I wish he had called it newSCHEME All this fuss over a name. Maybe Lutz should have called it “notYourLanguage,” so programmers of other languages wouldn’t feel so needlessly threatened by it. m i c h a e l

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http:// — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 20:49:43 +0000

I’ve been working in Lisp for 30 years now and after reading the manual for newLISP my feelings are that Lutz Mueller never understood what it is in Lisp that makes it still the most powerful programming language around. What he created is far far closer to scheme than to a modern Lisp. I wish he had called it newSCHEME so that people don’t get a bad impression of Lisp from newLISP.