[TeMPOraL]

Common Lisp doesn't use this term at the language level - nor does any other Lisp I know, except Clojure. But it shows up around the language. Like, the Metaobject Protocol. Or CLIM - the Common Lisp Interface Manager - has a whole large spec defined mostly in terms of protocols[0].

Where do protocols originate from, I don't know. Maybe Smalltalk. But I first met them in Common Lisp ecosystem.

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[0] - http://bauhh.dyndns.org:8000/clim-spec/2-5.html#_23

[lispm]

Protocols were used in the original CLIM implementation:

https://github.com/franzinc/clim2/blob/master/utils/protocol...

https://github.com/franzinc/clim2/blob/master/clim/stream-de...

[TeMPOraL]

Oh yes, I know. I was part of the effort of getting that codebase running on modern CL implementations.

https://github.com/dkochmanski/clim-tos/graphs/contributors

Two lessons I learned:

One, Common Lisp code is surprisingly stable over time, with 90% of it still working on CCL/SBCL even though the codebase predates the language standard and is older than I am (don't be mislead by that 1991 on Github, it's much older).

Two, oh my god, trying to understand a large codebase seriously abusing :before/:after/:around methods in large class graphs is not an easy task, though arguably it's more of an issue with available tooling. With better ways to explore runtime program state, it would be much easier to understand and improve such code. I may have written about this last night here: https://mastodon.technology/@temporal/100646861775747986.

Also fun fact, this project is the only case where macroexpanding code crashed my SBCL...

Anyway, let that codebase be and serve as a historical reminder; for more modern implementation of CLIM standard, I'll direct everyone to https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/.