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by mbrock
1621 days ago
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I’m also surprised by this and I continue to love Common Lisp over all other languages. But I think one reason is that languages aren’t just languages. The amazing parts of Common Lisp were all standardized in 1992 or whatever. By people who are not at all involved in any kind of Unix, Linux, open source, web, scripting, etc. It’s like a beautiful cultural legacy that’s maintained by some enthusiasts and a couple of insular commercial vendors. Now what I really wonder is why nobody outside of some Scheme dialects have stolen the restartable condition system, which is so amazing and straightforward to implement. |
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Common Lisp on UNIX appeared in the mid 80s, long before the ANSI CL standard.
Scott Fahlman was one of the five designers of the early Common Lisp. He headed the CMU CL project, which was a) on UNIX since around 1984 and b) public domain. Code from CMU CL was used in a dozen other implementations.
Other well known CL implementations for UNIX which were developed before 1994, when the ANSI CL standard was published: Allegro CL, GNU CLISP (free), (A)KCL (no cost, free, later renamed to GNU Common Lisp), LispWorks, Lucid CL, ...
Three large commercial implementations of CL were developed initially exclusively for UNIX and were available end 80s: Allegro CL, Lucid CL and LispWorks.
Generally the language came out of well funded research labs and companies and was designed to be portable across a large variety of operating systems (like UNIX variants, VMS, LISPMs, DOS/Windows, Mac OS, ...).