Re: member returns list

[Pascal J. Bourguignon]

Stefan Monnier <monnier@iro.umontreal.ca> writes:

>> Also, I didn't show the transitivities, but:
>> No Smalltalk -> no Objective-C -> no NeXTSTEP
>> No Lisp -> no Interface Builder -> no NeXTSTEP
>> No NeXTSTEP -> no MacOSX -> no iOS -> no iPad/iPhone.
>
> FWIW, history usually shows that most inventions don't depend on one
> particular person inventing that thing, but rather on a particular
> context making that thing desirable/reachable/useful, at which point
> some (set of) people usually invent similar things around the same time.
>
> So while the world might look a bit different if
> Smalltalk/Lisp/younameit hadn't been invented, it probably wouldn't be
> all that different since someone else would have invented something
> similar anyway.

You bet!

Given how accepted and mainstream lisp is, I can perfectly imagine a
universe where it would be totally ignored and where we'd lose all its
offsprings.

For example, Backus, of BNF and Fortran frame, wrote a paper about
functional programming in 1959!  You can bet it would still be ignored
if lisp hadn't shown the path with a garbage collector and high order
functions, and if it hadn't existed to develop ML and from this all the
functional programming language to Haskell nowadays.

If you want to argue that lisp wasn't essential, then explain the delay
between 1959 and ML which has been developed only in 1970!


Similarly for the web.  Without lisp and the interface builder (a
macintosh program written in lisp originally, and therefore doubly
dependent on lisp (from the lisp->smalltalk->parc->apple->lisa->mac and
from the lisp->dynamic-programming->UI paths), you wouldn't have had
nextstep where it was easy, obvious and trivial even, to develop html
and WWW server/browser, given the building blocks available.  The
alternative at the time was Xanadu on the hypertext side, SGML on the
document side, and gopher on the client/server side.  They could have
spend tens of years trying to mix two or three of those into something
vaguely ressembling the www, without lisp and NeXTSTEP.



-- 
__Pascal Bourguignon__                 http://www.informatimago.com/
“The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a
dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to
keep the man from touching the equipment.” -- Carl Bass CEO Autodesk