I haven't used Common Lisp professionally since 2014. These days I pay my bills using Clojure/ClojureScript for web stuff and Julia for machine learning and scientific computing. I still miss Common Lisp sometimes, and I enjoy lurking and seeing the occasional discussion in this mailing list.
Tord
I'm another lapsed Common Lisper. I used it professionally from 2008-2014 but since then I've been paying the bills with Clojure. Clojure is nice enough but there is a great deal I miss from CL and I hope I can write it in anger again sometime.
-Eli
OK, jumping on the history train here...
My lisp journey started in a CS class at UC Berkeley taught by Professor Richard Fateman (of Macsyma and Maxima fame). I volunteered on the first day to fix the lisp system (nil wasn't evaluating to nil, but generating an error). It was Harvard Lisp and it ran on a PDP 11 I think. It was written in assembler and had comments about class assignments. Fateman hired me after that class and I worked for him on Franz Lisp. First task was to port Liszt (the compiler) from the VAX to the Motorola 68000. The machine was in a closet and was bigger than a fridge. We got an early Sun workstation and I ported to that, too. 4MB of RAM was the same as the VAXen we had.
I helped found Franz, Inc (with 4 others) in 1984 and have been here ever since. I manage the Lisp group, do release management for Allegro CL, as well as lots of other things.
Kevin
Yay history train.
Been programming lisp languages since my enlightenment in the 90's and spend 8 years in a startup that was based on Common Lisp and Clojure that sadly disintegrated with the untimely death of my co-founder. Since then I've stopped using Federal Reserve Notes, AKA the petro-dollar, on principal, (< $100 month) and am attempting to build a life of pure reciprocity in a small Montana town. Gardens, orchards, goats, oh my. I spend most of my mornings, before sunrise, coding in a lisp based language attempting to build community support software and continuing on the life-long learning journey that is being a computer programmer.
Will
On Wed, May 13, 2020 at 2:51 PM Kevin Layer layer@franz.com wrote:
OK, jumping on the history train here...
My lisp journey started in a CS class at UC Berkeley taught by Professor Richard Fateman (of Macsyma and Maxima fame). I volunteered on the first day to fix the lisp system (nil wasn't evaluating to nil, but generating an error). It was Harvard Lisp and it ran on a PDP 11 I think. It was written in assembler and had comments about class assignments. Fateman hired me after that class and I worked for him on Franz Lisp. First task was to port Liszt (the compiler) from the VAX to the Motorola 68000. The machine was in a closet and was bigger than a fridge. We got an early Sun workstation and I ported to that, too. 4MB of RAM was the same as the VAXen we had.
I helped found Franz, Inc (with 4 others) in 1984 and have been here ever since. I manage the Lisp group, do release management for Allegro CL, as well as lots of other things.
Kevin
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Eli Naeher -
Kevin Layer -
Marco Antoniotti -
Tord Romstad -
William Halliburton