{"id":981,"date":"2018-01-31T19:18:00","date_gmt":"2018-02-01T03:18:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/?p=981"},"modified":"2025-10-27T09:44:54","modified_gmt":"2025-10-27T16:44:54","slug":"the-lisp-2-project","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2018\/01\/31\/981\/","title":{"rendered":"The LISP 2 Project"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>\u201c<a href=\"https:\/\/ieeexplore.ieee.org\/stamp\/stamp.jsp?tp=&#038;arnumber=8267589\">The LISP 2 Project<\/a>\u201d\u00a0appears in the\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/ieeexplore.ieee.org\/xpl\/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=8267588\">October-December\u00a02017<\/a>\u00a0issue\u00a0of\u00a0<i>IEEE Annals of the History of Computing<\/i> (open access).<\/p>\n<p>I first heard about LISP 2 around 1971, from a\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/doi.ieeecomputersociety.org\/10.1109\/AFIPS.1966.106\">1966 conference paper<\/a>\u00a0included in the reading for a U.C. Berkeley seminar on advanced programming languages. The goal of LISP 2 was to combine the strengths of numerically-oriented languages such as ALGOL and FORTRAN with the symbolic capabilities of LISP. The paper described the language and its implementation at some length, but by 1971 it was pretty clear that LISP 2 had not caught on; instead, the original\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.softwarepreservation.org\/projects\/LISP\/lisp15_family\/#LISP_I_and_LISP_1.5_for_IBM_704,_709,_7090_\">LISP 1.5<\/a>\u00a0had spawned a variety of dialects such as\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.softwarepreservation.org\/projects\/LISP\/interlisp_family\/#BBN_LISP_\">BBN-LISP<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.softwarepreservation.org\/projects\/LISP\/maclisp_family\/#LISP_1.5\/1.6\/MACLISP_for_PDP-6\/10_\">MACLISP<\/a>, and\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.softwarepreservation.org\/projects\/LISP\/stanford_lisp16_family\/#Stanford_LISP_1.6_\">Stanford LISP 1.6<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p>In\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2005\/05\/22\/40\/\">2005<\/a>\u00a0I began a project to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.softwarepreservation.org\/projects\/LISP\/\">archive LISP history<\/a>\u00a0 and kept encountering people who\u2019d been involved with LISP 2, including Paul Abrahams, Jeff Barnett, Lowell Hawkinson, Michael Levin, Clark Weissman, Fred Blair, Warren Teitelman, and Danny Bobrow. By 2010 I had been able to scan\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.softwarepreservation.org\/projects\/LISP\/lisp2_family\/#LISP_2_\">LISP 2 documents and source code<\/a>\u00a0belonging to\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2010\/08\/09\/224\/\">Barnett<\/a>,\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2010\/07\/29\/185\/\">Herbert Stoyan<\/a>, and Clark Weissman. In 2012, after writing about Hawkinson and others in an extended blog post \u201c<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2012\/07\/06\/239\/\">Harold V. McIntosh and his students: Lisp escapes MIT<\/a>,\u201d I decided to try to tell the story of the LISP 2 project, where so many interesting people&#8217;s paths had crossed. My sources included original project documents as well as telephone and email interviews with participants, and several participants were kind enough to provide feedback on multiple drafts. I let the article sit in limbo for five years, but last year after I published\u00a0<a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2017\/07\/14\/968\/\">another<\/a>\u00a0anecdote in the <i>Annals<\/i>, editor <a href=\"http:\/\/www.walden-family.com\/dave\/\">Dave Walden<\/a> encouraged me to submit this one.<\/p>\n<p>On December 28, 2017, as the article was about to go to press, Lowell Hawkinson <a href=\"http:\/\/www.mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2018\/01\/31\/985\/\">died<\/a> suddenly from an accident.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>\u201cThe LISP 2 Project\u201d\u00a0appears in the\u00a0October-December\u00a02017\u00a0issue\u00a0of\u00a0IEEE Annals of the History of Computing (open access). I first heard about LISP 2 around 1971, from a\u00a01966 conference paper\u00a0included in the reading for a U.C. Berkeley seminar on advanced programming languages. The goal of LISP 2 was to combine the strengths of numerically-oriented languages such as ALGOL and &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/archives\/2018\/01\/31\/981\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;The LISP 2 Project&#8221;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,43],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-lisp","category-people"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=981"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1023,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/981\/revisions\/1023"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mcjones.org\/dustydecks\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}