RE: what is the problem?

["David Simmons" <address@hidden>]

> -----Original Message-----
> From: owner-ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu
[mailto:owner-ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu]
> On Behalf Of Paul Prescod
> Sent: Tuesday, December 18, 2001 2:04 PM
> To: ll1-discuss@ai.mit.edu
> Subject: Re: what is the problem?
> 
> Christopher Barber wrote:
> >
> > > Modula-3, which was based in part on Lisp.
> >
> > This is news to me.  I thought Modula-3 was an outgrowth of of the
> Pascal
> > family.  It sure doesn't look very Lisplike.
> 
> I would like further explanation of all of this "Python is like Lisp".
> They are both dynamically typed. But so are Perl, Smalltalk and PHP.
> Perhaps Lisp has so influenced the world that everything looks like it
> today. But I always associated a recursive, functional style of
> programming with Lisp whereas most naive Python programmers use more
of
> a procedural style until and unless they learn more about Python's OO
> and functional features.

While McCarthy's Lisp began its life in 1958 as the first functional
language, the term object-oriented and many notions regarding objects
came into Lisp from Smalltalk[69-80] in the late 70's and well into the
80's, not the other way around. Dynamic typing did not come to Smalltalk
from lisp, but was a necessary outgrowth of the object metaphor in the
early Smalltalk interpreter efforts of Ingalls and Kay.

There was a great deal of cross-pollenization.

Simula[66-68] is largely credited with being the first "language" to
embody object-oriented techniques (even though it was not called
object-oriented and Nygaard would have preferred if the descriptive term
"object-oriented" had remained what he calls system-oriented).

Smalltalk is largely credited with developing the concept of what we now
refer to as frameworks. Lisp work on Flavors, CLOS, etc are largely
credited with formalizing notions of meta-object systems. Which Kiczales
went on to incorporate into his field of AOP for Java, ...

...etc

-- Dave S. [www.smallscript.org]

> 
>  Paul Prescod