Nano-Blog : July 27, 2025

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Nano-Blog for the week of July 27, 2025.

§ July 28, 2025

Two-Bit History Looks at Lisp

Software developer and writer Sinclair Target penned a very nice essay attempting to answer the question "Why do some programmers really like Lisp?"

Jumping between that famous XKCD comic about Lisp to a bit of history about John McCarthy to Terry Winograd, Target eventually forms a three pronged thesis. I won't give away the ending. It's probably fine to just say it's a merry jaunt through computer programming language design history and leave it at that. Worth the time it takes to read for the community interested in such things.

The text is available at Two-Bit History under the title How Lisp Became God's Own Programming Language.

#lisp #Sinclair-Target
Bret Victor's List of Notable Papers

Public intellectual Bret Victor should be no stranger to readers of this blog. He is a technologist with "Big Ideas." If you're looking for the "next big thing", it's probably mentioned as a reference in one of his presentations.

The "/refs" section of his web site (worrydream.com) is a delightful list of notable papers about technology and how we think about technology. In curating this list, he's acted as a bit of a librarian and opinionated guide to our conception of human technological progress. These aren't listicles about "Ten Surprising Features of 10x Python Engineers (You'll Never Believe Number Seven)," but ground-breaking papers like Christopher Alexander's A City Is Not A Tree or Alan Kay's A Personal Computer for Children of All Ages. If you have some spare time, grab a paper at random from this list... each of these papers is well worth the time it takes to read.

You can find the list on Bret's site at worrydream.com/refs.

#Bret-Victor #papers