History of T

http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html

by revorad • 18 years ago

76 27 18 years ago

paulgraham.com

patrickg-zill• 18 years ago

Is anyone using T currently? Or anything directly T-derived?

revorad2• 18 years ago

It would also be interesting to compare it with Arc.

carterschonwald• 18 years ago

comparison: T is Scheme with an optimizing compiler that was the state of the art that also served as a backend for a few other languages

Arc is a few syntactic rewrites layered on top of dr scheme with some relatively unique libraries that could easily be ported back to dr scheme.

gills• 18 years ago

I wonder if PG will incorporate the dataflow portions of his dissertation in a future Arc compiler?

zitterbewegung• 18 years ago

Some schemers on #scheme on irc.freenode.net are toying with it I believe.

raganwald2• 18 years ago

"I object to doing things that computers can do." --Olin Shivers

"I start getting the shakes real bad around 10am, right before my advisor meetings. A 10 oz. Jack 'n Zac helps me get through the meetings without one of my students winding up with his severed head in a bowling-ball bag. They look at me funny; they think I twitch a lot. I'm not twitching. I'm controlling my impulse to snag my 9mm Sig-Sauer out from my day-pack and make a few strong points about the quality of undergraduate education in Amerika." --Olin Shivers, from the scsh manual "acknowledgements"

lsb• 18 years ago

If I thought anyone cared, if I thought anyone would even be reading this, I'd probably make an effort to keep up appearances until the last possible moment. But no one does, and no one will. So I can pretty much say exactly what I think.

Oh, yes, the acknowledgements. I think not. I did it. I did it all, by myself.

The acknowledgements of the scsh manual is one of the most entertaining pieces of a technical manual I've read.

sspencer• 18 years ago

Any links anywhere to some sample applications or code snippets written in T?

Sounds like an interesting variant of Lisp.

revorad2• 18 years ago

You can get the last versions of T here - http://mumble.net/~jar/tproject/

Haven't checked if there's any sample code.

sigstoat• 18 years ago

it looks like there is more recent stuff available at: http://people.csail.mit.edu/riastradh/

also of interest: http://web.archive.org/web/20070205145001/mumble.net/~campbe...

msluyter• 18 years ago

This article is both inspiring and depressing. Depressing because it reminds me of how little I truly know about computing. :(

jlouis• 18 years ago

Maybe a brave professor will set down a Team of 6-7 skilled graduates and hack out a language of the future again. It is about time it happens. When I see around the world of academia I am not seeing that happen that much though as good old software engineering on creating a good compiler will not produce any articles.

It is sad though.

ken• 18 years ago

It's funny to hear how Lisp implementors of the day thought Scheme was too dynamic to be implemented efficiently.

Greenspun's experience with Scheme performance, including a startling confession from Sussman (as remembered by Greenspun, anyway): http://philip.greenspun.com/bboard/q-and-a-fetch-msg?msg_id=...

jmatt2• 18 years ago

This essay reminds me of the HOPL papers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HOPL).

As a younger hacker it provides insight to what was going on in the LISP and Scheme communities in the 80s. (Thanks PG!)

leoc• 18 years ago

Johnathan Rees' T project page has a list of errata to Shivers' article.

http://mumble.net/~jar/tproject/

History of T

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