June 03, 2007

Dr. Dobb's Classic Lisp Articles

Recently, I have noticed that the online version of Dr. Dobb's Journal published an article about multitasking in Common Lisp. What was weird to me was that it reads like a rather old article mentioning techniques that, if I understand correctly, were popular in the 1980's, and especially mentioning a Common Lisp implementation that has not been maintained for probably over a decade. So I asked around in comp.lang.lisp whether anyone had an idea what this was about.

Surprisingly, Jon Erickson, editor of Dr. Dobb's Journal, responded to that question and explained that they routinely get requests for classic articles that are 15-20 years old, and so they indeed regularly republish such articles from the past. Since they are responsible for the archives of a number of publications, such as AI Expert, C/C++ Users Journal, BYTE, and Computer Language, there are probably quite a few nuggets to be rediscovered here.

For example, earlier this year they have already published an article by Paul Graham about graphic objects, originally from 1988. Just yesterday, they have published a very interesting article by Nick Bourbaki about dynamic programming. Nick Bourbaki is actually Richard Gabriel's pseudonym that he used in some of his writings in the early 1990's - see Worse Is Better and also Nickieben Bourbaki.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

I remember a LISP issue of Byte magazine - probably around 1975 or 1977. I think I still have it somewhere. It's what got me initially interested in it.