I recently ran across a fascinating history of T, a Scheme-like Lisp dialect that preceded Common Lisp, over at Paul Graham’s blog. It was written by Olin Shivers who is well-known in the Scheme community and is the founding author of scsh, a Unix shell that runs on Scheme 48.
If you’ve been reading Irreal for a while you know that I enjoy reading stories about the founding of our profession. The History of T begins in the early 1980s. Sussman and Steele had published the Lambda Papers, Steele had written his master’s thesis on the Rabbit Compiler but MIT Scheme had not yet been written. Lexical scope was considered an interesting theoretical construct but completely impractical. Shivers was a junior at Yale.
What really impressed me about this history is how most of the principals were undergraduate/graduate students. Earning a Ph.D. is all about research, of course, but here we see undergraduates and master’s students doing cutting edge research and building state-of-the-art systems.
This is really an interesting and engaging story and well worth a few minutes of your time. Most of it takes place only 30 years ago. Although that may seem like a long time to many, it’s amazing how far our field has progressed since then.