Okay, quick… how many people besides Alan Kay can you name that worked at Xerox PARC? Not very many, eh? Yeah, that’s your loss. It wasn’t all about the guys like Kay that get all the glory, you know….

Warren Teitelman was by far my favorite speaker. Unfortunately my notes got worse as the day drug on, so I simply cannot do justice to him. Yeah, Guy Steele is…you know… Guy Steele. (OMG! The guy who wrote the lambda papers is sitting right behind me! Uh… can I have your autograph?) Fritz Kunze seemed like he’d have been a great guy to go out drinking with. And we’d heard from John McCarthy himself, for crying out loud…. But Teitelman came off as being at once knowledgeable and approachable. He didn’t exude any of the “dysfunctional Lisp-programmer” type attitudes at all. (Not that anyone else did….) And his work at PARC and InterLisp seemed to address things that the Lisp community as a whole seems to have overlooked somewhat in the years since. He’d been right in the middle of some pretty significant moments of computer history, but he still seemed like a pretty humble guy in spite of it.

Teitelman’s early work had to do with debugging Lisp programs while they were still running. When he presented it at a conference in 1968, he was completely flamed by Dijkstra! “We shouldn’t make it easier for programmers to recover from bugs,” Dijkstra said angrily. (He’d been visibly shaking his head through out the talk even before this outburst.) “How many bugs are we going to tolerate?” he demanded. “Seven,” Teitelman shot back. The audience laughed, of course, but Dijkstra never forgave him. From that day forward, Dijkstra referred to him as the Internationally Renowned Computer Entomologist!

In 1970 he worked on the DWIM features of InterLisp. He’d been discussing the feature for weeks, but somehow the implications of it were just not evident to the people he worked with. The idea was that the computer should be able to automatically correct doubled and transposed characters and such like. He rolled out the code for it into production and soon one of his colleages burst into the room and explained breathlessly: “I was talking on the phone and typed the wrong thing… and… and the computer corrected it!” Until you have something out there, the user can’t be sure what it can do, Teitelman said.

So yes… we were all sitting there listening to the guy that pretty much impelented the first spell checker, the first undo system (for a Lisp environment), and the first online help system. There were some court cases between Microsoft and Apple back in the eighties over who had these features first, but Teitelman of course has printouts from long before either one were on the scene! I think he was one of the first people to get a personal computer. (It cost $150,000…. It was something called a “Dorado”.) And when windowing systems were first developed at PARC, he rewired the Lisp programming tools to work with it. He was the first person to use the term “programming enviornment” in print. Incredible.

He concluded by quoting Alan Kay as saying that there aren’t enough languages these days that are late binding self-reflexive. Teitelman said that we’ve got to strive to separate the business process from the code. Your average developer, though, just thinks, “hey… I can easily build this rule in Java!” Don’t!!! This is a concept that people don’t get. If the program is rapidly changing or needs to look at itself, then you really need those late binding self-reflexive features, he said.

After hearing about many of the wonderful developments in the various branches of Lisp, Kent Pitman told us about extremely Machiavellian process of consolidating them under Common Lisp. (Earlier in the day, Fritz Kunze had remarked that this was a “deeply flawed” process and that the mailing archive revealed it to be an “unfolding disaster.”) Pitman had a strikingly cynical slide detailing the strategies of the process organizers: “due process is an illusion,” it said. Other bullet points sounded like something out the Art of War: “turn opponents against each other and let them wear each other down.” “Soliciting volunteers gives critics something to do,” another said, “which dilutes their passion, pacifies them, and makes them feel involved.” In order to isolate the Interlisp guys, dark rumors were spread about various computing nightmares caused by Teitelman’s DWIM features!

While at MIT, Pitman recounted how he’d written the MacLisp manual and naively signed the copyright over to them. “Oh, it’s just a formality,” they said. Not really understanding what copyright was about, he didn’t really think anything of it. He also didn’t see a dime of the money that MIT brought in with the book sales. Pitman wrote up the standard for the Common Lisp project and was very careful to avoid a similar deal for that. The committee would vote on the truth of the various propositions, but he would do all of the writing. No matter what, he was not going to give up the copyright for any reason!

When ANSI Common Lisp was finally finished, Pitman described how people simply could not come to grips with the fact that it was portable. “What platform is this implementation for?” people would ask. After failing to get people to try it out, these same people would end up calling two years later and say, “hey, you know… we tried it and it works. Can we use this?” Talk abut not getting the point!

He had another slide detailing an eerie phone conversation between him and someone from ANSI. Each side engaged in subtle forms of intimidation to try to get their way. After being pushed to turn it over, Pitman said flatly: “Our commitee just voted on the truth of things, not the text. Copyright covers the form of the text, not the truth.” He held his ground and somehow ANSI figured something out. The tragedy is that you can’t get a decent copy of the language standard anymore! And due to all of these maneuverings, it was years before Pitman could get his work published on the web… (Steele’s CLtL books actually beat him, much to his chagrin….) Stallman was not happy with the way Pitman handled copyrights: “I don’t care about useful,” he said, “it has to be free!”

Pitman seemed to have a knack for being a day late and a dollar short. He decided to write a Lisp based web server back in the nineties and after six months of working on it Franz (I think) came out with a free one. As a result of this experience, he has reservations about not only giving up his copyrights, but also with the open source development model in general….

(I apologize for the poor quality of this post. There so much that could be done to get this right, but I have limited time, etc. Hopefully this will suffice to give people a sense of the sessions until something better is released.)

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