Chips

["Scott E. Fahlman" <Fahlman@C.CS.CMU.EDU>]

My thanks to Weinreb for being so flexible on this.

The non-Lucid stock hardware implementations come from DEC, DG, H-P,
Tektronix/Franz, Intermetrics, Gould, Gold Hill...that's all I can think
of for now.  Franz has some people who have at least participated in the
design discussions surrounding Common Lisp, but we've discussed those
problems.  The others (except H-P) don't seem to have any good language
designers, though there are some decent compiler writers out there.  All
of the above started from CMU's sources except for Gold Hill and
probably Franz.

The situation at H-P is a bit odd.  The Common Lisp comes from a
compiler gorup at Fort Collins -- they just started from CMU's sources
and put some competent compiler jocks on the case, as far as I can tell.
No language design talent in that group, that I can see.  But the H-P
Labs people have a number of good Lispers, of whom I would rate Griss
the one with the most experience and perspective.  They've all been
stuck in PSL in the past, but now that H-P is committed to Common Lisp
and has a good one, I think they'll all come over to our point of view
rather quickly once they've wallowed in the language awhile.

Of course, we need to verify that Girss is interested in this, if we
decide that we actually want him.  Same for Rees, I think.

If we have representatives from H-P and Xerox, I think that the other
big companies would be happy -- big companies are represented, and no
one big company has a monopoly.

I don't think Wegman is a good choice.  He is a good implementor, but I
don't think he knows or likes Common Lisp, he has never participated in
meetings or netmail discussions, and I don't think that most of the
factions at IBM would be pleased to have him "representing" them.  My
group at CMU probably has more to do with the future of Lisp within IBM
than Wegman/Yorktown does -- we're doing prototypes that will end up
being polished either by outside vendors or by development groups within
the product divisions.  So my guess is that if we asked the higher-ups
at IBM what they would like from us, Wegman would not be at the top of
the list.

If this ends up being one big committee, we can't afford to have both
Griss and Kessler aboard (unless we add a couple of puppets of our own
to balance things out).  But, depending on what Mathis has to say, I
think we may want to go with two distinct (but friendly) committees, one
to deal with (big) Common Lisp and the other to do a smaller Lisp.  In
that case, we might move Ida, Kessler, and Chailloux, plus some others
to be named later, to the small-Lisp committee.  Then the big-Lisp
committee looks like

    	Gabriel
    	Fahlman
    	Moon
    	Steele
    	Griss
    	Rees
    	Bobrow

Or maybe it's all one committee formally, but we agree among ourselves
to specialize in this way.

I don't know any Brits who care about Common Lisp except purely as
spectators.  Jeff Dalton from Edinburgh was at the conference as the
sole SERC (British NSF) observer, but he's not in a class with the
people listed above.  Fitch would presumably only be interested in the
small-Lisp committee.  All the Brits of any repute are into either
POP-whatever or Prolog.  I'm not sure if we have to pick total unknowns
from various countries, but let's not worry about that until Mathis
tells us we have to.

-- Scott