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Comment by kazinator | Hacker News Reader

I suspect that some people disliked Common Lisp because they worked at institutions where they were able to develop and support their own Lisps, and ANSI CL was foisted on them: "party is over, make it compatible with this honkin' document".

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Also internationally, since CL was a most US effort and Europe/Japan were trying to have independent or international implementations/standards of Lisp.

I wonder what they thought the point of that was.

What the point of international standards with international cooperation is?

Is that the question?

No, the point of having their own Lisp, not using the US standard. Was it a hedge against Lisp becoming hugely successful and helping their computer industries?

> No, the point of having their own Lisp, not using the US standard

Why not develop according to US standards?

> Was it a hedge against Lisp becoming hugely successful and helping their computer industries?

That was the plan? What went wrong?

Pitman covers this in his article: communication back then between Europe and the US was much more difficult. Sending UUCP emails meant at least a 48hr round trip and so the US committee basically couldn't be bothered cooperating with their European counterparts. The Europeans - at least as Pitman imagines it - got upset and did their own thing

In the document he mentions that the eMail latency between EU/Japan and US was 2-3 days because of the number of uucp hops that the mail needed to make. He cites this as a reason why it was impractical to collaborate.

Perhaps those issues persisted and once they were gone the culture was embedded?

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