A pattern of language evolution

Richard P. Gabriel, Guy L. Steele
2008 Celebrating the 50th Anniversary of Lisp on - LISP50  
Preface In 1992 when we completed our first draft of the History of Programming Languages II paper, The Evolution of Lisp [1], it included sections on a theory or model of how complex language families like Lisp grew and evolved, and in particular, how and when diversity would bloom and consolidation would prune. The historian who worked with all the HOPL II authors, Michael S. Mahoney, did not believe our theory was substantiated properly, so he recommended removing the material and sticking
more » ... th the narrative of Lisp's evolution. We stopped working on those sections, but they remained in the original text sources but removed with conditionals. Although the uncut version of the paper is published online [2], the theory was never officially published. This short paper is the publication of that material.
doi:10.1145/1529966.1529967 fatcat:wkkewi3rmvew5ha7zgyfdx72b4