Paolo AmorosoThis article by @masinter Larry Masinter and Bill VanMelle, published in December of 1981, reported on the state of Common Lisp from the angle of the Interlisp community. It's interesting as it covers the early stage of standardization, when the specification and design work was under way but no implementations were available yet.
The Medley Interlisp ProjectThe ? command of the Interlisp Exec (REPL) prints a list of available commands with brief explanations of what they do. Most are Interlisp-D commands, some modern Medley additions.
To kick the tires of ECL I'm running my McCLIM program ILsee, a tool for viewing Interlisp code files I developed with SBCL. This is made possible by Common Lisp, a deadstable language with multiple high-quality implementations.
Although not a requirement Interlisp source file names are usually all uppercase with no extension such as EDIT or FILEIO. Sometimes Medley Common Lisp sources are all lowercase with .lisp extension like env.lisp or vector.lisp.
Simon Brooke@interlisp DWIM -- 'Do What I Mean' -- was at once wonderful and terrifying. By the time I used it it had flags to get it to confirm with you that yes, this was indeed what you meant to do before blithely going ahead and doing it...
Most of the time it guessed write. But SOMETIMES...
I've often wondered why no one (to my knowledge) has ever tried to write a DWIM for the UN*X command line.
Warren Teitelman developed the Programmer's Assistant, i.e. the expression and command history and replay, undo, and editing facility of the Interlisp Exec (REPL), while working on the predecessor of Interlisp, BBN Lisp. This 1972 paper provided an overview of the early facility.
https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/1480083.1480119
Driving a text editor as part of a user interface, as this post describes, reminds me of a similar tradition in Lisp. Think of Emacs and other Lisp Machine editors. Such design patterns were also common on Interlisp-D with the TEdit editor which could also be used as a GUI component.
Ryan Burnside published the code of his turtle graphics library in Interlisp, which he used to make the generative art of this screenshot.
@kentpitman @screwlisp The 'for...in', 'for...from...to', 'when <predicate expression> return <expression>' parts of this closely resemble #Interlisp's CLISP and there was presumably some cross-fertilisation between the projects?
To my puritanical aesthetic all this looks very un-Lisp-like, and I somewhat turn up my nose; but some people clearly find it helpful.
https://softwarepreservation.computerhistory.org/LISP/interlisp/Teitelman-3IJCAI.pdf
A quotation from a report on BBN Lisp, the predecessor of Interlisp, hints it was published in 1966: "[...] magnetic core memory (the only large scale random-access memory available) is very expensive relative to serial memory devices such as magnetic drums or discs."