And you're right: we were not out to win over the Lisp programmers; we were after the C++ programmers. We managed to drag a lot of them about halfway to Lisp. Aren't you happy?

Last night I went to SeaJUG to hear Joe Bowbeer talk about Concurrency Utilities in Practice. This talk is the second of a pair covering the JSR-ized (166) version of Doug Lea's excellent concurrency libraries for Java. Concurrent Programming in Java is an excellent book on concurrent programming in general.

During the talk, I was reminded (again) of Java's great intellectual debt to Lisp. The Future construct which is part of util.concurrent and now java.util.concurrent was originally invented in Multilisp around 1985. It turns out that Juan Loiaza who did some of the work with Halstead was a senior living in the same dorm as me.

This kind of thing is a problem because people don't know where good ideas came from, and so they have no idea of where to look for good ideas when they run into problems that they don't know how to solve.