“Common Lisp: The Untold Story”, Kent M. Pitman2008-10-20 (Lisp; backlinks)⁠:

…The original design of the Common Lisp language, culminating in the 1984 publication of Common Lisp: The Language was designed not by an ANSI committee but just by a set of interested individuals. I was not a founding member of the group, although my office-mate Guy Steele was. I was vaguely aware that there was some sort of thing afoot, but my specific involvement came slightly later through the same kind of accidental path that had led me to Lisp itself.

3.1 The INTERLISP Threat: Although I was not directly involved in how funding arrived to our group, I was vaguely aware that ARPA was very interested in being able to connect up the programs that resulted from research it had funded at various universities and research labs. Because many of these facilities used different dialects of LISP, ARPA was inclined to try to get them all to use the same dialect. They were leaning toward concluding that INTERLISP was the dialect of choice because it seemed to be deployed at more locations than any other single dialect, but a case was made that many MACLISP variants were really the same dialect and could be collected under a single Common Lisp banner.

In part, this was an issue of simple territorialism. The MIT crowd would have preferred to use a dialect of Lisp more similar to the MACLISP dialect it had been using. But at another level, there was perceived to be a serious technical issue: INTERLISP was perceived as a very complex design, including a very controversial facility called DWIM, that many felt would not be a suitable base for the kind of system programming that MACLISP programmers were used to doing.

In effect, there was a fight to the death between Common Lisp and INTERLISP because ARPA was not willing to fund work in both dialects going forward. And after Common Lisp: The Language was published, Common Lisp succeeded and INTERLISP largely disappeared within a small number of years.

This was unfortunate, of course, because although the nascent Common Lisp community really didn’t desire to destroy all of that investment in INTERLISP, they did simply want to survive. The INTERLISP community was renowned for its user interfaces, for example. Someone once observed to me, however, that the cost of any such battle is that later the individuals who have lost out or otherwise been alienated will eventually need to be repatriated with the community. At that point, some compromise is often needed in order to bring them back.

…5.2 Early Politics and Posturing

Never having been part of a formal standards process, I didn’t quite know what to expect. The very fact that there are a lot of rules was very daunting and confusing. Work was divided up. Committees were assigned to work on various subtasks…the notes include these remarks:

• “due process is an illusion”
• “gerrymandering (Pittsburgh committee)”
• “turn opponents on each other and let them battle each other down and/or demonstrate that you couldn’t have done better because problem was unreasonable in general.”
• “soliciting volunteers gives critics a thing to do, which dilutes their passion and pacifies them by making them feel involved.”
• “start process leaving details blind, then manipulate detail assumption, finally it will be too hard to back out of.”

I don’t know if these things really aptly described what was actually going on. They may have been, in some cases. They are just the personal guesses of someone who was new to the process and struggling to understand it. But I think it’s fair to say that early in the standards process there was a lot of tactical posturing between the committees.

It’s equally reasonable to note that while inter-corporate tactical posturing may have appeared to serve the individual vendors represented, it probably kept the vendors from cooperating in ways that later turned out to be essential. Before the process could move forward, a new understanding would have to be reached where we started to work more together, and less at odds with one another.

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