Anyone use uLisp, Ferret (clojure->C++) and/or esp-lisp that can give a good recommendation on which one is most appropriate and capable on microcontrollers?
RISC-V is basically a MIPs ripoff with healthy architectural inspiration from ARM. There is a linux distro for RISC-V, and there's no reason Python or nodejs etc. can't run on it.
https://riscv.org/2015/01/a-linux-distribution-for-risc-v/
There is a perfectly good reason that NodeJS does not run on RISC-V Linux, which is that NodeJS has not been ported to RISC-V. Projects like Node (or rather the underlying V8 engine) have nontrivial amounts of architecture-specific code.
As always, the obsession with firsts is a fools errand. The IBM 801 and the CDC 6600 are often mentioned as some of the earliest candidates. As so often with technology, it's a function of the context. In the case of RISC, integrated circuits were reaching capabilities that made it worthwhile reconsidering the conventional wisdom.
The 6600 didn't have general purpose registers. It had operand, address and increment registers. The 801 development began in October 1975. The Cray 1 had been in development for 4 years when it was released in 1975.
So I'll go with the Cray as being to OG RISC. But yes, firsts don't really matter except to say it sure wasn't the Berkeley RISC or the Stanford MIPS.
Never seek after "firsts" too avidly. I've seen people claim the rock is the first computer, and an IBM mainframe running VM/CMS is the first personal computer. (You get your own personal CMS instance running on the massive, institutional big iron, see?)
Certainly not, and for interpreters it's a trivial port. JITs require more work. I imagine the biggest challenge for uLisp wasn't RISC-V per se, but the very limited amount of data memory on this particular chip (16 KiB IIRC).
I’m sure a lot of people have their opinions about what the best introductory lisp text is. I won’t add to that list since a google search will give results from reviewers far more eloquent than I am.
What I would like to suggest is that once you basically “get” how the prefix syntax works, and how to process lists, Doug Hoyte’s Let Over Lambda (https://letoverlambda.com/textmode.cl/guest/toc) is a book that can really help you -learn- lisp, to fundamentally understand what makes lisp so powerful compared to other languages. Incredibly perspective-expanding content when I first read it, and largely references many of the “great” lisp texts that helped build the language and its community into what they are today.
Depends on the dialect. I learned lisp via clojure (in before all the "clojure is not a real lisp!" haters come in, please skip that) and first book I used was Clojure for the Brave and True which is a good introduction, fun to read, practical and is available for free to read online. Highly recommended! https://www.braveclojure.com/
regardless of experience, i recommend the little schemer, land of lisp, realm of racket, structure and interpretation of computer programs, and the courses how to code: simple data and how to code: complex data (don't be discouraged by the apparently simple titles as they cover the book how to design programs). if common lisp is really what you want, then i have lisp by winston and horn and common lisp by touretzky and find them quite nice, although i haven't gone through them, just peeking from time to time.
