Comment by kragen
1 day ago
Currently the title says "Web-based IBM 1620 emulator and IPL-V from 1963" until HN's title policy inevitably vandalizes it to remove the informative part. But, to give further context on IPL-V, IPL (I think actually IPL-IV) was key to some early AI research, but the main reason it's interesting in 02026 is that it's what inspired Lisp. It's a terrible programming language by today's standards, and the manual is a horrible slog, but you can see the seed of almost every programming language popular today in it.
Reading through a CACM publication, I'm struck by how they call the whole system the "IPL Computer" -- they were specifying a bytecode VM. It looks like early IPLs dated to the 1950s, so they'll get a pass for the actual language...
I didn't realize IPL lasted that long since indeed it's mentioned by mccarthy as a strong influence.. somehow I always assumed it meant pre-1959.
btw, for people who were there at the time, even considering the bare metal assembly nature of IPL, were people already approaching solutions similarly to lispers in the 60s ? aka dynamic generic lists, tree traversals etc