That's right, it's just a throw-away quip, but if you want the deep nuanced story and inside history of Common Lisp and comparison with Scheme, Kent Pitman is the one to read:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kent_Pitman

Index of Kent Pitman's Papers:

https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/

Scheme or Lisp? Kent M Pitman explains the deep philosophical differences.

https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/6fa5r/scheme_o...

Kent Pitman on Scheme or Lisp?:

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/TEk4O4-zsA8/m/H...

Common Lisp: The Untold Story:

https://www.nhplace.com/kent/Papers/cl-untold-story.html

Why Wolfram Mathematica did not use Lisp (2002) (ymeme.com):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9797936

https://web.archive.org/web/20110122140154/http://www.ymeme....

Kent Pitman's essay on why lisp doesn't have copying of lists.

https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/MmtQreo3PCM

Parenthetically Speaking with Kent Pitman: The Best Intentions: EQUAL Rights -- And Wrongs -- In Lisp:

https://www.nhplace.com/kent/PS/EQUAL.html

Kent M. Pitman Answers On Lisp And Much More:

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/01/11/03/1726251/kent-...

Kent M. Pitman's Second Wind:

https://developers.slashdot.org/story/01/11/13/0420226/kent-...

Tutorial on Good Lisp Programming Style: Peter Norvig, Sun Microsystems Labs Inc; Kent Pitman, Harlequin Inc.:

https://www.cs.umd.edu/~nau/cmsc421/norvig-lisp-style.pdf

Notes from the ANSI standardisation process:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/72414053/notes-from-the-...

Issue CLOS-CONDITIONS Writeup:

https://www.lispworks.com/documentation/lw50/CLHS/Issues/iss...

On Pitman's “Special forms in Lisp” (2011) (kazimirmajorinc.com):

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29947329

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29954993

DonHopkins on Jan 16, 2022 | parent | next [–]

Kent Pitman also wrote the "Revised Maclisp Manual (Saturday Evening Edition)" aka the "Pitmanual".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_A._Moon

http://www.nhplace.com/kent/publications.html

>In 1983, I finished the multi-year task of writing The Revised Maclisp Manual (Saturday Evening Edition), sometimes known as The Pitmanual, and published it as a Technical Report at MIT's Lab for Computer Science. In 2007, I finished dusting that document off and published it to the web as the Sunday Morning Edition.

http://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/

Not to be confused with David Moon who wrote the "MacLISP Reference Manual" aka the "Moonual", and who co-authored the "Lisp Machine Manual" with Richard Stallman and Daniel Weinreb, which had big bold lettering that ran around the spine and back of the cover, so it was known as the "LISP CHINE NUAL" (reading only letters on the front).

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15185827

https://hanshuebner.github.io/lmman/title.xml

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15186998

DonHopkins on Sept 6, 2017 | next [–]

The cover of the Lisp Machine Manual had the title printed in all caps diagonally wrapped around the spine, so on the front you could only read "LISP CHINE NUAL". So the title was phonetically pronounced: "Lisp Sheen Nual".

My friend Nick made a run of custom silkscreened orange LISP CHINE NUAL t-shirts (most places won't print around the side like that).

https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=74206161754&l=54ec4e...

I was wearing mine in Amsterdam at Dappermarkt on Queen's Day (when everyone's supposed to wear orange, so I didn't stand out), and some random hacker (who turned out to be a university grad student) came up to me at random and said he recognized my t-shirt!

http://www.textfiles.com/hacking/hakdic.txt

CHINE NUAL (sheen'yu-:l) noun.

The reference manual for the Lisp Machine, a computer designed at MIT especially for running the LISP language. It is called this because the title, LISP MACHINE MANUAL, appears in big block letters -- wrapped around the cover in such a way that you have to open the cover out flat to see the whole thing. If you look at just the front cover, you see only part of the title, and it reads "LISP CHINE NUAL"

toomanybeersies on Sept 7, 2017 | parent | next [–]

Link to an image of the manual, for the lazy:

https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/101/264672507_307376d26c_z.jpg

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27332340

DonHopkins on May 30, 2021 | prev | next [–]

Here's the source code for Kent Pitman's "DOCTOR" in MACLISP, which was of course inspired by ELIZA. (Joseph Weizenbaum taught Kent Pitman LISP!)

https://github.com/PDP-10/its/blob/master/src/games/doc.102

And here's what happened with he (manually by typing) hooked it up with Kenneth Colby's "PARRY" (the paranoid patient):

https://www.maclisp.info/pitmanual/funnies.html

>Parrying Programs

>I didn't write the original ELIZA program, although my Lisp class was taught by Joseph Weizenbaum, who did. I later wrote a very elaborate program of similar kind, which I just called DOCTOR, in order to play with some of the ideas.

>At some point, I noticed there was a program at Stanford called PARRY (the paranoid patient), by Kenneth Colby. I understand from Wikipedia's PARRY entry that Weizenbaum's ELIZA and PARRY were connected at one point, although I never saw that. I never linked PARRY with my DOCTOR directly, but I did once do it indirectly through a manual typist. Part of my record of this exchange was garbled, but this is a partial transcript, picking up in the middle. Mostly it just shows PARRY was a better patient than my DOCTOR program was a doctor.

>I have done light editing to remove the typos we made (rubbed out characters were echoed back in square brackets).

>Also, I couldn't find documentation to confirm this, but my belief has always been that the numeric values after each line are PARRY's level of Shame (SH), Anger (AN), Fear (FR), Disgust (DS), Insecurity (IN), and Joy (J).—KMP

[...]

;;; Notes about CLI interrupts and eval-in-other-lisp:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20267415

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38061207

>Here's Kent Pittman's :TEACH;LISP from ITS, which is a MACLISP program that teaches you how to program in MACLISP. (That's "Man And Computer Lisp" from "Project MAC", not "Macintosh Lisp".)