💾 Archived View for gemini.spam.works › mirrors › textfiles › humor › COMPUTER › lisp.ad.story captured on 2022-07-17 at 02:27:44.
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-06-12)
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I just stumbled across this on your site. Here's a little history about it, in case you are interested. I was the one who had the idea to run this ad, and both wrote the code and typeset the camera-ready copy for the newspaper insertion. (We did this because we felt that there was no way that the editors at the Boston Globe would preserve the correct lisp indentation which made the function more readable.) We wanted to hire some Lisp programmers for a project at DEC (Digital Equipment Corporation back then), and wanted the very fact of their knowing what the name of the company was to be a sort of pre-screening that they did indeed understand a little about Lisp. I constructed this ad so that the function would only reveal the name of the company if you evaluated a call to it with appropriate arguments by extracting and combining pieces of the function definition itself. (The original version also constructed the phone number out of pieces, but that both made the code longer and more obscure, so in the end we decided against it.) While someone could have just typed it in to a suitable PDP-10 installation running a suitable version of MacLisp and run it with the appropriate arguments, since such installations were pretty rare it was much more likely that someone would "evaluate it by hand" to find out the result and if they succeeded, they were the sort of candidate for whom we were looking. One sticking point in getting the ad run was that the corporate lawyers had decreed that the phrase "Digital is an affirmative action employer" had to appear at the bottom of every ad. It took a serious amount of arguing to convince them that this would defeat the purpose of the ad and that we could change it to "We are an affirmative action employer." Typesetting the ad was an effort in itself; Digital had a brand-new typesetting program (this was long before laser printers) called Typeset-10, but the program and the photo typesetter (which was the size of a washing machine and used photographic paper and chemicals) were both finicky. It took a lot longer than I expected (on the order of days) to get an acceptable typeset version to be able to send to the newspaper. We did get some responses to the ad and did interview some candidates, but I don't recollect that we hired anyone from it. One person called, said "It only works interpreted" and hung up. He was referring to the fact that MacLisp could compile functions as well as interpret them, but those compiled functions couldn't manipulate their own definitions the way the ad function did. On a trip to the west coast years later, I saw a photocopy of the ad pinned to a bulletin board. When I asked about it I discovered that copies had circulated among Lisp programmers but they (the ones I talked to at least) didn't know the name of the company for which the ad was run. Yours sincerely, Kalman Reti Ab Initio Software Corporation