SOso-cal-schemer·Apr 13, 2026
Great examples, those.
Here's another:
https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp/blob/main/sectorlisp.S
Given this, you might write less asm.
In Now is the best time to write code by handjart
sectorlisp
C2020–2026
jart / sectorlisp
sectorlisp
Bootstrapping LISP in a Boot Sector
22Distinct people
28Mentions
2Explicit recommenders
1.5KGitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
Bootstrapping LISP in a Boot Sector
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use was verified in the last source check.
What people are saying
I love MBR hacking, it's so fun to see. Cf. sector lisp [1] and OSle [2]. [1]: https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp [2]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43866585
D4ckard used a recommendation phrase. 2 indexed comments match. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 8–Nov 15 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/15/2026, 6:36:16 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year28 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2020-10-27 01:44:31 UTC to 2026-04-13 21:54:34 UTC.
* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2020 | 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 2 | 2 |
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 9 | 0 | 9 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 6 | 1 | 5 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 1 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 4 | 1 | 3 |
| 2026 (partial) | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 3 | 0 | 3 |
What Hacker News says
3 sourcesBoot sector lisp?
https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp
In femtolisp: A lightweight, robust, scheme-like Lisp implementationThis is a nice and unexpected release, thanks for writing it. Getting a RPG endorsement is great. I just finished reading his foreword and skimming the table of contents and bibliography from the preview. I'd have liked to see a sample of a middle chapter to really see how technical and deep it gets (e.g. Land of Lisp gives its chapter 8 as a sample which I think is very representative for that book). But I plan to get this book regardless -- just not right now.
The back blurb hints that expert systems might be mentioned, but how much? No one ever seems to go much into their implementation or usage.[0] It also mentions writing some JS, which I guess is part of chapter 5, I wonder if that was a publisher request. (My favorite take on that subject in recent years is https://github.com/jart/sectorlisp)
Would it be fair to say this is mainly
Read the rest
a history told through the lens of AI and PL research?
Amusingly I think part of me is already setting myself up for some disappointment -- it seems too short with too few references! But it's good to have a Lisp history book like this looks to be and I'm sure I'll learn things from it, and the promise of more RPG writings inside is enticing. Besides, any complete telling would take multiple books. (There's so much of historical interest locked up in proprietary applications and companies with their own histories, and so many papers published, there's also so much that can be dug through in the standardization mailing list (and other lists, like emacs) archives[1], the SAIL archives[2], the Xerox PARC archives[3], the CMU archives[4], and the many undigitized things sitting in boxes at the computer history museum...[5])
[0] Norvig's PAIP gives a small taste, one of the files: https://github.com/norvig/paip-lisp/blob/main/lisp/mycin-r.l... And a book about a particular system, MYCIN: https://www.shortliffe.net/Buchanan-Shortliffe-1984/MYCIN%20... And a short video: https://youtube.com/watch?v=a65uwr_O7mM
[1] http://ml.cddddr.org/ and http://cl-su-ai.lisp.se/
[2] https://www.saildart.org/
[3] The url I had before is down... I made a local copy but https://archive.org/details/2014.01.ftp.parc.xerox.com might be the same content
[4] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/afs/cs.cmu.edu/project/ai-repository/...
[5] Even in the earliest Lisp reports like https://www.researchgate.net/publication/42766480_Artificial... there are interesting things mentioned like a two-move checkmate program or "Other projects on which work continues include the Advice Taker, visual pattern recognition, and an artificial hand." Multiple times I've tried to track down those sorts of things mentioned in really old papers only to hit dead-ends on so many of them. Sometimes things were embellished, or were abandoned, or were just lost to time, and sometimes there's an undigitized box at the museum that might contain printouts etc. (There might be MYCIN source code, even.)