1 The Muddle programming languge is a member of the Lisp family. It
2 started at MIT's Project MAC.
4 It's hard to pin down exactly when development began. The first
5 documented reference to it seems to be in the Project MAC Progress
6 Report VIII at <http://www.dtic.mil/docs/citations/AD0735148> which
7 covered the period of July 1970 to July 1971 although some have
8 claimed as early as 1969 but provide no sources.
10 The original MIT-DMS (along with other historically important systems
11 like AI, MC, anmd ML) were KA- and KL-10 based PDP-10 systems running
12 the Incompatible Timesharing System (ITS.) When they were retired in
13 1982, four KS-10 systems ("DECSYSTEM-2020") were put in their place in
14 order to keep ITS running. These were retired from service around 1995.
16 This mudman.git repository is named after the MUDMAN directory on
17 MIT-DMS, which contained documentation about Muddle.
19 Many people have worked on Muddle in one aspect or other over the
20 years. These include (in alphabetical order by first name): Brian
21 Berkowitz, Bruce Daniels, Carl Hewitt, Chris Reeve, Dave Lebling,
22 David Cressey, Gerald Sussman, Greg Pfister, Jim Michener, Joel Berez,
23 Marc Blank, Michael Broos, Neal Ryan, Roger Banks, Stu Galley, Sue
24 Pitkin, Tak To, Tim Anderson and others that will probably never be
27 This represents an effort to preseve information about the Muddle
28 programming language by migrating the documentation from aging books
29 into modern formats. Despite efforts to preserve the documentation as
30 much as possible one change is made: Changing MDL references back to
33 In talking to people that originally worked on the language it was
36 The Muddle name was in the MIT AI Lab's tradition of naming Lisp
37 dialects with somewhat sarcastic names. Reference other names from
38 there like Planner, Scheme (which was actually named Schemer but ITS
39 limited file names to a maximum of 6 characters), Conniver, etc. and
40 it shows a pattern. Chris Reeve says that the Muddle name came from
41 the nickname of the Project MAC Dynamic Modeling Group from either
42 Gerald Sussman and/or Carl Hewitt, which was "Dynamic Muddlers."
44 The MDL name was actually invented by an administrator at the project
45 that feared losing DARPA funding over a funny name. No one actually
46 called it "MDL" except in documents DARPA might see and even then they
47 wrote "MDL" but said "Muddle." The name "MIT Design Language" is,
48 consequently, a backronym.
50 The Muddle name itself eventually got a backronym of "MAC's User
51 Defined Data and Language Evaluator", with "MAC" representing "Project
54 Changing the MDL references back to Muddle is believed to be in
55 support of the original naming decision of those that made the
56 language, especially since there are no longer any DARPA funding
59 The documents in this repository, including this one, are made
60 following Pandoc's extended version of Markdown:
63 Converting them to other formats requires that Pandoc or some other
64 program that can understand this version of Markdown be installed on
69 This document by Jason Self is licensed under the Creative Commons
70 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License and all future
71 versions: <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/>.