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 MIT-DM (along with other historically important systems like AI, MC,
11 and ML) were a group of PDP-10 computers running the Incompatible
12 Timesharing System (ITS.) This mudman.git repository is named after
13 the MUDMAN directory on DM, which contained documentation about
16 Many people have worked on Muddle in one aspect or other over the
17 years. These include (in alphabetical order by first name): Brian
18 Berkowitz, Bruce Daniels, Carl Hewitt, Chris Reeve, Dave Lebling,
19 David Cressey, Gerald Sussman, Greg Pfister, Jim Michener, Joel Berez,
20 Marc Blank, Michael Broos, Neal Ryan, Roger Banks, Stu Galley, Sue
21 Pitkin, Tak To, Tim Anderson and others that will probably never be
24 This represents an effort to preseve information about the Muddle
25 programming language by migrating the documentation from aging books
26 into modern formats. Despite efforts to preserve the documentation as
27 much as possible one change is made: Changing MDL references back to
30 In talking to people that originally worked on the language it was
33 The Muddle name was in the MIT AI Lab's tradition of naming Lisp
34 dialects with somewhat sarcastic names. Reference other names from
35 there like Planner, Scheme (which was actually named Schemer but ITS
36 limited file names to a maximum of 6 characters), Conniver, etc. and
37 it shows a pattern. Chris Reeve says that the Muddle name came from
38 the nickname of the Project MAC Dynamic Modeling Group from either
39 Gerald Sussman and/or Carl Hewitt, which was "Dynamic Muddlers."
41 The MDL name was actually invented by an administrator at the project
42 that feared losing DARPA funding over a funny name. No one actually
43 called it "MDL" except in documents DARPA might see and even then they
44 wrote "MDL" but said "Muddle." The name "MIT Design Language" is,
45 consequently, a backronym.
47 The Muddle name itself eventually got a backronym of "MAC's User
48 Defined Data and Language Evaluator", with "MAC" representing "Project
51 Changing the MDL references back to Muddle is believed to be in
52 support of the original naming decision of those that made the
53 language, especially since there are no longer any DARPA funding
56 The documents in this repository, including this one, are made
57 following Pandoc's extended version of Markdown:
60 Converting them to other formats requires that Pandoc or some other
61 program that can understand this version of Markdown be installed on
66 This document by Jason Self is licensed under the Creative Commons
67 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License and all future
68 versions: <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/>.