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, Edward Black, Gerald Sussman, Greg Pfister, Jack
20 Haverty, Jim Michener, Joel Berez, Marc Blank, Michael Broos, Neal
21 Ryan, Roger Banks, Safwan Bengelloun, Stu Galley, Sue Pitkin, Tak To,
22 Tim Anderson and others that will probably never be
25 This represents an effort to preseve information about the Muddle
26 programming language by migrating the documentation from aging books
27 into modern formats. Despite efforts to preserve the documentation as
28 much as possible one change is made: Changing MDL references back to
31 In talking to people that originally worked on the language it was
34 The Muddle name was in the MIT AI Lab's tradition of naming Lisp
35 dialects with somewhat sarcastic names. Reference other names from
36 there like Planner, Scheme (which was actually named Schemer but ITS
37 limited file names to a maximum of 6 characters), Conniver, etc. and
38 it shows a pattern. Chris Reeve says that the Muddle name came from
39 the nickname of the Project MAC Dynamic Modeling Group from either
40 Gerald Sussman and/or Carl Hewitt, which was "Dynamic Muddlers."
42 The MDL name was actually invented by an administrator at the project
43 that feared losing DARPA funding over a funny name. No one actually
44 called it "MDL" except in documents DARPA might see and even then they
45 wrote "MDL" but said "Muddle." The name "MIT Design Language" is,
46 consequently, a backronym.
48 The Muddle name itself eventually got a backronym of "MAC's User
49 Defined Data and Language Evaluator", with "MAC" representing "Project
52 Changing the MDL references back to Muddle is believed to be in
53 support of the original naming decision of those that made the
54 language, especially since there are no longer any DARPA funding
57 The documents in this repository, including this one, are made
58 following Pandoc's extended version of Markdown:
61 Converting them to other formats requires that Pandoc or some other
62 program that can understand this version of Markdown be installed on
67 This document by Jason Self is licensed under the Creative Commons
68 Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International Public License and all future
69 versions: <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/>.