I just had lunch with George, and we spoke about various maxima and lisp
issues.
In particular, we discussed:
What has been learned in the last 20 years that can be applied to making
maxima a better, more maintainable tool.
George believes that one of the reasons for mathematica's success is
that large
parts of mathematica are written in mathematica.
How programming styles have changed over the last 20 years.
For example GUI generators that were successful in the late 80's
and early 90's generated large quantities of code, but the current
trend to GUI development is to use callouts and a database
to define the GUI somehow, which is more lisplike.
Dan Stanger