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Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

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Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#11

Post by lispm »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #8
mordocai wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You act like I have the skill, time, and motivation to build my own system. It is perfectly valid to tell the creators of the systems you use that you'd would prefer them to be more like X.

I know that, but telling everybody who expresses any preference for any system that system X is obviously far superior is really annoying.

Nobody does that. But for certain areas this is true and you should not ignore that.

Grady Booch once at an Eclipse conference:

"For those of you looking at the future of development environments, I encourage you to go back and review some of the Xerox documentation for InterLisp-D."

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#12

Post by lispm »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #10
lispm wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would not know that GNU Emacs has a shitty UI, if people would not tell you. > Take the energy you would use doing that, and put it into making your system that much better. It's not easy, but people are/were doing it: CMUCL, SBCL, McCLIM, Mezzano, the commercial Lisp systems like LispWorks and Allegro CL, ... all of them were/are efforts to bring some of the ideas/features. People were even developing emulators…

I was plenty aware that Emacs had a crummy UI. I just don't think it matters as much as you do. I said as much. >It's not easy, but people are/were doing it... That's actually great. I'm tremendously excited by those systems. I tend to prefer Scheme to CL (less cruft), but I'm excited all the same. Those systems and environments are really cool. Although it is telling that SLIME (which is excellent, by the way) is on…

> I just don't think it matters as much as you do. I said as much.

There is a lot of software out there which needs powerful and/or different IDEs to be written.

> Although it is telling that SLIME (which is excellent, by the way) is one of the most popular ways to write Lisp code.

Guess where the inspiration for some of the SLIME features is coming from... Slime also does many cool new things, but it is still missing a lot of features and usability from the old environments. Part of the reason is GNU Emacs. It is what it is: a programmable editor with zillions of features. But its base, its UI, its interaction model, its integration idea is limiting in many ways. Many of the defining/leading IDEs were very different: Smalltalk 80, Interlisp-D, Symbolics Genera, ... Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic, Hypercard, ... NeXT ..., IntelliJ, ... (and a lot of others)

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#13

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

pjmlp wrote: post #7
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #4

Symbolics made some really cool tech. I just wish everybody would stop complaining about it. Yes, it was amazing. Yes, nothing modern can ever compare, not even Emacs, an environment arising from the same culture. Yes, we who experienced The Glory of the Lispm must eternally genuflect before it, condescending to anybody who didn't. Instead, go look at what Symbolics did (or try: it's quite hard to get the emulator ru…

Bret Victor, The Future of Programming https://vimeo.com/71278954

I'm not sure what your point is... If you're saying I'm resistant to new ideas, perhaps, to some degree. My point was more that if you want to make people receptive to a new idea, slamming them as ignorant fools for not knowing about it already, or condescending to them for not immediately genuflecting before it isn't the best approach.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#14

Post by tachyonbeam »

mordocai wrote: post #3
catpolice wrote: post #2

We have one of these sitting in the lobby at my office, used as a coffee table.

If it is functional(and maybe if not), you can potentially get a decent amount of money from selling that.

Or you could donate it to the computer history museum.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#15

Post by noahm »

I used to work with a number of LISP machine believers at the MIT AI Lab/CSAIL. They all had more modern computers for day to day tasks, but used the lispm for most of their programming. This wasn't that long ago (I left in 2010), and I suspect that those machines will remain in active use for as long as people can keep them running.

They all believed that the loss of the lisp machine was a serious loss to society and were all very much saddened by it. I never used the system enough to come to my own conclusions in that regard, but it was interesting food for thought. As somebody for whom Linux/POSIX is very deeply entrenched, would I even recognize a truly superior system if it was dropped in my lap? More importantly, would society in general? The superior technology is rarely the "winner"

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#17

Post by pjmlp »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #13
pjmlp wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bret Victor, The Future of Programming https://vimeo.com/71278954

I'm not sure what your point is... If you're saying I'm resistant to new ideas, perhaps, to some degree. My point was more that if you want to make people receptive to a new idea, slamming them as ignorant fools for not knowing about it already, or condescending to them for not immediately genuflecting before it isn't the best approach.

The point being that we have seen the future like Bret puts it, and are to certain extent disappointed that the industry keeps doing left turns.

Many C++ users are finally enjoying environments like Clion and incremental compilers, well this was a C++ environment in 1993:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk

Built on top of Lucid Common Lisp infrastructure, as Lucid pivoted their business to C++.

IBM had a similar one, that imported C++ into a database, offering a Smalltalk like development experience for C++, called VisualAge C++ Professional 4.0

http://www.edm2.com/index.php/IBM_VAC_3.0

So yeah, we are grey hair dogs disappointed how things evolve.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#19

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

lispm wrote: post #12
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was plenty aware that Emacs had a crummy UI. I just don't think it matters as much as you do. I said as much. >It's not easy, but people are/were doing it... That's actually great. I'm tremendously excited by those systems. I tend to prefer Scheme to CL (less cruft), but I'm excited all the same. Those systems and environments are really cool. Although it is telling that SLIME (which is excellent, by the way) is on…

> I just don't think it matters as much as you do. I said as much. There is a lot of software out there which needs powerful and/or different IDEs to be written. > Although it is telling that SLIME (which is excellent, by the way) is one of the most popular ways to write Lisp code. Guess where the inspiration for some of the SLIME features is coming from... Slime also does many cool new things, but it is still missin…

I am well aware of where SLIME's inspiration comes from.

As for IDEs, I have a marked distaste for special purpose tools: I want to be able to use on tool to edit all text. And not all IDEs are good: IntelliJ is pretty rubbish (although that's more to do with Java than IJ itself...)

Emacs's limitations tend to line up with the length you can go before you start becoming a special purpose tool, tightly tied to your environment, or the point at which the Unix model doesn't really work, and you're going to have to go build your own little world (like Smalltalk did). They certainly aren't perfect, and could go a bit farther (something work is being done on, last I checked), but it usually works well enough, and it's so extensible, and has had so many extensions written for it, that it can beat just about any other general purpose editor, and sometimes even some of the special purpose ones.

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