Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum • Hacker News Board

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#51

Post by qwertyuiop924 » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 12:37 AM UTC

lispm wrote: post #45

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the information. It is legitimately interesting. But while it is a neat idea, the difference seems to be largely inside-baseball. Sure, we're dealing with text, but we can still inspect our code quite well, and we can do much of the same sort of stuff. In any case, I don't really want my editor editing sexps. The moment my editor is working with sexps rather than characters, it's no longer a general-purpos…

It feels very different. Imagine the editor and the runtime work on the same data: EDIT data EVAL In GNU Emacs it looks like this: Emacs EDIT -> text -> Emacs SAVE FILE SBCL LOAD FILE -> SBCL READ -> SBCL EXECUTE or Emacs EDIT -> text -> Emacs TRANSFER to SBCL -> SBCL READ > SBCL EXECUTE -> SBCL generate TEXT -> SBCL TRANSFER to Emacs -> Emacs DISPLAY -> text With presentations it looks for the user that the Emacs si…

I am aware of that indirection, but it never really shows up, or gets in my way. Maybe I'm missing something.

Could you link me some information about S-Edit? I can't find anything on it, and it might help me understand what you mean.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#52

Post by qwertyuiop924 » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 12:37 AM UTC

lispm wrote: post #46

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are working on new Lisp-based systems (which is awesome!) But Symbolics systems will never come back, and it's unlikely that any of these systems will gain traction in a world where Unix dominates. ...Unless, of course, one of the popular embedded or mobile systems companies (Apple, etc.) Suddenly rewrote everything in lisp, and forced all 3rd-party devs to do the same, creating a massive market only reachable…

Apple did that once upon a time, while Steve Jobs wasn't there. In a 'perfect' world you would use an iPhone which runs a Lisp OS. Before the iPhone and before the Newton MessagePad, Apple had an ARM-based Newton-like machine with really really tiny hardware (roughly 20 Mhz ARM CPU, around 1 MB RAM, a few MB ROM) running a real Lisp OS and had it almost made a product. Almost...

That would have been pretty cool.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#53

Post by kjhughes » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 12:45 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #33

noahm wrote: post #15

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 an…

It was by far the most productive programming environment I have ever used. The level of integration of the editor, debugger, IO system, and interpreted and compiled code is unparalleled. Interestingly it philosophically descended from MACLISP development on a machine (PDP-10) that was designed with Lisp in mind and that had an O/S (ITS) whose "shell" was a debugger, so you could also do pretty tightly coupled develo…

"Programming by successive approximation" is hardly scorn worthy in my mind.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#54

Post by DigitalJack » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 1:02 AM UTC

I get the nostalgia for these machines. I have great nostalgia for my old computers, the ones I learned on.

I have watched some videos of open genera. I don't see the appeal. It was neat for the time, but I have a hard time seeing what problems it solves for today. I'm not trolling, if someone can give some specifics, I'd be interested to read them.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#55

Post by lispm » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 1:18 AM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #51

lispm wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels very different. Imagine the editor and the runtime work on the same data: EDIT data EVAL In GNU Emacs it looks like this: Emacs EDIT -> text -> Emacs SAVE FILE SBCL LOAD FILE -> SBCL READ -> SBCL EXECUTE or Emacs EDIT -> text -> Emacs TRANSFER to SBCL -> SBCL READ > SBCL EXECUTE -> SBCL generate TEXT -> SBCL TRANSFER to Emacs -> Emacs DISPLAY -> text With presentations it looks for the user that the Emacs si…

I am aware of that indirection, but it never really shows up, or gets in my way. Maybe I'm missing something. Could you link me some information about S-Edit? I can't find anything on it, and it might help me understand what you mean.

http://www.textfiles.com/bitsavers/pdf/xerox/interlisp/31012...

Chapter 16 describes DEdit, the display oriented structure editor of Interlisp-D.

ALso see for general philosophy of interactive Lisp systems this article from 1978 (!!!):

http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c/b...

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#56

Post by duncan_bayne » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 1:32 AM UTC

lispm wrote: post #46

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are working on new Lisp-based systems (which is awesome!) But Symbolics systems will never come back, and it's unlikely that any of these systems will gain traction in a world where Unix dominates. ...Unless, of course, one of the popular embedded or mobile systems companies (Apple, etc.) Suddenly rewrote everything in lisp, and forced all 3rd-party devs to do the same, creating a massive market only reachable…

Apple did that once upon a time, while Steve Jobs wasn't there. In a 'perfect' world you would use an iPhone which runs a Lisp OS. Before the iPhone and before the Newton MessagePad, Apple had an ARM-based Newton-like machine with really really tiny hardware (roughly 20 Mhz ARM CPU, around 1 MB RAM, a few MB ROM) running a real Lisp OS and had it almost made a product. Almost...

Jobs' Apple would never allow such a product. A user programmable machine for which people could release software without paying Apple a cut? Zero chance of that getting off the ground, for the same reason that Hypercard had to die.

http://www.loper-os.org/?p=568

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#57

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 1:43 AM UTC

gumby wrote: post #34

protomyth wrote: post #18

Who actually owns the Symbolics IP these days? I still wonder if it would be possible to put a 3600 on a chip.

I heard rumor that JCMA had bought it. I'll ask him.

[deleted]

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#58

Post by mycall » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 1:47 AM UTC

lispm wrote: post #46

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

People are working on new Lisp-based systems (which is awesome!) But Symbolics systems will never come back, and it's unlikely that any of these systems will gain traction in a world where Unix dominates. ...Unless, of course, one of the popular embedded or mobile systems companies (Apple, etc.) Suddenly rewrote everything in lisp, and forced all 3rd-party devs to do the same, creating a massive market only reachable…

Apple did that once upon a time, while Steve Jobs wasn't there. In a 'perfect' world you would use an iPhone which runs a Lisp OS. Before the iPhone and before the Newton MessagePad, Apple had an ARM-based Newton-like machine with really really tiny hardware (roughly 20 Mhz ARM CPU, around 1 MB RAM, a few MB ROM) running a real Lisp OS and had it almost made a product. Almost...

What was it called?

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#59

Post by lispm » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 1:58 AM UTC

mycall wrote: post #58

lispm wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Apple did that once upon a time, while Steve Jobs wasn't there. In a 'perfect' world you would use an iPhone which runs a Lisp OS. Before the iPhone and before the Newton MessagePad, Apple had an ARM-based Newton-like machine with really really tiny hardware (roughly 20 Mhz ARM CPU, around 1 MB RAM, a few MB ROM) running a real Lisp OS and had it almost made a product. Almost...

What was it called?

The second Lisp OS at Apple was called Bauhaus.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#60

Post by PeCaN » Fri, Oct 14, 2016, 2:03 AM UTC

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #21

pjmlp wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 sim…

Fair enough. And it is irritating, I won't lie. We're too perf-obsessed for our own good. But complaining about it, or condescending the way many do, won't do any good: Either you're preaching to the choir, or you're irritating people, thus making them less likely to listen to you (sometimes both in one person, like me. But then, I took a while to come around on a lot of this stuff). If you want a future, build it. I…

Looking at software today, I'm note sure we're perf-obsessed enough actually. Fortunately, simpler, faster, and more powerful all go hand in hand if you pick the right abstractions.

And I am building something better—think AS/400 with an APL-inspired Forth dialect. It is certainly alienating, but (hopefully) the system will have enough fun demos to hook people, and the language runs on other OSes to tempt people in. ;)