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Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

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Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#71

Post by ScottBurson »

shakna wrote: post #47
JBiserkov wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thankfully Rich Hickey & co wrote Clojure so we can program on a modern Lisp in the Java Virtual Machine and in the browser! (ClojureScript) (even the .NET CLR is supported) [1] http://clojure.org [2] http://clojurescript.org

Though it kind of sucks that Tail Call Elimination is such a difficult task on the JVM. Scheme kind of gets you thinking in a way that works iteratively, but gets expressed recursively. Its easy to read, and can make for some great optimisation without being premature. The JVM does not really support this style of programming - despite LISP's syntax leading towards it.

Ironically, the Lisp Machines didn't have TCO either.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#72

Post by analognoise »

PeCaN wrote: post #60
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.…

Do you have anything to show off of the other system you're working on? It sounds interesting.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#74

Post by pjmlp »

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…

How was using Mesa/Cedar?

From my Native Oberon experience and having devoured all Xerox PARC related papers, I imagine it was a great experience.

But having used the real thing is quite different assessment.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#75

Post by setpatchaddress »

duncan_bayne wrote: post #56
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...

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

If we limit our perspective to the duration of Jobs's lifetime, the Apple I, II, III, and the entire Macintosh line never required a tithe to Apple for releasing software. (You can argue about the cost of developer tools / the developer program for the Mac, but you'd be wrong, since (a) those were never profitable for Apple and (b) people could and did use third party development tools.)

HyperCard development floundered before Steve came back partly because of bad management decisions and partly because it required a total ground-up rewrite to bring it up to even 1988's graphic standards (it was obsolete pretty much as soon as it was released, thanks to the appearance of the Macintosh II, which supported larger screens and RGB color).

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#76

Post by gumby »

pjmlp wrote: post #74
gumby wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

How was using Mesa/Cedar? From my Native Oberon experience and having devoured all Xerox PARC related papers, I imagine it was a great experience. But having used the real thing is quite different assessment.

It was fun although at that point in my life I was not comfortable with statically typed languages. So it was good for me as well.

I really just experimented in it and the (more welcoming to me) Smalltalk environment. I used InterLisp-D as my "day job" language (actually we implemented 3-Lisp in it, with some custom microcode).

BTW there was a good paper from the Mesa group which I can't find online (my copy must be buried in a box someplace) comparing the performance of counted strings vs delimited strings (e.g. [3, 'f', 'o', 'o'] vs ['f', 'o', 'o', \0] in C syntax). According to the paper the bounded strings were much faster. All three languages (Smalltalk, Mesa and Lisp) used counted strings.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#78

Post by gumby »

gugagore wrote: post #62
kjhughes wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

I too am left wondering, what is the alternative?

Well, with exploratory programming you tend to build up a couple of data structures, add some functions to manipulate them, and then extend out from there. In a more structured way you think up front about a lot more things. In the second you probably doodle some stuff out on the whiteboard or on paper before coding; in the first you probably simply start with an empty buffer type straight into the REPL. There's a time and place for each and certainly not a well-defined dividing line between the two (except in some highly structured UML/TDD processes which may not even exist any more outside aerospace).

For example I talked about the Lisp implementation of the code I'm working on: for deployment it looks like it'll be be an implementation in C++ based on what we end up learning about performance; certain implementation decisions that were particularly good or particularly bad, or that we iterated on several times before settling on something good; and that handles memory management more directly.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#79

Post by duncan_bayne »

setpatchaddress wrote: post #75
duncan_bayne wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If we limit our perspective to the duration of Jobs's lifetime, the Apple I, II, III, and the entire Macintosh line never required a tithe to Apple for releasing software. (You can argue about the cost of developer tools / the developer program for the Mac, but you'd be wrong, since (a) those were never profitable for Apple and (b) people could and did use third party development tools.) HyperCard development flounde…

I'm not sure what your point is? Dead is dead, even if it's just been left to die instead of being enhanced or re-released.

Re. not requiring a tithe to Apple, it's significant that their most popular OS (by orders of magnitude?):

* requires a tithe

* is not user programmable

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#80

Post by gumby »

lispm wrote: post #40
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Obviously not. ...And what makes you say that? I was actually aware, in any case. >A Lisp system is not text-based. >Lisp is based on data. Code is data and data can be code. >Using an editor to work with text is only half of the story. A good Lisp IDE lets me more or less directly interact with the data. I'm aware of that, but text is a fairly convenient representation of Lisp data. In fact, I'm unsure what you mea…

> I'm aware of that, but text is a fairly convenient representation of Lisp data. Some Lisp data does not have a textual representation, it might have a graphical representation or the textual representation may not be very helpful (Lisp data being a graph might be better displayed as a 2d or even 3d graph, than as a textual representation). The Symbolics UI of the REPL/Listener would allow you to interact with the 2…

BTW while pretty much every Interlisp-D user used D-edit, I was never comfortable with it because it required use of the mouse. By the time I started using Interlisp I had about six or seven years of Emacs wired into my fingers and didn't like being slowed down by taking my fingers off the keyboard.

There was an emacsy interface made by Kelly ??? in the office next to me which I extended into a real Emacs clone (with modes and everything) which a bunch of us used. In retrospect I should have gone native and adopted D-edit directly but what can I say I was a snot-nosed 20 year old kid.

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