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Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

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Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#81

Post by gumby »

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...

There was Dylan

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#82

Post by pjmlp »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #35
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

Not a super fan of Clojure, but it's a good language. Shame it's still stuck in the Java ecosystem, though.

Yeah, but for many of us the Java ecosystem is a feature.

You only get tooling comparable to Visual VM or Mission Control in commercial Common Lisps.

Also I think many that bash Java don't realise it is the only language ecosystem that matches C and C++ in availability across OSes, including many embedded ones.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#83

Post by pjmlp »

gumby wrote: post #76
pjmlp wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think that is the one discussing about ropes structures.

Thanks for the feedback.

Nowadays I use .NET and Java environments as an "almost like" experience of what mainstream computing could have looked like.

But when I see companies like Apple releasing playgrounds, Oracle adding a REPL and the edit/continue and REPL in .NET, there is some hope left.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#84

Post by pjmlp »

JBiserkov wrote: post #32
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We can do more than that. If everybody followed the trend, then Lisp would be dead, and we'd all just write Java. shivers

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

Even though I prefer static typing to dynamic typing, Clojure is a pleasure to do some coding for fun while traveling.

It would be nicer if the performance was better though, many that only know Java via Clojure don't realize the performance impact of Clojure.

At least 1.8 did had some improvements in that direction.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#85

Post by pjmlp »

metaobject wrote: post #70
smnplk wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I believe the whole point was to target the JVM, because of reuse and maturity. And actually it's not stuck just in java ecosystem, clojure got wings years ago. Yoy can find it inside a browser today too :)

I wonder if there ever has been talk of a native Clojure? I guess it may not be very usable without the JVM ecosystem, though. Frankly, I find calling JVM library calls from Clojure to be quite ugly and really stand out in the code (mostly because of the mix of the lower-case-dash-delimited variable and fn nameing convention of Clojure and the mixed-case/camelCase naming style of Java.

Yes, there are a few aborted attempts.

The problem with all languages that decide to implement their own runtime, instead of building it on top of JVM or .NET eco-systems is that their native code generation and GC implementation are always going to be worse.

Also there is the issue of having to implement the whole set of third party libraries from scratch, just like PyPy and JRuby have issues using libraries that rely on CPython or Ruby FFI.

So unless you get a set of developers really committed to go through the efforts of making it succeed, everyone will ignore it.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#87

Post by lispm »

gumby wrote: post #81
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...

There was Dylan

The early versions of that were used for the Lisp OS - actually more than one. As usual, the IDE was implemented in Common Lisp.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#88

Post by crististm »

lispm wrote: post #5

For a very early overview of the technology I would recommend the 3600 Technical Summary. The 3600 was the first machine which was mostly designed by Symbolics. It was followed by three more generations (gate array processor, micro-processor and a virtual machine) of CPUs with something like 20+ further models. I once used a 3600. :-) It greets with "Yes, master" when you turn it on. http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.co…

The alpha port that wanders on the torrents doesn't seem to have that. Either I didn't see it or is it something specific to a particular version of 3600?

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#89

Post by crististm »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #61
lispm wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Neat. But actually, I find that mechanism quite unpleasant, and one I wouldn't like working with. I'm sure it's quite powerful, but so is Vim, and I never really "got" Vim either. I would, in fact, argue that manipulating text has advantages over direct object manipulation: the first of which is that you can more directly edit text, whereas the DEdit interface is all about executing commands on objects. Secondly, you…

Text is not "raw data structure" and you may want to think twice that by manipulating text you touch the "data".

From the sidelines, your approach is "all I have are nails and all I need is the biggest hammer you can get me".

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#90

Post by pjmlp »

shakna wrote: post #66
smnplk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

recur in clojure is also easy to read in my opinion.

True. However, a named let in Scheme is not a loop. Its still a lambda. Which means you can have nested lets with TCE, and you can construct them on the fly, depending on what your needs are, usung patterns like currying. That flexibility just doesn't work on the JVM. You can force it, but it'll be slow and horrible compared to another pattern - and I don't think a LISP should tell me how to do something. That's Pyth…

It pops up every now and then in Java Language Summit presentations, usually in comparison with .NET, which does support it.

So who knows, maybe some day the JVM finally gets it.

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