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Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

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Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#91

Post by pjmlp »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #44
iterrogo wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That system lost, and it's never coming back There's no reason it can't come back. It requires a massive amount of programming work and possibly new hardware but it's definitely possible and people are already working towards it. It's actually quite possible to build upon it and even surpass it.

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…

Well they are actually doing it, but the UNIX crowd is so inflated that most mobile OSes use a UNIX kernel that they don't see it coming.

Hint, for Swift, Objective-C, Java, JavaScript, Android, Dart, .NET, the kernel doesn't matter at all from the API surface point of view.

And I am only listing the official mobile OS SDK languages being forced on 3rd-party devs as you say.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#92

Post by lispm »

crististm wrote: post #88
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?

The 3600 is a physical machine, a computer with a cpu, memory, disks, tape drive, lots of slots for extensions, network interface, console interface.

It has a display on the machine. That display shows the message.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#93

Post by gumby »

pjmlp wrote: post #83
gumby wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> I think that is the one discussing about ropes structures.

No, this was simply counted vs terminated strings. I would like to find that paper and revisit the data again to see if it is still true.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#94

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

pjmlp wrote: post #82
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I realize, I just can't stand the ecosystem. Everything is super verbose, frustratingly overcomplicated, and full of XML. Yuck.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#95

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

crististm wrote: post #89
qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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".

Text is a raw data structure, it's just not the one that's used behind the scenes: Everything is a datastructure. And actually I do touch the data by manipulating text.

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

From my perspective, my approach is "that development environment sounds really unpleasant, and while I can appreciare the elegance, I'm having trouble finding the relative upshot."

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#97

Post by qwertyuiop924 »

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.…

That sounds cool :-). Let us know when you release.

As for your opinions on perf, I can see where you're coming from, but I'm a Lisp programmer. If I agreed with you, I likely wouldn't be one.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#98

Post by [deleted] »

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.…

[deleted]

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#99

Post by pjmlp »

qwertyuiop924 wrote: post #94
pjmlp wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I realize, I just can't stand the ecosystem. Everything is super verbose, frustratingly overcomplicated, and full of XML. Yuck.

It is a consequence of being an enterprise language.

I imagine you never had the pleasure of doing enterprise distributed computing projects via CORBA, DCOM, SUN-RPC, DCE in C, C++, Visual Basic and Smalltalk.

Guess where those enterprise architects moved on.

EDIT: Should have mentioned Delphi and Objective-C as well.

Re: Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum

#100

Post by xenophonf »

kjhughes wrote: post #53
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…

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

I prefer to think of it as "rapid prototyping".
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