21–30 of 64 posts
The dates on Dan Weinreb's blog are all wrong for some reason. This post likely dates back to 2011 or before. (EDIT: Ah, corrected by the moderators, thanks.) I had the pleasure of meeting Dan at ECLM 2008, four years before his death. He was hacking away on his XO-1 and showing around fancy things. A very memorable man. He's missed.
Exactly why Java succeed - the world is dominated by mediocrity while idiots are mostly on management positions. This is why all we got nowadays are Windows PCs with Java. It "worth us" or "suits us well". Designers were too smart (consider David Moon) while management was "as usual".
Sure it became a horrible bloated mess - but isn't that the doom that faces all succesful software eventually?
As part of out work, we evaluated and benchmarked Xerox Interlisp machines, Symbolics systems, VAXen, later Gold Hill etc. to find a cost-effective delivery platform. We even eventually funded the development of a delivery-focused subset of Common Lisp.
One aspect that Symbolics didn't seem to understand back then was cost of entry and deployment: the Xerox D-machines were (IIRC) around 1/3 the cost of the Symbolics. Perhaps not as speedy, but adequate for our day-to-day development work as well as for the end customer's needs.
Symbolics had great development systems, but the delivery answers were late in coming; too late to help us.
There's lots more to be said about the late 80s collapse of AI (ES) applications and expectations, but the margins here are too small to contain it....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No - the world is dominated by stuff that works and solves real problems . It doesn't care for how much smarter than all those mediocre idiots you think you are. It offers lots of opportunities for very smart people who mistake their mental masturbation for unstoppable genius to be very, very stupid.
Symbolics stuff not just worked, it worked remarkably well on the very modest hardware and solved real word problems. For an example of unimaginable by "modern standards" quality , go ahead and take a look at the Common Lisp documentation produced by Symbolics (the art of writing, "motorcycle maintenance" kind of clarity and conscience) which is buried somewhere inside bitsavers and take a look at the sources of Open…
But hey, you can hire cheap labour and they will be prevented from messing up too much, so corporations like it.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No - the world is dominated by stuff that works and solves real problems . It doesn't care for how much smarter than all those mediocre idiots you think you are. It offers lots of opportunities for very smart people who mistake their mental masturbation for unstoppable genius to be very, very stupid.
Symbolics stuff not just worked, it worked remarkably well on the very modest hardware and solved real word problems. For an example of unimaginable by "modern standards" quality , go ahead and take a look at the Common Lisp documentation produced by Symbolics (the art of writing, "motorcycle maintenance" kind of clarity and conscience) which is buried somewhere inside bitsavers and take a look at the sources of Open…
I worked in an expert systems company in the 80s (one mentioned in the Phillips thesis referenced in the danweinreb article). Take all this with a dose of IIRC. As part of out work, we evaluated and benchmarked Xerox Interlisp machines, Symbolics systems, VAXen, later Gold Hill etc. to find a cost-effective delivery platform. We even eventually funded the development of a delivery-focused subset of Common Lisp. One a…
I couldn't afford a Lisp Machine, I just used Franz Lisp on an Atari ST.
The dates on Dan Weinreb's blog are all wrong for some reason. This post likely dates back to 2011 or before. (EDIT: Ah, corrected by the moderators, thanks.) I had the pleasure of meeting Dan at ECLM 2008, four years before his death. He was hacking away on his XO-1 and showing around fancy things. A very memorable man. He's missed.
Corrected by moderators? How corrected? The dates are still wrong
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Symbolics stuff not just worked, it worked remarkably well on the very modest hardware and solved real word problems. For an example of unimaginable by "modern standards" quality , go ahead and take a look at the Common Lisp documentation produced by Symbolics (the art of writing, "motorcycle maintenance" kind of clarity and conscience) which is buried somewhere inside bitsavers and take a look at the sources of Open…
Everything in the Java language is done so as to prevent clueless people from messing up too much. It is an useful goal, but it impairs creativity and productivity. Complex concepts are either not implemented or forbidden outright. This is even in contrast to its closest competitor, which is C#. The latter has evolved a lot since its creation, while in the Java world lambdas are the hot new thing. But hey, you can hi…
Exactly why Java succeed - the world is dominated by mediocrity while idiots are mostly on management positions. This is why all we got nowadays are Windows PCs with Java. It "worth us" or "suits us well". Designers were too smart (consider David Moon) while management was "as usual".
I think that's a bit harsh - I actually moved from mostly doing Common Lisp development (on DEC Alpha workstations) to Java development in early '95 and I really liked Java back then - I was as passionate about it as people are today about Go/CoffeeScript/Haskell. Java, at least at the start, really was something fresh and good. Sure it became a horrible bloated mess - but isn't that the doom that faces all succesful…
I worked in an expert systems company in the 80s (one mentioned in the Phillips thesis referenced in the danweinreb article). Take all this with a dose of IIRC. As part of out work, we evaluated and benchmarked Xerox Interlisp machines, Symbolics systems, VAXen, later Gold Hill etc. to find a cost-effective delivery platform. We even eventually funded the development of a delivery-focused subset of Common Lisp. One a…
On that subject, Richard Gabriel [1] writes about his experiences as a founder of Lucid, which produced Common Lisp for regular Unix workstations, in the "Into the Ground: Lisp" chapter of his book, "Patterns of Software", which is available as a free PDF from his web site [2].
(Lucid's pivot to developing a C++ environment is covered in the "Into the Ground: C++" chapter).
There's some interesting history there (and the rest of the book is probably worth reading as well for a variety of reasons).