What kind of systems today in the software development field are produced by experts for experts?
The only ones I can think of are languages like C++ or Rust. Perhaps emacs and vi...
Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
51–60 of 94 posts
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#52Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is a bit more nuanced than that, ARPANet was a lot of DEC machines, USC and USC-ISI had a number of DEC-10's on the network. Usenet was however primarily a bunch of UNIX (or UNIX like) machines. They traded in their modems for nifty connections to the Internet and carried a lot of the same protocols with them. Much of the Internet protocols were developed in college labs with the ability to 'plug in' different UNI…
> Lisp systems were popular for research, but were not used extensively for networking research. I expect it was in part a compatibility issue with BSD's socket stuff They were not used for networking research , AFAIK, but Lisp Machines were definitely very well networked, speaking many protocols which soon came to include IP and TCP (though they started out with MIT's CHAOSnet). I was using Lisp Machines (both Symbo…
That is correct, they were ubiquitous in various research organizations but fairly rare with people who were doing research on network protocols.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#53I've managed today to boot OpenGenera in a Linux VM. It took me a couple of weeks but it finally works. I intend to have a look myself at what the fuss is all about. If you're interested, here are some pointers to relevant resources (snap4.tar.gz image works as advertised): http://www.advogato.org/person/johnw/diary/12.html http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux http://libarynth.org/vlm_on_linux The opengenera tar-ball ca…
What's the fuss all about? A lot, but please bear in mind the time this was developed. We are now in 2014. We are talking about something about 30 yrs old. A good way to really compare is to go compare with an Apple ][.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#54"It was also grounded in the believe that software development is best done by small groups of very good software engineers working in a networked environment."
Wow, what a quote. Now can we repeatedly beat that into management's head.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#55I'd love to play with a Lisp Machine. I live in London, UK, so sadly I can't see any way of using one (either a physical device or a VM). There are pirate copies, but I don't want to go that route.
What lisp machine articles often miss is contrast to other related projects.
Complete introspectable systems: How does the experience compare with using Pharo Smalltalk today? Sure, it doesn't provide a kernel, but it's a pretty complete* system that's very reflective and open to modification.
Running a lisp userland: There are Common Lisp replacements for Emacs, CL window managers, and one or two Lisp Machine style GUI libraries (CLIM). However, most Lispers seem to be happy using other WMs and Emacs. Do the CL applications miss something that the Lisp Machine environment provided, or were the alternatives more compelling somehow?
Other Lisp Machines: The MIT CADR is open source and available online[1]. Lisp Machine articles seem to focus on Symbolics software, what is that the CADR lacks? rms allegedly reimplemented many Symbolics features on MIT Lisp machines.
I'm often struck by how many Lisp Machine features have been implemented on other systems (e.g. CLIM, versioned file systems) yet haven't gained many users. There must be stories here.
1: http://www.unlambda.com/cadr/
*: Of the developers I've met, Emacs hackers seem to live in Emacs more than Smalltalkers in their image. For example, there are multiple Emacs twitter packages, but I've not seen any applications (only libraries) for tweeting from inside a Smalltalk image. I'm not sure what this says about the respective environments.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#56I'd love to play with a Lisp Machine. I live in London, UK, so sadly I can't see any way of using one (either a physical device or a VM). There are pirate copies, but I don't want to go that route. What lisp machine articles often miss is contrast to other related projects. Complete introspectable systems: How does the experience compare with using Pharo Smalltalk today? Sure, it doesn't provide a kernel, but it's a…
There is also an emulator for the TI Explorer [1] that maybe gives more of the feel of using the development environment.
I still hope to be able to run the final version of the LMI software environment on the CADR emulator but haven't had much time to work on it recently.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#57I'd love to play with a Lisp Machine. I live in London, UK, so sadly I can't see any way of using one (either a physical device or a VM). There are pirate copies, but I don't want to go that route. What lisp machine articles often miss is contrast to other related projects. Complete introspectable systems: How does the experience compare with using Pharo Smalltalk today? Sure, it doesn't provide a kernel, but it's a…
> How does the experience compare with using Pharo Smalltalk today?
Genera is a full operating system running directly on Lisp Machine hardware. A CPU which runs a stack machine. The network code goes down to the packets and the Ethernet card driver.
> There are Common Lisp replacements for Emacs, CL window managers, and one or two Lisp Machine style GUI libraries (CLIM).
A few thousand developer years is the difference. Sophistication. Polishing. Applications.
> rms allegedly reimplemented many Symbolics features on MIT Lisp machines.
He didn't. He tried to help LMI, but stopped soon. Symbolics, LMI and then TI developed a lot of more software. Much more.
> I'm often struck by how many Lisp Machine features have been implemented on other systems (e.g. CLIM, versioned file systems) yet haven't gained many users. There must be stories here.
Versioned file systems existed before and after Lisp Machines. For example DEC's VMS had a versioned file system. CLIM was the attempt to develop a portable standardized version of the GUI library of Symbolics. It failed to gain real traction: too different, not very polished, everybody had already a different GUI toolkit, ...
Here is an example of using a high-end Lisp machine application for 3d graphics:
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#58I've managed today to boot OpenGenera in a Linux VM. It took me a couple of weeks but it finally works. I intend to have a look myself at what the fuss is all about. If you're interested, here are some pointers to relevant resources (snap4.tar.gz image works as advertised): http://www.advogato.org/person/johnw/diary/12.html http://www.cliki.net/VLM_on_Linux http://libarynth.org/vlm_on_linux The opengenera tar-ball ca…
It would be great if someone (anonymously) could get a working OpenGenera VM and upload the image so that people could skip all these steps and try it out immediately.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#59Earlier quoted context omitted.
Current hardware wouldn't contemplate supporting only a single, oddball (even then) language. (Although the C spec is carefully written to allow C-on-Lisp - e.g. by making it illegal to compare pointers not pointing to the same array, allowing a C-"object"-per-Lisp-object implementation - real C code tends to make assumptions.)
Symbolics sold ISO Pascal, C, Ada, Prolog and Fortran compilers for it. I've used TeX and the original MIT X11 server on a Lisp Machine.
My Zeta-C compiler predated Symbolics C by almost two years.
One customer said they'd run millions of lines of code through it.
Re: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine
#60The real ergonomics of the LispM were due to the wonderful Microswitch keyboards, which have never been equalled since. To use one was a kind of revelation into the the apotheosis of keyboard use. (The old, original Tom Knight AI Lab keyboards were even slightly more wonderful; the later Microswitch LispM keyboards never quite equalled the originals in terms of tactilely satisfying feel.) (For a long while after leav…
Those were nice keyswitches, but the modern Cherry MX is also excellent. I would be hard pressed to pick a favorite between the two of them. The Cherries have a lighter touch and a little "snap", both of which I like.