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The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]

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Re: The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]

#11

Post by pjmlp »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #7
pfdietz wrote: post #3

I love this quote (from Interlisp-D: Overview and Status): "Interlisp is a very large software system and large software systems are not easy to construct. Interlisp-D has on the order of 17,000 lines of Lisp code, 6,000 lines of Bcpl, and 4,000 lines of microcode." So large. :) http://www.softwarepreservation.net/projects/LISP/interlisp-...

Same thing could probably be some 200k or more LoC in enterprise Java.

Or Objective-C,

https://github.com/Quotation/LongestCocoa

Or Smalltalk or C++,

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_Patterns

Or even C,

https://www.amazon.com/Modern-Structured-Analysis-Edward-You...

Point being, people like to blame Java, while forgetting history of enterprise architecture.

Re: The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]

#12

Post by diggan »

amszmidt wrote: post #9
imglorp wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LMI here https://github.com/dseagrav/ld

Mostly dead. Current Lisp Machine shenanigans related to MIT/LMI are at https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3 ... Currently working on an accurate model of the MIT CADR in VHDL, and merging the various System source trees into one that should work for Lambda, and CADR.

> Currently working on an accurate model of the MIT CADR in VHDL

Sounds extremely interesting, any links/feeds one could follow the progress at?

The dream of running lisp on hardware made for lisp lives on, against all odds :)

Re: The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]

#13

Post by eadmund »

rjsw wrote: post #6
jshaqaw wrote: post #5

Retro lisp machines are cool. Kudos to the team. Love it. That said… we need the “lisp machine” of the future more than we need a recreation.

What does a Lisp Machine of the future look like? There is Mezzano [1] as well as the Interlisp project described in the linked paper and another project resurrecting the LMI software. [1] https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

> What does a Lisp Machine of the future look like?

Depends on what one means by that.

Dedicated hardware? I doubt that we’ll ever see that again, although of course I could be wrong.

A full OS? That’s more likely, but only just. If it had some way to run Windows, macOS or Linux programs (maybe just emulation?) then it might have a chance.

As a program? Arguably Emacs is a Lisp Machine for 2025.

Provocative question: would a modern Lisp Machine necessarily use Lisp? I think that it probably has to be a language like Lisp, Smalltalk, Forth or Tcl. It’s hard to put into words what these very different languages share that languages such as C, Java and Python lack, but I think that maybe it reduces down to elegant dynamism?

Re: The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]

#14

Post by amszmidt »

diggan wrote: post #12
amszmidt wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Mostly dead. Current Lisp Machine shenanigans related to MIT/LMI are at https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3 ... Currently working on an accurate model of the MIT CADR in VHDL, and merging the various System source trees into one that should work for Lambda, and CADR.

> Currently working on an accurate model of the MIT CADR in VHDL Sounds extremely interesting, any links/feeds one could follow the progress at? The dream of running lisp on hardware made for lisp lives on, against all odds :)

Current work is at http://github.com/ams/cadr4

And of course .. https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3 .

Re: The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]

#15

Post by amszmidt »

eadmund wrote: post #13
rjsw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a Lisp Machine of the future look like? There is Mezzano [1] as well as the Interlisp project described in the linked paper and another project resurrecting the LMI software. [1] https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

> What does a Lisp Machine of the future look like? Depends on what one means by that. Dedicated hardware? I doubt that we’ll ever see that again, although of course I could be wrong. A full OS? That’s more likely, but only just. If it had some way to run Windows, macOS or Linux programs (maybe just emulation?) then it might have a chance. As a program? Arguably Emacs is a Lisp Machine for 2025. Provocative question:…

> Provocative question: would a modern Lisp Machine necessarily use Lisp?

Seeing that not even "Original Gangster" Lisp Machine used Lisp ...

Both the Lambda and CADR are RISCy machines with very little specific to Lisp (the CADR was designed specifically to just run generic VM instructions, one cool hack on the CADR was to run PDP-10 instructions).

By Emacs you definitely mean GNU Emacs -- there are other implementations of Emacs. To most people, what the Lisp Machine was (is?), was a full operating system with editor, compiler, debugger and very easy access to all levels of the system. Lisp .. wasn't the really interesting thing, Smalltalk, Oberon .. share the same idea.

Re: The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]

#16

Post by rjsw »

amszmidt wrote: post #14
diggan wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Currently working on an accurate model of the MIT CADR in VHDL Sounds extremely interesting, any links/feeds one could follow the progress at? The dream of running lisp on hardware made for lisp lives on, against all odds :)

Current work is at http://github.com/ams/cadr4 And of course .. https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3 .

Maybe try replacing the ALU with one written directly in Verilog, I suspect this will run a lot faster than building it up from 74181+74182 components.

Re: The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]

#17

Post by kps »

~wavy lines~~ I've never used this in anger, but I owned a second-hand Xerox Daybreak for a while to play around with. Later, there was a some freely available project (I've now forgotten) that used Interlisp running on an emulator running on a DEC Alpha, and so I added some minor bits to NetBSD's Ultrix compatibility.

Re: The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]

#18

Post by amszmidt »

rjsw wrote: post #16
amszmidt wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Current work is at http://github.com/ams/cadr4 And of course .. https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3 .

Maybe try replacing the ALU with one written directly in Verilog, I suspect this will run a lot faster than building it up from 74181+74182 components.

From what I see -- that is not the case.

The current state is _very_ fast in simulation to the point where it is uninteresting (there are other things to figure out) to write something as a behavioral model of the '181/'182.

~100 microcode instructions takes about 0.1 seconds to run.

Re: The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]

#19

Post by 0xpgm »

eadmund wrote: post #13
rjsw wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What does a Lisp Machine of the future look like? There is Mezzano [1] as well as the Interlisp project described in the linked paper and another project resurrecting the LMI software. [1] https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano

> What does a Lisp Machine of the future look like? Depends on what one means by that. Dedicated hardware? I doubt that we’ll ever see that again, although of course I could be wrong. A full OS? That’s more likely, but only just. If it had some way to run Windows, macOS or Linux programs (maybe just emulation?) then it might have a chance. As a program? Arguably Emacs is a Lisp Machine for 2025. Provocative question:…

> Dedicated hardware? I doubt that we’ll ever see that again, although of course I could be wrong.

Since we're now building specialized hardware for AI, emergence of languages like Mojo that take advantage of hardware architecture and what I interpret as a renewed interest in FPGAs perhaps specialized hardware is making a comeback.

If I understand computing history correctly, chip manufacturers like Intel optimized their chips for C language compilers to take advantage of economies of scale created by C/Unix popularity. This came with the cost of killing off lisp/smalltalk specialized hardware that gave these high level languages decent performance.

Alan Kay famously said that people who are serious about their software should make their own hardware.

Re: The Medley Interlisp Project: Reviving a Historical Software System [pdf]

#20

Post by rjsw »

kps wrote: post #17

~wavy lines~~ I've never used this in anger, but I owned a second-hand Xerox Daybreak for a while to play around with. Later, there was a some freely available project (I've now forgotten) that used Interlisp running on an emulator running on a DEC Alpha, and so I added some minor bits to NetBSD's Ultrix compatibility.

The Lisp Machine emulator that was tied to DEC Alpha was Symbolics OpenGenera.
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