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Why we need Lisp machines

fultonsramblings.substack.com

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Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#131

Post by agumonkey »

jodrellblank wrote: post #101
taeric wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This feels like an odd critique. I would expect that more programs should devote more code to the parts that interact with a user. That is, the size alone isn't much of a signal. Is it?

In the sense of the PowerShell engine doing the argument parsing and display formatting for all cmdlets, which is something I think the designers took from VMS shell. That makes for "Don't Repeat Yourself" (one place for all the argument parsing code) and from the user experience side all commands which subscribe to this take parameters in the same way, arguments handled in the same way, with the same common paramete…

I didn't mention it but powershell was in my mind. powershell format-table in particular. Also there's some guys who are patching linux user space to embed json as output (and the jc wrapper to be able to leverage jq later down the pipe)

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#132

Post by xedrac »

> They were programmed in lisp the whole way down and could be run code interpreted for convenience or compiled to microcode for efficiency. You could open up system functions in the editor, modify and compile them while the machine was running. Everything worked in a single address space, programs could talk to each other in ways operating systems of today couldn’t dream of.

So this is basically expanding Emacs to actually be the operating system. There's definitely some allure to it. Awhile back, I was hacking on the Lem editor for Common Lisp, using the Lem editor itself. It was great until I made a mistake in some code that restricted my ability to edit the code, sort of like performing brain surgery on my self and snipping a nerve that controlled my arms. It was amazing to have that immediate feedback loop, but in a world that is striving to find new ways to minimize human error, I'm just not sure it'd hold up.

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#133

Post by TacoT »

Gollapalli wrote: post #122
GregorMendel wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Anyone interested in the computing holes that can be filled by lisp machines should check out Urbit. There is an vibrant and growing community of people building a network of personal servers running a lisp-like functional OS. It uses an identity system secured by the Ethereum blockchain and it has created a bottom up economic incentive for developers to participate. They are starting to solve unique problems that co…

And it's 4x more expensive than it was supposed to be to buy a planet. Ethereum was a mistake.

It's $3. www.azimuth.shop

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#134

Post by reikonomusha »

syngrog66 wrote: post #116
zozbot234 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> We don't "need" Lisp machines. We "need" Lisp software. What made a Lisp machines extraordinary wasn't the hardware, it was the software. Nothing today is impeding one from writing such software, except time, energy, willpower, and/or money. Discussed here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30800520 The main issue is that Lisp, for all its inherent "power", has very limited tools for enforcing modularity boundari…

agreed, and well said in broadstrokes, imo, Lisp's endless plasticity of infinitely nested parentheses is both its greatest strength and... its greatest weakness I love it at Write time. hate it at Read/Maintain time. why I've avoided it for serious work. Python, Java, Go Rust etc are all easier for my brain & eyes to quickly parse on the screen which is unfortunate. because I still drool at Lisp's linguistic power

Lisp at "read/maintain" time in a good environment is probably the most enjoyable time for me working with Lisp, assuming it's on a code base that followed some sort of coding standards. Introspection, debugging, and navigation in a Lisp environment are incredible.

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#135

Post by copperx »

coryrc wrote: post #125
reikonomusha wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think many people have conjectures, such as this one, but I don't think it's a tech problem, or a "Lisp is too powerful for its own good" problem. It's a "people aren't writing software" problem. History has demonstrated umpteen times that developing large, sophisticated, maintained, and maintainable projects in Lisp is entirely and demonstrably possible. Modern Common Lisp coding practices gravitate toward modular…

> people aren't writing software Maybe not OSS, but somebody is keeping Lispworks and Franz in business.

I'd love to know who. The example apps in Lispworks site aren't commercial successes, as far as I know.

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#136

Post by openfuture »

chubot wrote: post #48

Meh the problem is "Which Lisp?" There are dozens of incompatible Lisps. Even this site is written in a Lisp dialect written by its author (Arc). In fact I conjecture that this is the reason Unix is more popular than Lisp -- because Lisps don't interoperate well. They haven't built up a big ecosystem of reusable code. Whereas Python, JavaScript, R, C, C++, and Rust programmers can reuse each others' code via Unix-sty…

It's all going to be datalisp, mark my word :)

Although you have no idea what I am talking about yet just wait a bit more :))

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#137

Post by scroot »

lispm wrote: post #51
scroot wrote: post #18

Leaving the specific idea of the Lisp Machine aside, today there we have a tremendous advantage over the past when it comes to creating the kind of full, self-consistent systems Lisp Machines -- and systems like Smalltalk or Oberon, etc -- represent. Today we have widely accepted communications and data format standards. This is something that really isolated system diversity in the past, where you were "stuck" in so…

One can implement these standards. Problem: it's work. They supported things like TCP/IP, UDP, SMTP, X11, RPC, NFS, DNS, HTTP, ... The machines had C compilers, too.

Some of these new systems should definitely be lisp machines of a kind, though not direct clones of Genera. We need something more "of the times." In reality, there are only a few things people expect of their computing systems, but those things are huge: decent graphics and components for the UI, and a web browser.

So, yeah, standards and protocols are there. And it would take a s*t-ton of work to implement them in a bespoke environment. But they are not "difficult" in the classic sense. If we had a completely different type of economy it might even be possible!

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#138

Post by reikonomusha »

jodrellblank wrote: post #93
reikonomusha wrote: post #46

I'm as big of a Lisp fan as can be. I'm a proud owner of Symbolics and TI hardware: a MicroExplorer, a MacIvory, two 3650, and two 3620. Not to mention an AlphaServer running OpenGenera. Today, we have computers that run Lisp orders of magnitude faster than any of those Lisp machines. And we have about 3–4 orders of magnitude more memory with 64-bits of integer and floating point goodness. And Lisp is touted to have…

> " We don't "need" Lisp machines. We "need" Lisp software. " Nobody goes into Java because their self identity is "a Java programmer" to gather a team of people to create a Java machine running Java software to unleash the power of Java for the masses by enabling them to do everything in Java for the sake of doing everything in Java, By Java, With Java, For Java. And if they do talk like that they would be a Sun Mic…

I don't know how to respond to the whole "Lisp programmer identity" stuff; it doesn't seem relevant to anything I said. I also didn't suggest anybody rewrite anything in it. The success of Lisp doesn't depend on the existence of fancy machines, it depends on people choosing to write software in it. That's basically all I meant to say.

As for Kandria, did you play the demo, or did you just look at screenshots and system requirements and make your brazen judgment? I don't think Kandria is at all amateur or sloppy, regardless of to which aesthetic era you think it belongs. Many have claimed that it's not even possible to write a game that doesn't blow because Lisp is dynamically typed and garbage collected. Now the goalposts have moved to, "well, it takes 1GB of memory and doesn't even look like it's from 2022."

I commend anybody who ships.

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#139

Post by syrrim »

chubot wrote: post #48

Meh the problem is "Which Lisp?" There are dozens of incompatible Lisps. Even this site is written in a Lisp dialect written by its author (Arc). In fact I conjecture that this is the reason Unix is more popular than Lisp -- because Lisps don't interoperate well. They haven't built up a big ecosystem of reusable code. Whereas Python, JavaScript, R, C, C++, and Rust programmers can reuse each others' code via Unix-sty…

pretty sure hn was ported away from arc at some point.

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#140

Post by ogogmad »

I've started using Mathematica recently. I quite like it: I've used Sympy before, which was good, but nowhere near as "good" as Mathematica. How does it compare to the Lisp Machine operating systems? There's some vague resemblance to Lisp in treating symbols as a basic type of object. In the Mathematica use-case, these symbolic values are used to stand for algebraic variables or unknowns. Undeclared variables by default have symbolic type, with their own names being their values. (I know that other CASes do similar things here). Also, algebraic manipulations produce expressions which double as Mathematica code, which resembles the meta-programming features of Lisp. There's even glimpses of reactive programming in the way you construct interactive plots.

I know this is "uncouth" because it's commercial software, but Mathematica is one of the most interesting programs I've ever used. [edit] Might something like this be the future?

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