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Why we need Lisp machines

fultonsramblings.substack.com

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Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#191

Post by mportela »

DonHopkins wrote: post #24
mportela wrote: post #7

This post would benefit from further expanding some of these statements. > UNIX isn’t good enough anymore and it’s getting worse Why exactly? > A new operating system means we can explore new ideas in new ways. LISP machines were not only OSes but also hardware. Is the author also proposing running this OS on optimized hardware or simply using our x86-64/AMD/M1 CPUs? > With lisp machines, we can cut out the complicat…

There's a old book all about just that, which included and popularized Richard P. Gabriel's paper, "The Rise of Worse Is Better": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_UNIX-HATERS_Handbook https://web.mit.edu/~simsong/www/ugh.pdf >The year was 1987, and Michael Travers, a graduate student at the MIT Media Laboratory, was taking his first steps into the future. For years Travers had written large and beautiful programs at…

I really appreciate your writing this reply (esp. the links). Thanks a lot, mate!

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#192

Post by mportela »

sseagull wrote: post #77
tacitusarc wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m curious what you would classify as a hard problem. Personally, I think writing a good, easy to use Python package manager that both gains adoption and addresses the myriad of corner cases is a hard problem.

I work in scientific software. I tend to view really hard problems as problems where you don't know the solution, and don't even have a blueprint for how could be solved. Writing a package manager is hard in some sense, but you have an idea of what it needs to do, what features it should have, and what success ultimately looks like. But there are problems, large and small, which require new thinking and leaps of fait…

> I work in scientific software

I envy you!

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#193

Post by mbrodersen »

daly wrote: post #184
mbrodersen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A number of Lisp fans seems to care. That’s why we regularly see articles on HN trying to convince other developers to use Lisp. It has been going on for years. Article after article written by frustrated Lisp fans, not understanding why the language they love is not mainstream. Often making bizarre claims about non-Lisp developers not being smart enough to “get” Lisp or whatever. Not having a clue that most develope…

For the record, I made (and make) no claims about "non-Lisp developers not being smart enough". My claim is that Lisp is perfect for thinking about a new idea or a new approach. For example, I implemented a program that merged Expert Systems and Knowledge Representation into a single system (KROPS) that allowed a domain expert to express their knowledge as rules or as facts. Anything the system learned by either meth…

> For the record, I made (and make) no claims about "non-Lisp developers not being smart enough".

I am glad to hear that.

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#194

Post by mbrodersen »

lispm wrote: post #186
mbrodersen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A number of Lisp fans seems to care. That’s why we regularly see articles on HN trying to convince other developers to use Lisp. It has been going on for years. Article after article written by frustrated Lisp fans, not understanding why the language they love is not mainstream. Often making bizarre claims about non-Lisp developers not being smart enough to “get” Lisp or whatever. Not having a clue that most develope…

> frustrated Lisp fans Why be frustrated? For example I'm using the latest Apple Silicon laptop and there are a dozen Lisp (and related) systems already ported to it. Years ago it took a lot longer to move to a new platform, especially for open source software implementations with native code compilers. Happy times.

I agree. Nothing stops Lisp fans from using Lisp for their own projects. The fact that Lisp isn’t popular, and probably never will be, really shouldn’t matter.

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#195

Post by mbrodersen »

daly wrote: post #184
mbrodersen wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A number of Lisp fans seems to care. That’s why we regularly see articles on HN trying to convince other developers to use Lisp. It has been going on for years. Article after article written by frustrated Lisp fans, not understanding why the language they love is not mainstream. Often making bizarre claims about non-Lisp developers not being smart enough to “get” Lisp or whatever. Not having a clue that most develope…

For the record, I made (and make) no claims about "non-Lisp developers not being smart enough". My claim is that Lisp is perfect for thinking about a new idea or a new approach. For example, I implemented a program that merged Expert Systems and Knowledge Representation into a single system (KROPS) that allowed a domain expert to express their knowledge as rules or as facts. Anything the system learned by either meth…

It’s great that there is commercially successful software written in Lisp. However a lot more needs to be written in Lisp to compete with the hundreds of thousands of commercially successful applications written in other languages. I don’t think that will ever happen. But that’s fine of course. Pick the language that makes you happy and work with that. It doesn’t have to be a popular language to make you happy.

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#196

Post by taneq »

sterlind wrote: post #185
taneq wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> History has demonstrated umpteen times that developing large, sophisticated, maintained, and maintainable projects in Lisp is entirely and demonstrably possible. The thing is, developing maintained, maintainable projects is work , and everything I see about Lisp seems to have an undertone of being done, to some degree, for fun. It’s a language that scratches a specific itch; people feel clever about writing elegant…

the 1% is extremely important though, and the tools for it look very different. I do algorithm design, a lot of which is seeing what's possible/feasible before committing. I prototyped a classical AI planning system for orchestrating maintenance. there's no battle-tested standard library to reach for here. I needed prolog, I chose picat because it had a good planning engine. before this, I worked on an NP-hard graph…

Absolutely true, and it sounds like you're doing really interesting stuff where the language and the way it maps to the problem are more important than the factors I listed above.

Do you stick with the same (maybe-)esoteric language for the production implementation? And if so, does this then drag the rest of the production implementation into that language as well, or do you do the hard bit in one language and the routine stuff in another more common language?

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#197

Post by sterlind »

taneq wrote: post #196
sterlind wrote: post #185

Earlier quoted context omitted.

the 1% is extremely important though, and the tools for it look very different. I do algorithm design, a lot of which is seeing what's possible/feasible before committing. I prototyped a classical AI planning system for orchestrating maintenance. there's no battle-tested standard library to reach for here. I needed prolog, I chose picat because it had a good planning engine. before this, I worked on an NP-hard graph…

Absolutely true, and it sounds like you're doing really interesting stuff where the language and the way it maps to the problem are more important than the factors I listed above. Do you stick with the same (maybe-)esoteric language for the production implementation? And if so, does this then drag the rest of the production implementation into that language as well, or do you do the hard bit in one language and the r…

I do the hard bit in the esoteric language, then the glue in a traditional language. for instance, I made a tool that exhaustively steps an implementation through every possible state of a TLA+ model. I wrote "serializers" to parse TLA+ expressions into C# classes and vice-versa, and used this to build a bridge. Parser combinators work great for this stuff, though that's another reason I'd be happier with a Lisp representation for everything.

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#198

Post by maydup-nem »

Too wrote: post #181
reikonomusha wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Lisp is not type safe. It is type safe. While Lisp is not statically typed, its typing discipline is strong: operations performed on incompatible types signal recoverable errors.

Crashing at runtime, recoverable or not, is usually not what people mean when they say type safe. Spare me the static vs strong academia. Type safe when spoken, in practical every day terms, normally means enforced at compile time with IDE autocompletion support, usually implying static typing.

Recoverable error handling at runtime is usually not what people mean when they say crashing.

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#199

Post by chevill »

GregorMendel wrote: post #104
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…

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…

>They are starting to solve unique problems that couldn't be addressed on currently prevalent platforms.

Got any examples?

Re: Why we need Lisp machines

#200

Post by chevill »

jodrellblank wrote: post #161
reikonomusha wrote: post #138

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 syst…

It's relevant in the sense of being a reply to "we need software written in Lisp" and how, if you substitute Java and say "we need software written in Java", people would just shrug and ask "why do we?". People are saying "we need sofware written in Rust" and other people are asking "why?" and one answer is "to avoid the memory and race condition problems we have from C and C++ code". Maybe correct or not, maybe comp…

>anyone who has used a modern forum with all the trimmings would do the "yes, Grandpa, everything was better in the old days" polite smiling and nodding.

HN could have indeed been written in many languages, but IMO the simplicity is a strength. I'd rather be here than twitter, reddit, or any other forum. There's no dark patterns, no recommendation engines or other annoying nonsense trying to game "engagement", no ads, basically none of the things that make the modern Internet an awful user experience.

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