Why we need Lisp machines

I used to start writing Star-Lisp code for my company’s Connection Machine (version 1, the SIMD one) by using Coral Common Lisp on my little Macintosh. Then I would get on an airplane and fly to the city where out CM was installed.

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 the console of his Symbolics Lisp Machine (affectionately known as a LispM), one of two stateof-the-art AI workstations at the Lab. But it was all coming to an end. In the interest of cost and efficiency, the Media Lab had decided to purge its LispMs. If Travers wanted to continue doing research at MIT, he discovered, he would have to use the Lab’s VAX mainframe.

>The VAX ran Unix.

>MIT has a long tradition of mailing lists devoted to particular operating systems. These are lists for systems hackers, such as ITS-LOVERS, which was organized for programmers and users of the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory’s Incompatible Timesharing System. These lists are for experts, for people who can—and have—written their own operating systems. Michael Travers decided to create a new list. He called it UNIXHATERS:

    Date: Thu, 1 Oct 87 13:13:41 EDT
    From: Michael Travers 
    To: UNIX-HATERS
    Subject: Welcome to UNIX-HATERS

    In the tradition of TWENEX-HATERS, a mailing list for surly folk
    who have difficulty accepting the latest in operating system technology.
    If you are not in fact a Unix hater, let me know and I’ll remove you.
    Please add other people you think need emotional outlets for their
    frustration.

https://www.amazon.com/UNIX-Haters-Handbook-UNIX-Haters-line...

https://www.goodreads.com/en/book/show/174904.The_UNIX_Hater...

https://wiki.c2.com/?TheUnixHatersHandbook

>I'm a UnixLover, but I love this book because I thought it was hysterically funny. Many of the war stories are similar to experiences I've had myself, even if they're often flawed as a critique of Unix itself for one reason or another. But other UnixLovers I've loaned the book to found it annoying rather than funny, so YMMV.

>BTW the core group of contributors to this book were more Symbolics Lisp Machine fans than ITS or Windows fans. ITS had certain technical features superior to Unix, such as PCLSRing as mentioned in WorseIsBetter, but having used it a bit myself, I can't see that ITS was superior to Unix across the board. The Lisp Machine on the other hand, although I never used it, was by all accounts a very sophisticated environment for programmers. -- DougMerritt

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13781815

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19416485

>mtraven on March 18, 2019 | next [–]

>I founded the mailing list the book was based on. These days I say, Unix went from being the worst operating system available, to being the best operating system available, without getting appreciably better. (which may not be entirely accurate, but don't flame me).

>And still miss my Lisp Machine. It's not that Unix is really that bad, it's that it has a certain model of computer use which has crowded out the more ambitious visions which were still alive in the 70s and 80s.

>Much as the web (the Unix of hypertext) crowded out the more ambitious visions of what computational media for intellectual work could be (see the work of Doug Engelbart and Ted Nelson). That's a bigger tragedy IMO. Unix, eh, it's good enough, but the shittiness of the web makes humanity stupider than we should be, at a time when we can ill afford it.

https://medium.com/@donhopkins/the-x-windows-disaster-128d39...

When the author talks about too many languages and libraries, I personally think he means the proliferation of Unix DSLs (some of which are Posix and some are not) like Make, Awk, Sed, BC, DC, shell-script dialects, Gnuplot (I know it's not Posix but it was widely used once), xargs, Vimscript, ELisp. Each of these has its own quirks and random limitations. Each of these makes Unix unnecessarily complicated and difficult to learn, and they don't even accomplish much that's impressive. I also think they make the editing experience worse, because they prevent the use of IDEs or highly featured REPLs like the ones general-purpose languages have.

I imagine that a lot of this can be replaced with libraries for a general-purpose language like Python. In the case of Awk, BC and DC, Python's standard library does everything these do without their strange quirks. Gnuplot can be replaced with umpteen plotting libraries like Matplotlib. Shell-scripting can be done in a Python dialect like Xonsh. I don't know of a Python alternative to Make, but Make is a fairly perverse and ad-hoc language that looks ripe for being replaced by a library.

I don't think a new operating system (however you define that) is necessary. I think you just swap out a lot of the crazy DSLs with one consistent general-purpose language. People will switch over when they want to accomplish things more easily (like me!). This is especially likely if you're not a SWE but you want to do file system automation anyway. The DSL-heavy approach is too Byzantine for such people (like me!). And it's mostly possible today.

From a semi shallow position, what annoys me with linux is the lack of genericity above the "file" abstraction (which is not even real enough).

I remember seeing GNU ls code, 30% argparse, 30% formatting.., all of this seems brittle and redundant.

Bazaar is fine to allow freeform innovative evolution but it's also too messy.

The future is already here, but unfortunately it's programmed in elisp and still lacks a decent editor.