31–40 of 176 posts
Author falls into the same trap he talks about in the article. AI is not going away, we are not going back to the pre-AI world.
As someone who used Franz LISP on Sun workstations while someone else nearby used a Symbolics 3600 refrigerator-sized machine, I was never all that impressed with the LISP machine. The performance wasn't all that great. Initially garbage collection took 45 minutes, as it tried to garbage-collect paged-out code. Eventually that was fixed. The hardware was not very good. Too much wire wrap and slow, arrogant maintenanc…
This mentality seems to have carried over to (most) modern FP stacks
“ I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will.” What? They’re awesome. They present a vision of the future that never happened. And I don’t think anyone serious expects lisp machines to come back btw.
See also: Amiga romantics. 8-bit romantics. PDP-10 romantics. Let them stay. Let them romantizice.
As someone who used Franz LISP on Sun workstations while someone else nearby used a Symbolics 3600 refrigerator-sized machine, I was never all that impressed with the LISP machine. The performance wasn't all that great. Initially garbage collection took 45 minutes, as it tried to garbage-collect paged-out code. Eventually that was fixed. The hardware was not very good. Too much wire wrap and slow, arrogant maintenanc…
"Old man yells at Lisp Machines (And their enthusiasts)"
Earlier quoted context omitted.
And portacle.
Although Portacle isn't being maintained any more (at least as far as the main developer was concerned last time I looked a few months ago).
https://github.com/portacle/portacle/issues/182
In 2020 they went full-time on developing the game Kandria.
They're still active:
As someone who used Franz LISP on Sun workstations while someone else nearby used a Symbolics 3600 refrigerator-sized machine, I was never all that impressed with the LISP machine. The performance wasn't all that great. Initially garbage collection took 45 minutes, as it tried to garbage-collect paged-out code. Eventually that was fixed. The hardware was not very good. Too much wire wrap and slow, arrogant maintenanc…
> "So we could ship a product." This was an alien concept to them. This mentality seems to have carried over to (most) modern FP stacks
Most of them still require a very specific, very special, very fragile environment to run, and require multiple tools and carefully ran steps just so it does same you can do with a compiled executable linked to the OS.
They weren't made for having libraries, or being packaged to run in multiple machines, or being distributed to customers to run in their own computers. Perhaps JS was the exception but only to the last part.
Sure it mostly works today, but a lot of people put a lot of the effort so we can keep shoving square pegs into round roles.
> I’d be saying that in a few years there are going to be a lot of huge farms of GPUs going very cheap if you can afford the power. People could be looking at whether those can be used for anything more interesting than the huge neural networks they were designed for. Author falls into the same trap he talks about in the article. AI is not going away, we are not going back to the pre-AI world.
I can't predict when the shakeout will be, but I can predict that not every AI company is going to survive when it happens. The ones that do survive will be the ones that found a viable niche people are willing to pay for, just as the dot-com bubble bursting didn't kill Paypal, eBay, and so on. But there are definitely going to be some companies going bankrupt, that's pretty clear even at this point.
As someone who used Franz LISP on Sun workstations while someone else nearby used a Symbolics 3600 refrigerator-sized machine, I was never all that impressed with the LISP machine. The performance wasn't all that great. Initially garbage collection took 45 minutes, as it tried to garbage-collect paged-out code. Eventually that was fixed. The hardware was not very good. Too much wire wrap and slow, arrogant maintenanc…
> "So we could ship a product." This was an alien concept to them. This mentality seems to have carried over to (most) modern FP stacks
I'll grant that there are plenty of languages that seemed designed for research and playing around with cool concepts rather than for shipping code, but the FP languages that I see getting the most buzz are all ones that can ship working code to users, so the end users can just run a standard .exe without needing to know how to set up a runtime.