In order to see how important and iconoclastic (nevermind good) the Lisp Machine paradigm is, examine the trickle-down effect that it put in motion. There are popular IDEs today that are only _just beginning_ to integrate concepts from that paradigm. The Lisp Machines were so far ahead of their time, so visionary, that it will take decades if not centuries for the consensus to catch up to what they represented.
The marketplace sucks for things like healthcare, public transportation, infrastructure. But it works pretty good for many other things and if there is one success story in the last 6 decades then computing would be it.
The marketplace also gave us the billion dollar computer security industry as a direct result of practices that were 'selected' by said marketplace. We find ourselves operating in an emergent, cascading-effects, all-subsuming space - that we have absolutely no control over - and is now threatening to destroy us.
I would go as far as to say that you are completely out of touch with technology if you think for a moment that the marketplace has longterm memory or stratagem ability. This is validated by the constant re-invention / regurgitation of the same ideas. It seems that abiding by 'greed is good' short-term, is not really a good way to wield the Promethean fire.
Maybe you have not paid attention: but we are talking about Lisp Machines with special hardware and their specific operating system written in Lisp from the ground up. Thus it's not your idea of a high-level Lisp, but a Lisp which runs the graphics card interface, handles memory, schedules processes, as much as it implements the network interface incl. the whole TCP/IP stack. It runs on top of a special processor for which the compiler generates machine code.
And yes, there are various emulators for various Lisp Machines - there are some for Intel + SPARC (Medley, the emulator for Xerox' Interlisp-D) and there is Symbolics' Open Genera (DEC Alpha, and nowadays Intel 64bit and ARM 64bit). Those have been sold commercial. The there are a handful of non-commercial emulators. But this is old software and there are only tiny user groups left. You can use those, but its more like a time-travel to an alternative universe and its state 20 years ago.
That's what Open Genera does. Symbolics wrote an emulator for the Ivory architecture, which allowed people to use much of the OS on a DEC Alpha under Unix.
> I maintain that 90% of those who irrationally praise that old system this much did never even work a single hour with one of them
Possibly true, though I have. I know both its pros and cons (and it conses a lot).
> They don't, but they just can't keep from creaming all over any forum where the LISP machine is mentioned at all. Darn I need my morning coffee, I'm cranky.
I think you have a point here.
I think its useful to have alternative approaches preserved and some people have influenced by it and implemented slightly similar stuff on current software (see for example MCCLIM for Common Lisp, which is a portable reimplementation of some of the UI management and graphics substrate of the Symbolics Lisp Machine OS). It did not catch on, since much of that is very exotic and complex at the same time. But those have probably never had the opportunity to format a disk in Lisp, read a Unix tape via a Lispm tape drive or copy a file via anonymous FTP onto a Lispm. It's not the fault of the current generation - they haven't had the chance to actually work with such computers (since the whole thing was mostly dead after the early 90s) and all in all they were very rare (roughly 10000 Lisp Machines in various forms were built) and the whole experience was very expensive - thus only affordable to companies and well funded research. This makes it more mythical and mysterious. Then also the commercial systems have't been 'freed' yet - their source code is not available under an open source / free software license - only the old MIT code has been made available - but that is really ancient.
It's the same with the old Lispm keyboards - the layout is cool, but using it for typing? Who has ever typed with the old mechanical keyboards from the 80s and would do that today? There are only a few...
Then of course you accuse the Lisp advocates of suffering from what you so clearly represent. If you had a clue, even a minimal one, you would never write 'just port the damn software'. This statement - and your previous comments - portray fundamental ignorance of what you are trying to argue against. May I suggest further education - Lisp Machine emulators are widely available - so as to stop making a fool of yourself.
The K-machine development was 'just porting the damn software' to a large extent.
Thank you for proving my point, which you didn't get.
a: They were not successful, but should have been, and now it's too late.
b: If anybody cared it wouldn't be too late for success.
a: No see, somebody DID care!
b: And still no success... qed
Lots of the features of the software only work because everything is in the same address space, working out how to do similar things across multiple address spaces for a modern operating system is much harder.
I have talked with RG on Skype but not about historical stuff.
TI modernized a lot of stuff of LMI (hardware and software). But TI management radically pulled the plug when the government funding for the various projects went away. DARPA financed their 32bit Lisp microprocessor - but there was no one to fund the next round and TI not even published an emulator or published the source code under some license. It just went away... there is an archive with code from them - but who would touch it without a license?
A student travelled to the east to hear Master Sussman discourse on the Lisp-nature. When Master Sussman began holding forth on low-level programming in Scheme, the student interrupted him.
"Master," he said, "How can you do such bit-level programming in a high-level language such as Lisp? Would you not want to use C or pure assembly language?"
Master Sussman replied, "A fisherman was walking along the beach, when he spotted an eagle. 'Brother eagle,' said he, 'how distant and unreachable is the sky!' The eagle said nothing, and flew away."
With that, the student was enlightened.
I don't think so, and, this being HN, I thought we all knew by now that just because the market favors something it doesn't make it better in every aspect to other virtually unknown things. Most easily identifiable examples of this are windows vs linux, gui vs cli, and point-and-click interfaces (touchscreen or mouse) vs keyboard.
The market favors what the masses favor, and the masses favor simple, intuitive interfaces with minimal learning curve. Versatility, efficiency, power and everything else that necessitates even the smallest of learning curves are all damned by the market. When's the last time we've seen an average joe read an instruction manual?
In any case, looking at Lisp OSes vs Unix OSes, there is a design dichotomy where both options have great advantages. Anyone correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand Lisp OSes chose to have the whole OS work in a single high-level language, which allows a very natural coupling between programs, basically destroying the distiction between whole programs and program functions. On the other hand, Unix OSes chose to have a very unassuming framework for programs that would best support a great diversity of programming languages so that they could best interoperate despite the fact that they could work via very different semantics. This structure, as we all know, consists around the semantics of files which could be thought of as global variables, plain text arguments as very unassumming (untyped and with no predefined arity) function call arguments, standard input, output, and error as lazily-evaluated function arguments, and environment variables which could be thought as dynamically-scoped variables.
I don't know exactly why Unix won over Lisp, but I could guess that it was because people favored language diversity or even just being able to stick to the language they already knew over having to learn Lisp.
I must say, though, I'm very interested in how Lisp OSes took advantage of this monolanguage property of theirs. I think I remember hearing that when an error (an exception) ocurred in any applicacion, the system could open the exact line that raised the error in an editor, allowing one to edit the source and load the modifications while the program is still running. That's just impossible in Unix by design and sounds super exciting. It would be totally useless for an average computer user of today, though. Maybe if the average computer user were a programmer they could see the value, but we all know that's never going to happen. In the beginning all users were programmers and administrators, but as the masses also became users, the administrators are now a minority and the programmers even more so. Such technology like Lisp OSes favor programmers and that's their sin in the market.
That was then, though. Now, the real obstacle for Lisp OSes, more so than them favoring a minority, is that we've built a shitload of stuff on top of Window and Linux. How much work would it be to port Chrome or Firefox (both of which are like OSes on their own) to a Lisp OS? Not to mention the other loads of apps that people depend on for their work.
That reminds me, you know how much people bitch about not being able to work because they can't find buttons with specific drawings when offered LibreOffice instead of MS Office? There's lots more to the market than it choosing solely based on quality. The software market is really depressing at times.
> Nostalgia is a powerful agent of deception.
I wasn't alive when Lisp machines were a thing, so no nostalgia applies to me here.