The Symbolics Genera Programming Environment (1987) | Hacker News Reader

The Symbolics Genera Programming Environment (1987)

archive.org

48 pointsmepian8 comments

"Genera's design philosophy holds that no action of the software should be hidden from the designer"

So refreshing and edgy even to this day.

Also says a lot about the "New Jersey" model that CS as a whole pivoted to (see UNIX haters handbook), where every damn thing is hard , opaque and/or hidden, either in propreitary blobs, or not much differently, in complex unreliable build systems, and binary blobs.

A bit sad that we're moving back out of this religious dogma of the 70s with half-baked lisps like Python etc.

The original Bell Labs approach was to make things as simple as possible, even at the expense of functionality- should that impact simplicity.

Adhering to that philosophy is very, very hard. Especially since complexity sells better & is often more expedient.

You can run Open Genera: https://archives.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html

And if you’re interested in other historical lisp systems, you can try out Medley Interlisp right in your browser: https://interlisp.org/

direct to pdf, https://ia804608.us.archive.org/10/items/smbx-genera-program...

Search for “kalman reti lisp” on youtube for some neat demos of this. (Trivia: He registered the first ever .com)

This sounds similar to Smalltalk systems, especially in that it clashes with modern version control source code practices.

What is the modern equivalent, that would be used with files checked in to git? IDE's? Jupyter or Livebook?

Some combination of [0], [1], [2], and [3] is the closest modern equivalent.

[0] https://slime.common-lisp.dev/

[1] https://github.com/joaotavora/sly

[2] https://mcclim.common-lisp.dev/

[3] https://lem-project.github.io/

Also, Portable Genera is still being developed by a former Symbolics employee but unfortunately it is only available for a chosen few, at least for now.

"Cuis-Smalltalk uses GitHub to host, version, diff its core development and to manage a set of external packages"

https://cuis-smalltalk.github.io/TheCuisBook/Daily-Workflow....

Even back in the '90s: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/mastering-envydevel...

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