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Comment by gpderetta | Hacker News Reader

> The good news is that in 1995 we will have a good operating system and programming language; the bad news is that they will be Unix and C++.

And 30 years later they show few signs of letting go.

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Yep. And nary a tear is shed these days over the death of the so-called superior Lisp machines.

The Spirit of the Machine still lives in some form in emacs.

Maybe not in any position to do anything about it, but I'm quite sad :-/

I was gonna say, I do shed a tear now and then dreaming of Lisp machines and the future that could have been.

Meh. Lisp machines still exist. They're just simulated in various Lisp's runtime environments. It turns out that a RISC machine running a Lisp interpreter or an executable compiled from Lisp source tends to perform better than a tagged/cdr Lisp Machine w/ hardware GC.

That being said... I've wanted to implement an old Explorer using an FPGA for a while. Maybe if I just mention it here, someone will get inspired and do it before I can get to it.

Lisp machines didn't have hardware GC, though they had hardware support for read/write barriers.

Kind of. A lot of the GC support in the Symbolics 3600 architecture is on the Microcode level (current CPUs usually don't have such operations in Microcode). The word size of the CPU is 36bit. The CPU operations don't deal with the type and gc tags on the instruction level, this is done on the Microcode level. Things like "invisible pointers" are also dealt on the Microcode level.

Ephemeral GC, concentrates on garbage collecting objects in RAM: For example every memory page has a page tag, which marks it modified or not. The ephemeral GC uses this to scan only over changed pages in memory. The virtual memory subsystem keeps a table of swapped-out pages pointing to ephemeral pages. The EGC can then use this information...

At a certain level, sure, but C++ at least has definitely lost out. In the 90s it seemed like it might really take over all sorts of application domains, it was incredibly popular. Now and for probably the last couple decades it and C have only kept around 10% of the global job market.

My gut feeling is there are still the same number of jobs for C++ today as there were in the 90s. It's just that they're hard to find because the total number of programming jobs has exploded. The reason you can't see the C++ jobs is because the newer, non-C++ jobs are crowding them out on job boards. [This is a hypothesis, one I haven't (dis)proven.]

For fun a few weeks ago I went looking for COBOL on VMS jobs. They're definitely still out there, but you do have to look for them. No one's going to send you an email asking if you're interested and if you don't hang out with COBOL/VMS people, you may not know they exist.

I think my point is the total number of C/C++ jobs today are probably the same or slightly higher than 1994. But the total number of Java and C# jobs (or Ruby or Elixr or JavaScript jobs) is dramatically higher than in 1994, if for no other reason than the fact these languages didn't exist in 1994.

[As an aside... if you're looking for a COBOL / VMS programmer/analyst... I spent much of the 80s as a VMS System Manager, coding custom dev tools in Bliss and some of the 90s working on the MicroFocus COBOL compiler for AIX. And while you would be crazy to ignore my 30+ years of POSIX/Unix(tm) experience, I think it would be fun to sling COBOL on VMS.]

> My gut feeling is there are still the same number of jobs for C++ today as there were in the 90s. It's just that they're hard to find because the total number of programming jobs has exploded. The reason you can't see the C++ jobs is because the newer, non-C++ jobs are crowding them out on job boards. [This is a hypothesis, one I haven't (dis)proven.]

I don't know anything about the total number of C++ jobs, but there's a huge filter bubble effect for job searching. If you don't mention a language on your resume or list it under your skills then you're very unlikely to see any jobs for it or have anybody contact you for a job using it, whether we're talking about C++, Python, Typescript, or even technologies like Docker.

It's not C++ that has been replaced, it's VB.

Depends on the market, even the C++ wannabe replacements are implemented in compiler toolchains written in C++.

It gets a bit hard to replace something that your compiler depends on to exist in first place.

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