Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

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> Lisp would have been really good relative to BASIC interpreters at the time

I see no evidence for that. Lisp was a pain on tiny machines with bad user interface.

> 64K is solid for a Lisp if you own the whole machine.

I had a Lisp on an Apple II. It was a useless toy. I was using UCSD Pascal and Modula 2 on it. Much better.

I had Cambridge Lisp on an Atari with 68k CPU. It was next to unusable due to frequent crashes on calling FFI functions.

The first good Lisp implementation I got was MacScheme on the Mac and then the breakthrough was Macintosh Common Lisp from Coral Software.

> Had one of the Lisperati evangelized Lisp on micros

There were articles for example in the Byte magazine. Lisp simply was a bad fit to tiny machines. Lisp wasn't very efficient for small memory. Maybe with lots of work implementing a tiny Lisp in assembler. But who would have paid for it? People need to eat. The tiny Lisp for the Apple II was not usable, due to the lack of useful programming environment.

> Alas, they were off charging a gazillion bucks to government contracts.

At least there were people willing to pay for it.

> There were articles for example in the Byte magazine.

And they were stupid. Even "good" Lisp references didn't cover the important things like hashes and arrays. Everybody covered the recursive crap over and over and over ad nauseam while people who actually used Lisp almost always sidestepped those parts of the language.

> I had a Lisp on an Apple II. It was a useless toy. I was using UCSD Pascal and Modula 2 on it. Much better.

And yet UCSD Pascal was using a P-machine. So, the problem was the implementation and not the concept. Which was exactly my point.

> At least there were people willing to pay for it.

Temporarily. But then it died when the big money went away and left Lisp all but dead. All the while all the people using languages on those "toys" kept right on going.

> And yet UCSD Pascal was using a P-machine. So, the problem was the implementation and not the concept. Which was exactly my point.

My point is that implementations don't come from nothing. You can't just demand them to be there. They have to be invented/implemented/improved/... Companies at that time did not invest any money in micro implementations of Lisp. I also believe that there was a reason for that: it would have been mostly useless.

> Temporarily. But then it died when the big money went away and left Lisp all but dead. All the while all the people using languages on those "toys" kept right on going.

Lot's of toys and languages for them died.

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