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Comment by moomin | Hacker News Reader

I have a hard copy of this from back in the day. It’s a great read and a mixture of historical artefact and still relevant criticism.

e.g. It’s really interesting reading about LISP machines but no-one’s building a new one. Equally, all the criticism of sendmail and csh is valid but no-one uses them anymore either.

Most of the reliability criticisms have been addressed over the years but people are still trying to address the design of C, usually by replacing it. Equally, sh remains a problematic scripting language but at least it’s reliably there, unlike many of its many alternatives.

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Pretty much all of the benefits provided by the hardware of lisp machines are provided by modern CPUs, just in more general ways.

Most of the benefit was pushing their interpreter into microcode, leaving more of the data bus free for actual data. Now we have ubiquitous icaches which give you a pseudo harvard architecture when it comes to the core's external bandwidth.

Some of the benefit was having a separate core with it's own microcode doing some of the garbage collection work. Now we have ubiquitous general multicore systems.

Etc.

> Equally, sh remains a problematic scripting language but at least it’s reliably there

I too still have a hard copy of this from way back. This book was my introduction to Unix, as I shifted from programming for DOS/Windows/NT to SunOS, and later, Linux. Despite the many issues (humorously) exposed by this book, the one thing that hooked me is what that quote above implies: It was accessible, durable, and thus worth taking the time to learn, warts and all.

Yeah, I learned an enormous amount from it when I encountered it (in hard copy of course) in 01996, and some of what I learned is now no longer relevant.

There are some people building new Lisp machines: https://opencores.org/projects/igor https://github.com/lisper/cpus-caddr https://interlisp.org/ http://pt.withington.org/publications/LispM.html http://pt.withington.org/publications/VLM.html https://github.com/dseagrav/ld http://www.aviduratas.de/lisp/lispmfpga/ https://groups.google.com/g/comp.lang.lisp/c/36_qKNErHAg https://frank-buss.de/lispcpu/

Also, Morello includes some Lisp-machine-like features. In my view knowing about the history of hardware architectures is far more important for designing new ones than for reproducing old ones.

You encountered this book in 01996? Is that around the time of the Norman Conquest?

I'm assuming you're using octal here. Myself, I haven't used octal since 03677.

:-)

I see you mentioned https://interlisp.org/ ; while it's not a Lisp machine, the Medley Interlisp Project aims to recreate the Interlisp environment that ran on Xerox D-machines up through the 1980s or so. Still very interesting.

I'm older than I look.

kragen should be applauded for getting in early when it comes to the Y10K problem. (-:

* https://cr.yp.to/y2k.html

>It’s really interesting reading about LISP machines but no-one’s building a new one

There have been two open source Lisp Machine OS created in the last 15 or 10 years.

However a big part of the power of the Symbolics/LMI machines was in the software itself (applications), and this is still propietary code.

To reimplement the Lisp Machine applications would take quite a big effort.

The LMI and MIT Lisp Machine source code is not proprietary since about 10 and 20 years respectively.

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