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Comment by karlgkk | Hacker News Reader

“ I am just really bored by Lisp Machine romantics at this point: they should go away. I expect they never will.”

What? They’re awesome. They present a vision of the future that never happened. And I don’t think anyone serious expects lisp machines to come back btw.

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For me what's inspiring about lisp machines is not any particular implementation detail, but the very idea that working with a computer can be this immersive, holistic experience where everything is accessible and workable through a single, but multidimensional human affordance; language. That the APIs and code within a computer system can be the ergonomic inward counterpart to rich accessible user interfaces, just as a man works with his hands and looks with his eyes, but easily turns inward to think and imagine. This is what I felt when I got that leaked Genera image going in a linux VM several years ago.

Its fair enough to say that lisp machines had this or that hardware limitation, or that they weren't really compatible with market needs, but to criticize 'lisp machine romantics' like this article does is to fail to understand what really motivates that romanticism. Maybe you have to be a romantic to really get it. Romanticism is abstract, its about chasing feelings and inspirations that you don't really understand yet. Its about unrealized promises more than its about the actual concrete thing that inspires them.

(I'm also an Amiga romantic, and I think what inspires me about that machine is equally abstract and equally points to a human attitude towards making and using software that seems sadly in decline today)

>They present a vision of the future that never happened

Hauntology strikes again

See also:

Amiga romantics.

8-bit romantics.

PDP-10 romantics.

Let them stay. Let them romantizice. <glasses tint="rose">

Without those people lots of history (and hence knowledge) would be lost. I’m happy they are around.

As an Amiga romantic, I’d say we have no illusions about a late-80s Amiga being a good idea if it existed today. But it captured my imagination (and at just the right age) like nothing else.

You're using an 8-bit machine right now.

Smalltalk romantics

All of those are systems small enough that all their details could fit inside one human brain. That is a very intoxicating feeling, at least for me.

OpenDoc

I'm honestly surprised nobody tried to capitalize on the early 2000s Java hype by making some kind of Java box (there were a few things labeled as a Java OS or a Java workstation but none of these were really a "Java Machine")

Sun JavaStation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation

I was aware of these, it's kinda what I meant by "None of these were really Java Machines". They were just shitty sparc machines that had Java OS in flash. It didn't have some kind of Java co-processor and still relied on a JVM. Java OS was pretty neat but I wouldn't really consider it a "Java OS" since it was basically just a microkernel that bootstrapped a JVM from what I've read. An actual Java machine IMO would have to at least have some kind of Java co-processor and not rely on a software based JVM

Sun also tried, and failed, to bring to market, a microprocessor architecture for running Java on metal - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MAJC

In theory you could say that simcards were / (are?) Tiny java on a chip machines.

Coincidentally on the front page, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45989650

ARM also used to have opcodes for Java: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle

Haha, I was the one who submitted it after going down a rabbit hole from this :)

Azul Systems was making Java machines a while ago.

There were attempts to create a "Java Machine". Apart from JOP that is mentioned in another comment there were other systems that had a whole OS written in Java, a stub interrupt handler written in assembler would call into Java for any event.

There were a lot of efforts to accelerate the JVM in hardware, the one i remember is the ARM "Jazelle" extension https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jazelle

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