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I don't think Lisp ran well if at all on early microprocessors like the 8-bit 8086. The Lisp community was, then, as now, committed to Lisp being the One True W
by RockyMcNuts 11y ago
I don't think Lisp ran well if at all on early microprocessors like the 8-bit 8086. The Lisp community was, then, as now, committed to Lisp being the One True Way, and centered around the MIT AI lab. The PC revolution was happening, so naturally they built their own CPU, OS and workstations around Lisp. Half the MIT AI lab ended up going to Symbolics, and half to LMI. The West Coast hackers out of Berkeley and Stanford were more into C and Unix. Once the 68000 and the first Sun (especially), also Apollo, SGI workstations came out, they performed well at a broad range of tasks including even Lisp. C compiled software often outperformed similar software written in Lisp. And when volume ramped up (for 68000-based Macintosh as well) they had much better cost/performance compared to relatively low-volume Lisp machines. (like $30,000 for a decent Sun workstation vs. something like twice as much for a Symbolics)
See Hackers, by Steven Levy, also some stuff in Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_Machines https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_Machines
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Symbolics
Had a summer job doing UI work on a Symbolics machine at MITRE, which was kind of like working in the future in summer of 1985... object oriented development, megapixel WIMP interface. I don't think Sun came close to that until UIM/X, Motif, PowerBuilder in early 90s, Visual C++, VB on PCs...like a 10-year head start.
But python especially feels like the revenge of Scheme and Lisp in the sense of being the same sort of dynamic interpreted language and environment where code is data, all the data and code (including libraries) are very accessible and amenable to inspection and tweaking.
- Taniwha 11y agoSun was just spinning up - but remember that first Mac (3/4M pixel WIMP interface) had become available the year before for $2400 (and I was making a living in '84/85 porting Unix to 68ks as fast as we could, every man and their dog had built a workstation in their garage)
- pdw 11y agoThe early Macs had tiny displays, something like 512x342. The first Macs with a resolution of 1024x768 (¾ megapixel) wouldn't appear until the 90s.
- draven 11y agoHow is python homoiconic?
- Volt 11y agoHe didn't say it was.
- Guthur 11y ago> But python especially feels like the revenge of Scheme and Lisp in the sense of being the same sort of dynamic interpreted language and environment where code is data He implied it by saying that code is data in Python. Being able to inspect code is not the equivalent. It is also incorrect to refer to Scheme and Lisp as just dynamic interpreted languages; while they are dynamic and tend to have an interpreter they have also had compilers for quite some time if not from near the very beginning (1957 according to this http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/ibm/Blair-StructureOfLispCompiler.pdf http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/LISP/ibm/Blair-...).
- TeMPOraL 11y agoHe didn't, but it was implied in "But python especially feels like the revenge of Scheme and Lisp in the sense of being the same sort of dynamic interpreted language and environment where code is data". Python doesn't feel to me like revenge of Lisp. It's more like having a shard of a powerful magic artefact; it has some power, but a whole artefact has qualitatively more.
- eggy 11y agoPython is no where near Lisp in code as data. Also, I think what's important is to marry the Lisp programming language and the Lisp Machines. The hardware was built with Lisp in mind. I am a fifth of the way through a 1991 book called "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers" by Peter M. Kogge, and it is like my eyes have opened wide. No more splitting hairs over Ruby, Python, Clojure, Linux, OSX and Windows: Give me a machine tailored for the software running on it. the Von Neumann register-based machine cannot efficiently serve all, it bottlenecks. People talk about Linux as the break away from the Windows and Mac OS crowd, but let's face it, it is all the same thing running on Von Neuman architecture hardware. There are people trying to build machines from scratch to run their own OS on. I hope somebody succeeds. I don't think we need to go back to Lisp Machines, but there's a lot of gold nuggets there to mine and re-use. Technology doesn't age linearly. Sometimes things are forgotten, and need to be rediscovered for progress to jump again. I work in Common Lisp (SBCL, LispWorks), Racket (Scheme), and I play with PicoLisp (incredible for its size). Shen is something I am trying to wrap my head around (optional typing, and optional laziness, functional, pattern matching, and there implementations of the small instruction set it runs on for many common languages - CL (SBCL), Java, Ruby, Python, JavaScript, Haskell, Clojure... Here's to the coming hardware revolution!
- protomyth 11y ago"I don't think Lisp ran well if at all on early microprocessors like the 8-bit 8086" The 8086 was a 16-bit CPU, but you are correct that Lisp didn't run well on it.
- RockyMcNuts 11y agomy bad lol ... was thinking 8088, Z80
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoHey, the 80186 was 8-bit, so maybe you were thinking of that?
- protomyth 11y agoThe 80186 was also a 16-bit chip with a 20-bit address (like the 8086).
- JoeAltmaier 11y ago8-bit bus interface?
- protomyth 11y agoThe 8088, 80188 had 8-bit buses, but I haven't met anyone who claimed that made them 8-bit chips. Neither really affected programmers and it was a maneuver to make the chip a bit cheaper. The 68008 was the same way, and used in some Sinclair designs.
- JoeAltmaier 11y agoRight, that makes sense. Programmatically they were still 16-bit. But as an OS engineer, the 8-bit bus was very much evident when writing drivers, moving data, initializing memory etc.