7 ms·

At some point I realized Unix is basically a long-running IDE + REPL, and thought that was just so cool. And then I realized how horribly inefficient it is at b

by _vya7 10y ago

At some point I realized Unix is basically a long-running IDE + REPL, and thought that was just so cool. And then I realized how horribly inefficient it is at being that. So I started longing for the days when we had some kind of OS where it actually is a IDE + REPL, like an OS based on Lisp. And then I learned that that already was done and didn't turn out as cool as people had hoped. Oh well.

cathexis 10y ago
By all accounts, LispM's were awesome systems to use but lost out due to heavy marketing from unix vendor companies.
- qwertyuiop924 10y ago
  They were also really expensive, and there have always been people who hated Lisp for the syntax.
  - DonaldFisk 10y ago
    On Symbolics Genera they had the option of using C, Pascal, Ada, Fortran, or Prolog.
  - deleted 10y ago
    [deleted]
  - catnaroek 10y ago
    Lisp's syntax is okay, but its semantics is absolutely horrendous. Even ignoring the features that make it not so great a high-level language (such as the lack of a workable static semantics, forcing programmers to dynamically test what can be taken for granted in more civilized languages), Lisp is an even worse low-level systems language. In the 80's, the only way one could reasonably hope to use Lisp as a systems language was to run it on hardware explicitly designed to run Lisp. Of course, hardware support for features like dynamic typing and efficient dynamic allocation of lots of small objects doesn't come for free - this is what made Lisp machines expensive.
    - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
      Well, some of us like Dynamic Typing. Just because you don't doesn't make it horrendous. Given, it can be unpleaseant in certain contexts, but Lisp has really good metaprogramming support, so you can add syntax for a runtime type system relatively simply. It's not optimal, and it certaibly isn't the fastest thing, but it works if you want it. And nowadays, CL (and several of the Schemes) provide more powerful type systems, and sometimes even compile-time typing. All optional, of course.
      - catnaroek 10y ago
        I don't have anything against the presence of dynamic typing - it's in fact very useful. What's annoying is the absence of meaningful static typing: parametric polymorphism and exhaustive pattern matching help me prove things about what my code does and how it can be used by others, but their usefulness is reduced to zero when dynamically typed code is allowed to break the proofs' assumptions. To be perfectly clear: it doesn't bother me in the slightest that a dynamically typed module can break the internal state of another dynamically typed module, since in most likelihood I'm the author of neither, and I respect other people's right to write their code however they wish. So I'd be fine with a Racket-like contract system, where well-typed modules can't be blamed. But, if I understand correctly, what Common Lisp has is nothing like this.
        qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        I don't know. I'm not a CL user. I understand that they actually do have a type system, which can be used to verify that your inputs are of the correct type and match your assumptions. As for contracts, I wouldn't be surprised if someone wrote a macro for it: they're not exactly rocket science, at their simplest. Don't ask me: I'm using Chicken Scheme, which provides both (to an extent: The documentation is worryingly vague about how the type system handles failure).
        catnaroek 10y ago
        Checking alone isn't the point. As things stand, it's no better than C, where the type checker can approve your code, yet it still has undefined behavior.
- rbc 10y ago
  I had a couple of them, a 3620 and a MacIvory. With all the focus on AI, maybe Lisp optimized hardware will return in some form, perhaps a bit like GPUs have become a trend. There was a lot of clever code written on top of Genera. It would be a shame for it to get re-written due to the loss of the Lisp machine platforms.
pmiller2 10y ago
Yeah, the other way around seems to work better: IDE as OS (really IDE as OS shell) a la emacs.
- dozzie 10y ago
  But as the old saying goes, it will still need a decent editor.
  - unhammer 10y ago
    There are several. I prefer evil – see https://bling.github.io/blog/2015/01/06/emacs-as-my-leader-1-year-later/ https://bling.github.io/blog/2015/01/06/emacs-as-my-leader-1... for some intro.
BjoernKW 10y ago
The C64 was like that. Not Lisp but it booted right into a BASIC REPL. BASIC was the C64's operating system. I still think there is a niche for such a system today (mainly for developing rapidly changing business applications you'd nowadays use Excel for, as well as education).
- clifanatic 10y ago
  > I still think there is a niche for such a system today In Polish auto repair, if nowhere else: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a23139/commodore-64-repair-shop/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a23139/co...
- jjrh 10y ago
  Javascript and a browser is essentially that.
- wott 10y ago
  Almost all 8-bit computer were like that. I was so glad when I left REPLs and then debuggers and IDEs, to compiled languages and text-editor + command-line compilation and open source-code. I just cannot fathom the trend of the last 5 years where I hear and read people who cannot live without an IDE, a debugger and a REPL. It feels like living in a jail cell for me; a cell I left 20-25 years ago. Incidentally, I just had to install an IDE today, for HDL development. I urgently have to find a way to turn the process into a Makefile or I will throw the computer through the window before the week-end comes.
DonaldFisk 10y ago
Systems such as Genera were a lot better as development environments than the Unices which replaced them.
jcoffland 10y ago
> And then I realized how horribly inefficient it is at being that. This depends a lot on the user. In the right hands it's extremely efficient.
- TeMPOraL 10y ago
  It's a powerful lever, yes, but if we talk efficiency, then it very much sucks. You get a crappy pseudo-programming language (shell) that spawns a new process (!) for almost every function call, and communicates with unstructured text that has to be parsed and reparsed every step of the way. The only benefits of this system are that it's already there with batteries included, and that it became a de-facto standard.
  - sdegutis 10y ago
    Well also that it's entirely dynamic. You can create and edit "functions" on the fly, which will exist immediately, and are persisted across "sessions". But despite how convenient this is, there's basically no way to make it a whole lot more efficient. Especially the automatic "persisting" feature, there's no other way to do that than writing to disk. That said, you get a lot of similar behavior to this in things like Clojure + CIDER, but due to the nature of the underlying JVM, you still have to restart it every once in a while. Part of me still wonders what we could come up with if we took the principles behind a true interactive IDE + REPL (like Emacs + CIDER) but removed the concept of "wrapping" a VM that was designed for a "programming language", and added the concept of a longer-lived "VM". Not quite what LispMs were, nor even Smalltalk (which relied too heavily on a GUI and a monolithic "image state" rather than individual persist-able files).
    - imtringued 10y ago
      >but due to the nature of the underlying JVM, you still have to restart it every once in a while. The DCEVM project almost removed any limitations on hotswapping code in the JVM until oracle hired the people behind it and then never integrated it into their JVM.
- 10y ago

by _vya7 10y ago

cathexis 10y ago

By all accounts, LispM's were awesome systems to use but lost out due to heavy marketing from unix vendor companies.

qwertyuiop924 10y ago
They were also really expensive, and there have always been people who hated Lisp for the syntax.
- DonaldFisk 10y ago
  On Symbolics Genera they had the option of using C, Pascal, Ada, Fortran, or Prolog.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- catnaroek 10y ago
  Lisp's syntax is okay, but its semantics is absolutely horrendous. Even ignoring the features that make it not so great a high-level language (such as the lack of a workable static semantics, forcing programmers to dynamically test what can be taken for granted in more civilized languages), Lisp is an even worse low-level systems language. In the 80's, the only way one could reasonably hope to use Lisp as a systems language was to run it on hardware explicitly designed to run Lisp. Of course, hardware support for features like dynamic typing and efficient dynamic allocation of lots of small objects doesn't come for free - this is what made Lisp machines expensive.
  - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
    Well, some of us like Dynamic Typing. Just because you don't doesn't make it horrendous. Given, it can be unpleaseant in certain contexts, but Lisp has really good metaprogramming support, so you can add syntax for a runtime type system relatively simply. It's not optimal, and it certaibly isn't the fastest thing, but it works if you want it. And nowadays, CL (and several of the Schemes) provide more powerful type systems, and sometimes even compile-time typing. All optional, of course.
    - catnaroek 10y ago
      I don't have anything against the presence of dynamic typing - it's in fact very useful. What's annoying is the absence of meaningful static typing: parametric polymorphism and exhaustive pattern matching help me prove things about what my code does and how it can be used by others, but their usefulness is reduced to zero when dynamically typed code is allowed to break the proofs' assumptions. To be perfectly clear: it doesn't bother me in the slightest that a dynamically typed module can break the internal state of another dynamically typed module, since in most likelihood I'm the author of neither, and I respect other people's right to write their code however they wish. So I'd be fine with a Racket-like contract system, where well-typed modules can't be blamed. But, if I understand correctly, what Common Lisp has is nothing like this.
      - qwertyuiop924 10y ago
        I don't know. I'm not a CL user. I understand that they actually do have a type system, which can be used to verify that your inputs are of the correct type and match your assumptions. As for contracts, I wouldn't be surprised if someone wrote a macro for it: they're not exactly rocket science, at their simplest. Don't ask me: I'm using Chicken Scheme, which provides both (to an extent: The documentation is worryingly vague about how the type system handles failure).
        catnaroek 10y ago
        Checking alone isn't the point. As things stand, it's no better than C, where the type checker can approve your code, yet it still has undefined behavior.
rbc 10y ago
I had a couple of them, a 3620 and a MacIvory. With all the focus on AI, maybe Lisp optimized hardware will return in some form, perhaps a bit like GPUs have become a trend. There was a lot of clever code written on top of Genera. It would be a shame for it to get re-written due to the loss of the Lisp machine platforms.

pmiller2 10y ago

Yeah, the other way around seems to work better: IDE as OS (really IDE as OS shell) a la emacs.

dozzie 10y ago
But as the old saying goes, it will still need a decent editor.
- unhammer 10y ago
  There are several. I prefer evil – see https://bling.github.io/blog/2015/01/06/emacs-as-my-leader-1-year-later/ https://bling.github.io/blog/2015/01/06/emacs-as-my-leader-1... for some intro.

BjoernKW 10y ago

The C64 was like that. Not Lisp but it booted right into a BASIC REPL. BASIC was the C64's operating system. I still think there is a niche for such a system today (mainly for developing rapidly changing business applications you'd nowadays use Excel for, as well as education).

clifanatic 10y ago
> I still think there is a niche for such a system today In Polish auto repair, if nowhere else: http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a23139/commodore-64-repair-shop/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/gadgets/a23139/co...
jjrh 10y ago
Javascript and a browser is essentially that.
wott 10y ago
Almost all 8-bit computer were like that. I was so glad when I left REPLs and then debuggers and IDEs, to compiled languages and text-editor + command-line compilation and open source-code. I just cannot fathom the trend of the last 5 years where I hear and read people who cannot live without an IDE, a debugger and a REPL. It feels like living in a jail cell for me; a cell I left 20-25 years ago. Incidentally, I just had to install an IDE today, for HDL development. I urgently have to find a way to turn the process into a Makefile or I will throw the computer through the window before the week-end comes.

DonaldFisk 10y ago

Systems such as Genera were a lot better as development environments than the Unices which replaced them.

jcoffland 10y ago

> And then I realized how horribly inefficient it is at being that. This depends a lot on the user. In the right hands it's extremely efficient.

TeMPOraL 10y ago
It's a powerful lever, yes, but if we talk efficiency, then it very much sucks. You get a crappy pseudo-programming language (shell) that spawns a new process (!) for almost every function call, and communicates with unstructured text that has to be parsed and reparsed every step of the way. The only benefits of this system are that it's already there with batteries included, and that it became a de-facto standard.
- sdegutis 10y ago
  Well also that it's entirely dynamic. You can create and edit "functions" on the fly, which will exist immediately, and are persisted across "sessions". But despite how convenient this is, there's basically no way to make it a whole lot more efficient. Especially the automatic "persisting" feature, there's no other way to do that than writing to disk. That said, you get a lot of similar behavior to this in things like Clojure + CIDER, but due to the nature of the underlying JVM, you still have to restart it every once in a while. Part of me still wonders what we could come up with if we took the principles behind a true interactive IDE + REPL (like Emacs + CIDER) but removed the concept of "wrapping" a VM that was designed for a "programming language", and added the concept of a longer-lived "VM". Not quite what LispMs were, nor even Smalltalk (which relied too heavily on a GUI and a monolithic "image state" rather than individual persist-able files).
  - imtringued 10y ago
    >but due to the nature of the underlying JVM, you still have to restart it every once in a while. The DCEVM project almost removed any limitations on hotswapping code in the JVM until oracle hired the people behind it and then never integrated it into their JVM.
10y ago