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Lisp had a 10 year head start on expensive academic machines that were low on industry uses. C had a head start on high-end mainframes for actual work. Then the

Lisp had a 10 year head start on expensive academic machines that were low on industry uses. C had a head start on high-end mainframes for actual work. Then the main contenders on the nascent PC were assembly, C and Pascal. P-code based compilers arrived quickly and were faster to develop with, but the resulting code was inefficient—and early PCs were sufficiently resource-constrained that inefficient code was very noticeable. So C obtained the territory that mattered: high-end business machines and the low-end machines that would spark the computing revolution, and just had to grow the two together. Lisp had a head start, but wasn't on the track that mattered.

AnimalMuppet 9y ago
> C had a head start on high-end mainframes for actual work. No. C started on low-end minicomputers, not high-end mainframes. And why didn't Lisp take over the low-end minicomputers? Because Lisp was too resource-hungry, and those low-end minicomputers didn't have the muscle to run Lisp well. They ran C just fine, though.
- fusiongyro 9y ago
  So how did Lisp have the home court advantage then? :)
  - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
    Because it existed, and C didn't. Because it had a decade of code already written, and C didn't. Because it ran on many machines, and C initially ran on one.
    - fusiongyro 9y ago
      It ran on several machines, but not the ones that mattered. The existing code was irrelevant and not portable. I'm not denigrating Lisp. I'm saying the network effects favored C because the PC happened to take off.
      - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
        > It ran on several machines, but not the ones that mattered. And why wasn't it ported to the ones that mattered? I keep hearing about how easy it is to build a (simple) Lisp compiler. Why wasn't it ported, or a fresh one built? > The existing code was irrelevant and not portable. Why was the existing code irrelevant? In ten years, nobody wrote anything in Lisp that mattered to anyone? In fact, there were Lisp compilers for the PDP-10, which (I presume) could run on the PDP-11, where C began to take over the world. Why didn't those Lisps take over the world? You can't explain it just by C existing on the right machines at the right time. (There wouldn't have been C on the PC if it hadn't taken off - at least to some degree - on the PDP-11 a decade earlier.)
        fusiongyro 9y ago
        I don't have to explain why Lisp failed to take off. I just have to explain why C did, because network effects are more significant than language advantages. This is my central thesis. I don't think awareness of Lisp was evenly distributed among people developing on PCs in the time period when the network advantage was obtained. Even if it was, if there were already a decent C compiler, I don't think most practical engineers would immediately embark on a compiler development project. During this era, those who did know about Lisp certainly would have regarded it as being too resource-intensive for work in a resource-constrained environment like the PC. I think it's specious to say it's easy to develop a simple Lisp compiler, so why didn't anything get ported. The code you may have wanted to port would not have been written in some minimalist dialect of Lisp, it would have been written in ZetaLisp. So there would be assumptions about resources and the underlying system that you would have to fake. And again, we're talking about porting from a resource-rich environment to a resource-scarce environment. It was probably a reach for me to say there wasn't anything to port. But what would someone have wanted to port? A graphical application that ran on a Lisp machine would have made assumptions about the display that aren't true about a PC. An academic AI program would have been too short on resources to be much use. What wound up selling the PCs in the early days was business applications. Were there an assortment of useful business applications on Lisp machines that there was commercial demand for? WordStar and Visicalc invented that territory and were first released in the late 70s—does anyone remember programs for the Lisp machine that businesses were clamoring for? And really, software churn has always meant there are more new programs in use than old ones. What I don't have an explanation for is why the C compilers produced better code than the Pascal compilers. Partly, I know p-code made it faster to build a Pascal compiler but I don't know why it inhibited development of more performant ones. Turbo Pascal's speed of compilation was a result of not having an AST, which probably inhibited performance optimizations, but that may have been too late in the story to explain anything. And I don't have an explanation for why nobody developed a Lisp-like language that had explicit allocation. My best guess would be simply that their attention was elsewhere, probably working on AI, which wouldn't bottom out until after the winners were already entrenched. By the way, in case it isn't clear, I am really enjoying this conversation. I'm very interested in this window of time in computing and if I have a wrong idea about something, I do want to know. The only way to preserve this history is to talk about it and keep the memory alive.
    - deleted 9y ago
      [deleted]

AnimalMuppet 9y ago

> C had a head start on high-end mainframes for actual work. No. C started on low-end minicomputers, not high-end mainframes. And why didn't Lisp take over the low-end minicomputers? Because Lisp was too resource-hungry, and those low-end minicomputers didn't have the muscle to run Lisp well. They ran C just fine, though.

fusiongyro 9y ago
So how did Lisp have the home court advantage then? :)
- AnimalMuppet 9y ago
  Because it existed, and C didn't. Because it had a decade of code already written, and C didn't. Because it ran on many machines, and C initially ran on one.
  - fusiongyro 9y ago
    It ran on several machines, but not the ones that mattered. The existing code was irrelevant and not portable. I'm not denigrating Lisp. I'm saying the network effects favored C because the PC happened to take off.
    - AnimalMuppet 9y ago
      > It ran on several machines, but not the ones that mattered. And why wasn't it ported to the ones that mattered? I keep hearing about how easy it is to build a (simple) Lisp compiler. Why wasn't it ported, or a fresh one built? > The existing code was irrelevant and not portable. Why was the existing code irrelevant? In ten years, nobody wrote anything in Lisp that mattered to anyone? In fact, there were Lisp compilers for the PDP-10, which (I presume) could run on the PDP-11, where C began to take over the world. Why didn't those Lisps take over the world? You can't explain it just by C existing on the right machines at the right time. (There wouldn't have been C on the PC if it hadn't taken off - at least to some degree - on the PDP-11 a decade earlier.)
      - fusiongyro 9y ago
        I don't have to explain why Lisp failed to take off. I just have to explain why C did, because network effects are more significant than language advantages. This is my central thesis. I don't think awareness of Lisp was evenly distributed among people developing on PCs in the time period when the network advantage was obtained. Even if it was, if there were already a decent C compiler, I don't think most practical engineers would immediately embark on a compiler development project. During this era, those who did know about Lisp certainly would have regarded it as being too resource-intensive for work in a resource-constrained environment like the PC. I think it's specious to say it's easy to develop a simple Lisp compiler, so why didn't anything get ported. The code you may have wanted to port would not have been written in some minimalist dialect of Lisp, it would have been written in ZetaLisp. So there would be assumptions about resources and the underlying system that you would have to fake. And again, we're talking about porting from a resource-rich environment to a resource-scarce environment. It was probably a reach for me to say there wasn't anything to port. But what would someone have wanted to port? A graphical application that ran on a Lisp machine would have made assumptions about the display that aren't true about a PC. An academic AI program would have been too short on resources to be much use. What wound up selling the PCs in the early days was business applications. Were there an assortment of useful business applications on Lisp machines that there was commercial demand for? WordStar and Visicalc invented that territory and were first released in the late 70s—does anyone remember programs for the Lisp machine that businesses were clamoring for? And really, software churn has always meant there are more new programs in use than old ones. What I don't have an explanation for is why the C compilers produced better code than the Pascal compilers. Partly, I know p-code made it faster to build a Pascal compiler but I don't know why it inhibited development of more performant ones. Turbo Pascal's speed of compilation was a result of not having an AST, which probably inhibited performance optimizations, but that may have been too late in the story to explain anything. And I don't have an explanation for why nobody developed a Lisp-like language that had explicit allocation. My best guess would be simply that their attention was elsewhere, probably working on AI, which wouldn't bottom out until after the winners were already entrenched. By the way, in case it isn't clear, I am really enjoying this conversation. I'm very interested in this window of time in computing and if I have a wrong idea about something, I do want to know. The only way to preserve this history is to talk about it and keep the memory alive.
  - deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]