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I think I mentioned that before, Lucid as a company has never done anything with Lisp Machines. Their target market was Unix and various UNIX platforms. What th

by lispm 9y ago

I think I mentioned that before, Lucid as a company has never done anything with Lisp Machines. Their target market was Unix and various UNIX platforms. What they were famous for was Lucid CL as a very high quality implementation/compiler/runtime of Common Lisp for UNIX. They sold licenses to various companies (like IBM, DEC, SUN, ...), which sold it under their brand with their enhancements. Lucid CL was used for application delivery by commercial customers, because the compiler and runtime were fairly good. The Lucid CL IDE wasn't THAT advanced. Fairly standard CL stuff. Example: SUN sold Lucid CL as Sun Common Lisp and the IDE was called Symbolic Programming Environment: http://3e8.org/pub/scheme/doc/lisp-pointers/v2i2/p5-endelman.pdf http://3e8.org/pub/scheme/doc/lisp-pointers/v2i2/p5-endelman... That's nice, but not too advanced and with a basic look&feel. Lucid as a company failed, because the C++/Energize product failed in the market and it consumed all the money they had earned from milking their Lisp business, which itself was in a shrinking market.

pjmlp 9y ago
Thanks for clarifying it. Still if such products had been successful earlier, most likely our C++ IDEs would be much joyful to use even without plugging into clang. It always feels so many products have been a market failure just because people weren't yet ready for them. Only to have others 10, 20 years later to conquer exactly the same market.
- lispm 9y ago
  Prices of Energize IDE in 1992: Single user: $5425 Five users: $2975 each Ten users: $3250 each A single Energize C++ compiler was slightly more than $1000. On top of that Energize was a relatively complex piece of software. Probably it would also have been a good idea to have a capable UNIX desktop machine, which even in 1992 wasn't that cheap. The whole thing was aimed at professional C++ programmers in a relatively limited market of 'mission critical applications'.

by lispm 9y ago

pjmlp 9y ago

Thanks for clarifying it. Still if such products had been successful earlier, most likely our C++ IDEs would be much joyful to use even without plugging into clang. It always feels so many products have been a market failure just because people weren't yet ready for them. Only to have others 10, 20 years later to conquer exactly the same market.

lispm 9y ago
Prices of Energize IDE in 1992: Single user: $5425 Five users: $2975 each Ten users: $3250 each A single Energize C++ compiler was slightly more than $1000. On top of that Energize was a relatively complex piece of software. Probably it would also have been a good idea to have a capable UNIX desktop machine, which even in 1992 wasn't that cheap. The whole thing was aimed at professional C++ programmers in a relatively limited market of 'mission critical applications'.