4 ms·

Sorry to reply to myself, but when I awoke this morning, it occurred to me that above I am describing my daily-driver programming environment from early 1988, C

Sorry to reply to myself, but when I awoke this morning, it occurred to me that above I am describing my daily-driver programming environment from early 1988, Coral Common Lisp (except that who-calls wasn't built in; it was a contrib). Besides the previously-mentioned features, I could build a windowing UI by dragging pieces together. I could build the resulting native-code app for delivery by choosing "Save" from a menu. I could write WDEFs (the code resources that defined window shape and behavior) and other low-level stuff interactively in Lisp. I could patch arbitrary calls with assembly code written and debugged interactively in the Lisp environment (one of the SK8 authors was previously an assembly-language video-game programmer; he was ecstatic about this feature of CCL). Comparing my current daily-driver development machine to the one on which I was using Coral Common Lisp in 1988, the new machine has twice the word size, 400 times the clock speed, 16,000 times as much RAM, and 400,000 times as much disk space. Meanwhile, the development tools are in many ways worse, rather than better.

Zak 9y ago
I haven't used Coral Common Lisp, but I've used SBCL. It does have much of what you're describing, and I do have to wonder why it didn't catch on with a wider audience. There's a general belief in the tech community that better tech wins. When something works better, hackers will start using it, and if there are incidental barriers, they get solved. None of the explanations I've seen have been satisfactory; I reject the both the idea that Lisp isn't really that big an advantage and that the average hacker isn't smart enough to see it.
- mikelevins 9y ago
  SBCL is great. I use it often. I don't think the proposition that better tech wins passes the laugh test. You could argue that I'm a cynical old curmudgeon, though. I've been writing software for a living for thirty years now. It's not about hackers being smart enough to see Lisp's advantages. It's about them (1) being the sort of programmer who prefers programming-as-teaching over programming-as-carpentry, and (2) getting enough exposure to live-programming environments to see what the deal is. The important advantages are not immediately obvious. They're whole system synergies, and it takes time and experience to grasp the nature of stuff like that, regardless of how smart you are. Plus, maybe there are just more carpenters than teachers.

Zak 9y ago

I haven't used Coral Common Lisp, but I've used SBCL. It does have much of what you're describing, and I do have to wonder why it didn't catch on with a wider audience. There's a general belief in the tech community that better tech wins. When something works better, hackers will start using it, and if there are incidental barriers, they get solved. None of the explanations I've seen have been satisfactory; I reject the both the idea that Lisp isn't really that big an advantage and that the average hacker isn't smart enough to see it.

mikelevins 9y ago
SBCL is great. I use it often. I don't think the proposition that better tech wins passes the laugh test. You could argue that I'm a cynical old curmudgeon, though. I've been writing software for a living for thirty years now. It's not about hackers being smart enough to see Lisp's advantages. It's about them (1) being the sort of programmer who prefers programming-as-teaching over programming-as-carpentry, and (2) getting enough exposure to live-programming environments to see what the deal is. The important advantages are not immediately obvious. They're whole system synergies, and it takes time and experience to grasp the nature of stuff like that, regardless of how smart you are. Plus, maybe there are just more carpenters than teachers.