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The main topic 'adding OO' to Lisp is a good counter example. > Now make this thought experiment interesting: Imagine adding object orientation to the C and Sc

by lispm 8y ago

The main topic 'adding OO' to Lisp is a good counter example. > Now make this thought experiment interesting: Imagine adding object orientation to the C and Scheme programming languages. How was it done in Lisp? 1) various experiments and getting real work experience with 1st and 2nd generation OOP in Lisp (Flavors, Loops, CommonObjects, Object Lisp, ...) 2) various proposals for a standard OO system 3) a small group (with people from Xerox PARC, Symbolics and Lucid) working on an OO system with large amounts of user feedback -> developing a full-blown portable public domain CLOS implementation and using public mailing lists for feedback. The resulting implementation PCL (Portable Common LOOPS) was ported to more than a dozen Lisp implementations. A SPEC was written. Books were written. The result was CLOS. THE object system for Lisp. Built with the input of hundreds of developers/users. It worked great. The fear of group work in and for Lisp is massively overblown. > Why don't they make a free development system that calls to mind some of the lost glories of the LispM, even if they can't reproduce another LispM? The reason why this doesn't happen is because of the Lisp Curse. The reason is that the first systems were developed in a totally different environment: large research organizations like PARC and MIT AI Lab swimming in DARPA money employing the brightest minds of their generation. A genius like Richard Feynberg wanted to work there: '...many a visitor at Thinking Machines was shocked to see that we had a Nobel Laureate soldering circuit boards or painting walls...' http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine/ http://longnow.org/essays/richard-feynman-connection-machine... The hacker community can't replicate that in their spare time.

kamaal 8y ago
The sad part in all this is, many people like me will never see how Lisp Machines worked, what it mean't to use and how the overall experience was. This is really like some one describing Ice Cream to a person who never tasted it ever.
- lispm 8y ago
  Common Lisp was developed to have that language power outside of those.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    From what I understand, having never experienced those machines first-hand, that's just half of the equation. The tooling & larger ecosystem is missing.
- rjsw 8y ago
  There are emulators for all of the different families of Lisp Machines that will run on modern computers.
- Jach 8y ago
  Similarly there is lots of source code that we'll never see, some of it Lisp even. What beauties might they contain, especially if someone wrote a Fabien-style black book to bring forth the interesting bits? The solution is to be sad, in the same way we can be sad about the loss of the library of Alexandria, and move on, creating new works of beauty. As brought up above though, it's very hard to do this in your spare time... Few are lucky enough to hack with CL professionally, and I would wager even fewer still of those are any less free than other companies' employees of business needs coming first and forcing some terrible choices in the development cycle. Still, there can be beauty in the system, and CL is very much a systems-oriented language... (https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Incommensurability.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Incommensurability.pdf describes it as more of a programming system than a programming language, even.)
  - kamaal 8y ago
    Many people working in universities could bring it back to life? I mean I understand licensing and all that, but much of that code is past its commercial use. Merely reading OnLisp and Let Over Lambda felt like some one opened up a new portal to a world most of the world's programmers don't even know exists. I would die to read and learn from code written in the past.

by lispm 8y ago

kamaal 8y ago

The sad part in all this is, many people like me will never see how Lisp Machines worked, what it mean't to use and how the overall experience was. This is really like some one describing Ice Cream to a person who never tasted it ever.

lispm 8y ago
Common Lisp was developed to have that language power outside of those.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  From what I understand, having never experienced those machines first-hand, that's just half of the equation. The tooling & larger ecosystem is missing.
rjsw 8y ago
There are emulators for all of the different families of Lisp Machines that will run on modern computers.
Jach 8y ago
Similarly there is lots of source code that we'll never see, some of it Lisp even. What beauties might they contain, especially if someone wrote a Fabien-style black book to bring forth the interesting bits? The solution is to be sad, in the same way we can be sad about the loss of the library of Alexandria, and move on, creating new works of beauty. As brought up above though, it's very hard to do this in your spare time... Few are lucky enough to hack with CL professionally, and I would wager even fewer still of those are any less free than other companies' employees of business needs coming first and forcing some terrible choices in the development cycle. Still, there can be beauty in the system, and CL is very much a systems-oriented language... (https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Incommensurability.pdf https://www.dreamsongs.com/Files/Incommensurability.pdf describes it as more of a programming system than a programming language, even.)
- kamaal 8y ago
  Many people working in universities could bring it back to life? I mean I understand licensing and all that, but much of that code is past its commercial use. Merely reading OnLisp and Let Over Lambda felt like some one opened up a new portal to a world most of the world's programmers don't even know exists. I would die to read and learn from code written in the past.