7 ms·

Sorry, you can't sell Lisp. Maybe once upon a time that was possible, but those days are gone. And Lispers generally are a whiny, creaky bunch to deal with; me

Sorry, you can't sell Lisp. Maybe once upon a time that was possible, but those days are gone. And Lispers generally are a whiny, creaky bunch to deal with; me included. Pleasing that crowd is a serious undertaking. I sometimes try to imagine a world where these things took off, but the closest thing I've touched is Emacs and I'm pretty sure that's not what they had in mind.

dleslie 8y ago
I would buy a Lisp machine, provided that I could afford it. That proviso was the undoing of them, IMHO.
jolmg 8y ago
I would also buy a Lisp Machine, provided I could afford one. I'm really interested to see this software environment that I've heard spoken so highly of. What I've understood so far of it sounds amazing.
- rjsw 8y ago
  Try one of the emulators.
- jacquesm 8y ago
  Wait another hundred years and it will be close to magical. We have the collective habit of ascribing great properties to old technologies while bitching about the technologies we have today. I'm certainly no exception here, but the fact is that if it really was that good it likely would have won in the marketplace. Nostalgia is a powerful agent of deception.
  - armitron 8y ago
    You should definitely read 'Worse is Better' by Richard Gabriel if you truly believe that the marketplace is the final arbiter of what is really good. Hint: It's not. In order to see how important and iconoclastic (nevermind good) the Lisp Machine paradigm is, examine the trickle-down effect that it put in motion. There are popular IDEs today that are only _just beginning_ to integrate concepts from that paradigm. The Lisp Machines were so far ahead of their time, so visionary, that it will take decades if not centuries for the consensus to catch up to what they represented.
    - _0ffh 8y ago
      C'mon, you are really proving gp right here with that kind of superlative language. It's plain untrue. If the s/w was even very good for it's time, why would nobody have cared to just port it to a general purpose machine? After all LISP is all high level stuff, divorced from the hardware level. So, if the software was even just good, why did nobody care to carry it into the future?
      - lispm 8y ago
        > After all LISP is all high level stuff, divorced from the hardware level Maybe you have not paid attention: but we are talking about Lisp Machines with special hardware and their specific operating system written in Lisp from the ground up. Thus it's not your idea of a high-level Lisp, but a Lisp which runs the graphics card interface, handles memory, schedules processes, as much as it implements the network interface incl. the whole TCP/IP stack. It runs on top of a special processor for which the compiler generates machine code. And yes, there are various emulators for various Lisp Machines - there are some for Intel + SPARC (Medley, the emulator for Xerox' Interlisp-D) and there is Symbolics' Open Genera (DEC Alpha, and nowadays Intel 64bit and ARM 64bit). Those have been sold commercial. The there are a handful of non-commercial emulators. But this is old software and there are only tiny user groups left. You can use those, but its more like a time-travel to an alternative universe and its state 20 years ago.
        _0ffh 8y ago
        I have been paying attention, I've known that story for well over twenty years, and I fear I might have to listen to rehashes of the same damn old story at least every couple of years for the rest of my life, thank you very much. What's irking me is that the older the story gets the more irrational and extreme the ongoing deification. I say if the UX and tooling where that godlike as some are wont to make out, you can easily have that without the need for an actual lisp machine, just port the damn software. I maintain that 90% of those who irrationally praise that old system this much did never even work a single hour with one of them, so where are they getting their delusions from? How would they know it's not just as inefficient and frustrating at times as any other system? They don't, but they just can't keep from creaming all over any forum where the LISP machine is mentioned at all. Darn I need my morning coffee, I'm cranky.
  - zephyrfalcon 8y ago
    Yes, but the opposite happens too. There are plenty of people who believe that in technology, the latest is the greatest, and everything that came before that must have been inferior.
  - jolmg 8y ago
    > the fact is that if it really was that good it likely would have won in the marketplace I don't think so, and, this being HN, I thought we all knew by now that just because the market favors something it doesn't make it better in every aspect to other virtually unknown things. Most easily identifiable examples of this are windows vs linux, gui vs cli, and point-and-click interfaces (touchscreen or mouse) vs keyboard. The market favors what the masses favor, and the masses favor simple, intuitive interfaces with minimal learning curve. Versatility, efficiency, power and everything else that necessitates even the smallest of learning curves are all damned by the market. When's the last time we've seen an average joe read an instruction manual? In any case, looking at Lisp OSes vs Unix OSes, there is a design dichotomy where both options have great advantages. Anyone correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand Lisp OSes chose to have the whole OS work in a single high-level language, which allows a very natural coupling between programs, basically destroying the distiction between whole programs and program functions. On the other hand, Unix OSes chose to have a very unassuming framework for programs that would best support a great diversity of programming languages so that they could best interoperate despite the fact that they could work via very different semantics. This structure, as we all know, consists around the semantics of files which could be thought of as global variables, plain text arguments as very unassumming (untyped and with no predefined arity) function call arguments, standard input, output, and error as lazily-evaluated function arguments, and environment variables which could be thought as dynamically-scoped variables. I don't know exactly why Unix won over Lisp, but I could guess that it was because people favored language diversity or even just being able to stick to the language they already knew over having to learn Lisp. I must say, though, I'm very interested in how Lisp OSes took advantage of this monolanguage property of theirs. I think I remember hearing that when an error (an exception) ocurred in any applicacion, the system could open the exact line that raised the error in an editor, allowing one to edit the source and load the modifications while the program is still running. That's just impossible in Unix by design and sounds super exciting. It would be totally useless for an average computer user of today, though. Maybe if the average computer user were a programmer they could see the value, but we all know that's never going to happen. In the beginning all users were programmers and administrators, but as the masses also became users, the administrators are now a minority and the programmers even more so. Such technology like Lisp OSes favor programmers and that's their sin in the market. That was then, though. Now, the real obstacle for Lisp OSes, more so than them favoring a minority, is that we've built a shitload of stuff on top of Window and Linux. How much work would it be to port Chrome or Firefox (both of which are like OSes on their own) to a Lisp OS? Not to mention the other loads of apps that people depend on for their work. That reminds me, you know how much people bitch about not being able to work because they can't find buttons with specific drawings when offered LibreOffice instead of MS Office? There's lots more to the market than it choosing solely based on quality. The software market is really depressing at times. > Nostalgia is a powerful agent of deception. I wasn't alive when Lisp machines were a thing, so no nostalgia applies to me here.
- cellularmitosis 8y ago
  Welp, in the mean time you can learn about the keyboards they used :) https://youtu.be/oDozftThFMw https://youtu.be/oDozftThFMw
  - lispm 8y ago
    Not bad, but Richard Greenblatt was not founding Symbolics - his company was Lisp Machine, Inc., which he founded together with Stephen Wyle, and Alex Jacobson. ;-) Though, LMI also sold its machine with a space cadet keyboard and their first machine was also basically a CADR. Symbolics also was not a joint venture. Tom Knight was actually a co-founder of Symbolics.

dleslie 8y ago

I would buy a Lisp machine, provided that I could afford it. That proviso was the undoing of them, IMHO.

jolmg 8y ago

I would also buy a Lisp Machine, provided I could afford one. I'm really interested to see this software environment that I've heard spoken so highly of. What I've understood so far of it sounds amazing.

rjsw 8y ago
Try one of the emulators.
jacquesm 8y ago
Wait another hundred years and it will be close to magical. We have the collective habit of ascribing great properties to old technologies while bitching about the technologies we have today. I'm certainly no exception here, but the fact is that if it really was that good it likely would have won in the marketplace. Nostalgia is a powerful agent of deception.
- armitron 8y ago
  You should definitely read 'Worse is Better' by Richard Gabriel if you truly believe that the marketplace is the final arbiter of what is really good. Hint: It's not. In order to see how important and iconoclastic (nevermind good) the Lisp Machine paradigm is, examine the trickle-down effect that it put in motion. There are popular IDEs today that are only _just beginning_ to integrate concepts from that paradigm. The Lisp Machines were so far ahead of their time, so visionary, that it will take decades if not centuries for the consensus to catch up to what they represented.
  - _0ffh 8y ago
    C'mon, you are really proving gp right here with that kind of superlative language. It's plain untrue. If the s/w was even very good for it's time, why would nobody have cared to just port it to a general purpose machine? After all LISP is all high level stuff, divorced from the hardware level. So, if the software was even just good, why did nobody care to carry it into the future?
    - lispm 8y ago
      > After all LISP is all high level stuff, divorced from the hardware level Maybe you have not paid attention: but we are talking about Lisp Machines with special hardware and their specific operating system written in Lisp from the ground up. Thus it's not your idea of a high-level Lisp, but a Lisp which runs the graphics card interface, handles memory, schedules processes, as much as it implements the network interface incl. the whole TCP/IP stack. It runs on top of a special processor for which the compiler generates machine code. And yes, there are various emulators for various Lisp Machines - there are some for Intel + SPARC (Medley, the emulator for Xerox' Interlisp-D) and there is Symbolics' Open Genera (DEC Alpha, and nowadays Intel 64bit and ARM 64bit). Those have been sold commercial. The there are a handful of non-commercial emulators. But this is old software and there are only tiny user groups left. You can use those, but its more like a time-travel to an alternative universe and its state 20 years ago.
      - _0ffh 8y ago
        I have been paying attention, I've known that story for well over twenty years, and I fear I might have to listen to rehashes of the same damn old story at least every couple of years for the rest of my life, thank you very much. What's irking me is that the older the story gets the more irrational and extreme the ongoing deification. I say if the UX and tooling where that godlike as some are wont to make out, you can easily have that without the need for an actual lisp machine, just port the damn software. I maintain that 90% of those who irrationally praise that old system this much did never even work a single hour with one of them, so where are they getting their delusions from? How would they know it's not just as inefficient and frustrating at times as any other system? They don't, but they just can't keep from creaming all over any forum where the LISP machine is mentioned at all. Darn I need my morning coffee, I'm cranky.
- zephyrfalcon 8y ago
  Yes, but the opposite happens too. There are plenty of people who believe that in technology, the latest is the greatest, and everything that came before that must have been inferior.
- jolmg 8y ago
  > the fact is that if it really was that good it likely would have won in the marketplace I don't think so, and, this being HN, I thought we all knew by now that just because the market favors something it doesn't make it better in every aspect to other virtually unknown things. Most easily identifiable examples of this are windows vs linux, gui vs cli, and point-and-click interfaces (touchscreen or mouse) vs keyboard. The market favors what the masses favor, and the masses favor simple, intuitive interfaces with minimal learning curve. Versatility, efficiency, power and everything else that necessitates even the smallest of learning curves are all damned by the market. When's the last time we've seen an average joe read an instruction manual? In any case, looking at Lisp OSes vs Unix OSes, there is a design dichotomy where both options have great advantages. Anyone correct me if I'm wrong, but I understand Lisp OSes chose to have the whole OS work in a single high-level language, which allows a very natural coupling between programs, basically destroying the distiction between whole programs and program functions. On the other hand, Unix OSes chose to have a very unassuming framework for programs that would best support a great diversity of programming languages so that they could best interoperate despite the fact that they could work via very different semantics. This structure, as we all know, consists around the semantics of files which could be thought of as global variables, plain text arguments as very unassumming (untyped and with no predefined arity) function call arguments, standard input, output, and error as lazily-evaluated function arguments, and environment variables which could be thought as dynamically-scoped variables. I don't know exactly why Unix won over Lisp, but I could guess that it was because people favored language diversity or even just being able to stick to the language they already knew over having to learn Lisp. I must say, though, I'm very interested in how Lisp OSes took advantage of this monolanguage property of theirs. I think I remember hearing that when an error (an exception) ocurred in any applicacion, the system could open the exact line that raised the error in an editor, allowing one to edit the source and load the modifications while the program is still running. That's just impossible in Unix by design and sounds super exciting. It would be totally useless for an average computer user of today, though. Maybe if the average computer user were a programmer they could see the value, but we all know that's never going to happen. In the beginning all users were programmers and administrators, but as the masses also became users, the administrators are now a minority and the programmers even more so. Such technology like Lisp OSes favor programmers and that's their sin in the market. That was then, though. Now, the real obstacle for Lisp OSes, more so than them favoring a minority, is that we've built a shitload of stuff on top of Window and Linux. How much work would it be to port Chrome or Firefox (both of which are like OSes on their own) to a Lisp OS? Not to mention the other loads of apps that people depend on for their work. That reminds me, you know how much people bitch about not being able to work because they can't find buttons with specific drawings when offered LibreOffice instead of MS Office? There's lots more to the market than it choosing solely based on quality. The software market is really depressing at times. > Nostalgia is a powerful agent of deception. I wasn't alive when Lisp machines were a thing, so no nostalgia applies to me here.
cellularmitosis 8y ago
Welp, in the mean time you can learn about the keyboards they used :) https://youtu.be/oDozftThFMw https://youtu.be/oDozftThFMw
- lispm 8y ago
  Not bad, but Richard Greenblatt was not founding Symbolics - his company was Lisp Machine, Inc., which he founded together with Stephen Wyle, and Alex Jacobson. ;-) Though, LMI also sold its machine with a space cadet keyboard and their first machine was also basically a CADR. Symbolics also was not a joint venture. Tom Knight was actually a co-founder of Symbolics.