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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'

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.
    - armitron 8y ago
      How can you talk about irrationality when it's obvious that you've never worked on a Lisp Machine and are thus totally projecting and making up things? Then of course you accuse the Lisp advocates of suffering from what you so clearly represent. If you had a clue, even a minimal one, you would never write 'just port the damn software'. This statement - and your previous comments - portray fundamental ignorance of what you are trying to argue against. May I suggest further education - Lisp Machine emulators are widely available - so as to stop making a fool of yourself.
      - _0ffh 8y ago
        "Lisp Machine emulators are widely available - so as to stop making a fool of yourself" Thank you for proving my point, which you didn't get. a: They were not successful, but should have been, and now it's too late. b: If anybody cared it wouldn't be too late for success. a: No see, somebody DID care! b: And still no success... qed
      - rjsw 8y ago
        I have done a fair bit of work on the various Lisp Machine emulators and don't think that asking why the software wasn't ported to something else is a stupid question. The K-machine development was 'just porting the damn software' to a large extent.
- rjsw 8y ago
  The LMI software could have been ported to a 68020+custom MMU instead of the K-Machine but wasn't. I suspect that they didn't have enough staff with experience of low-level coding to be able to see different options, they seem to have been reluctant to do much to extend the microcode (equivalent to assembler) to support things like new ethernet cards, later drivers just worked by read memory word/write memory word function calls from Lisp. Lots of the features of the software only work because everything is in the same address space, working out how to do similar things across multiple address spaces for a modern operating system is much harder. I have talked with RG on Skype but not about historical stuff.
  - lispm 8y ago
    LMI ran out of steam in 86/87. The end of LMI was really strange. TI modernized a lot of stuff of LMI (hardware and software). But TI management radically pulled the plug when the government funding for the various projects went away. DARPA financed their 32bit Lisp microprocessor - but there was no one to fund the next round and TI not even published an emulator or published the source code under some license. It just went away... there is an archive with code from them - but who would touch it without a license?
- bitwize 8y ago
  > After all LISP is all high level stuff, divorced from the hardware level. A student travelled to the east to hear Master Sussman discourse on the Lisp-nature. When Master Sussman began holding forth on low-level programming in Scheme, the student interrupted him. "Master," he said, "How can you do such bit-level programming in a high-level language such as Lisp? Would you not want to use C or pure assembly language?" Master Sussman replied, "A fisherman was walking along the beach, when he spotted an eagle. 'Brother eagle,' said he, 'how distant and unreachable is the sky!' The eagle said nothing, and flew away." With that, the student was enlightened.
jacquesm 8y ago
The market place is not perfect. But it has - over time - been a pretty good arbiter for those things that could give a business an edge, and computing power definitely is such a thing. Yes, they were ahead of their time. But being ahead of your time is not an advantage per-se, you need to be ahead of your time and you need to be able to deliver practical results which will give the users of your hardware an edge over the competition. The marketplace sucks for things like healthcare, public transportation, infrastructure. But it works pretty good for many other things and if there is one success story in the last 6 decades then computing would be it.
- armitron 8y ago
  The marketplace gave us PHP and Javascript, Facebook and Google. The marketplace also gave us the billion dollar computer security industry as a direct result of practices that were 'selected' by said marketplace. We find ourselves operating in an emergent, cascading-effects, all-subsuming space - that we have absolutely no control over - and is now threatening to destroy us. I would go as far as to say that you are completely out of touch with technology if you think for a moment that the marketplace has longterm memory or stratagem ability. This is validated by the constant re-invention / regurgitation of the same ideas. It seems that abiding by 'greed is good' short-term, is not really a good way to wield the Promethean fire.

_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.
  - armitron 8y ago
    How can you talk about irrationality when it's obvious that you've never worked on a Lisp Machine and are thus totally projecting and making up things? Then of course you accuse the Lisp advocates of suffering from what you so clearly represent. If you had a clue, even a minimal one, you would never write 'just port the damn software'. This statement - and your previous comments - portray fundamental ignorance of what you are trying to argue against. May I suggest further education - Lisp Machine emulators are widely available - so as to stop making a fool of yourself.
    - _0ffh 8y ago
      "Lisp Machine emulators are widely available - so as to stop making a fool of yourself" Thank you for proving my point, which you didn't get. a: They were not successful, but should have been, and now it's too late. b: If anybody cared it wouldn't be too late for success. a: No see, somebody DID care! b: And still no success... qed
    - rjsw 8y ago
      I have done a fair bit of work on the various Lisp Machine emulators and don't think that asking why the software wasn't ported to something else is a stupid question. The K-machine development was 'just porting the damn software' to a large extent.
rjsw 8y ago
The LMI software could have been ported to a 68020+custom MMU instead of the K-Machine but wasn't. I suspect that they didn't have enough staff with experience of low-level coding to be able to see different options, they seem to have been reluctant to do much to extend the microcode (equivalent to assembler) to support things like new ethernet cards, later drivers just worked by read memory word/write memory word function calls from Lisp. Lots of the features of the software only work because everything is in the same address space, working out how to do similar things across multiple address spaces for a modern operating system is much harder. I have talked with RG on Skype but not about historical stuff.
- lispm 8y ago
  LMI ran out of steam in 86/87. The end of LMI was really strange. TI modernized a lot of stuff of LMI (hardware and software). But TI management radically pulled the plug when the government funding for the various projects went away. DARPA financed their 32bit Lisp microprocessor - but there was no one to fund the next round and TI not even published an emulator or published the source code under some license. It just went away... there is an archive with code from them - but who would touch it without a license?
bitwize 8y ago
> After all LISP is all high level stuff, divorced from the hardware level. A student travelled to the east to hear Master Sussman discourse on the Lisp-nature. When Master Sussman began holding forth on low-level programming in Scheme, the student interrupted him. "Master," he said, "How can you do such bit-level programming in a high-level language such as Lisp? Would you not want to use C or pure assembly language?" Master Sussman replied, "A fisherman was walking along the beach, when he spotted an eagle. 'Brother eagle,' said he, 'how distant and unreachable is the sky!' The eagle said nothing, and flew away." With that, the student was enlightened.

jacquesm 8y ago

The market place is not perfect. But it has - over time - been a pretty good arbiter for those things that could give a business an edge, and computing power definitely is such a thing. Yes, they were ahead of their time. But being ahead of your time is not an advantage per-se, you need to be ahead of your time and you need to be able to deliver practical results which will give the users of your hardware an edge over the competition. The marketplace sucks for things like healthcare, public transportation, infrastructure. But it works pretty good for many other things and if there is one success story in the last 6 decades then computing would be it.

armitron 8y ago
The marketplace gave us PHP and Javascript, Facebook and Google. The marketplace also gave us the billion dollar computer security industry as a direct result of practices that were 'selected' by said marketplace. We find ourselves operating in an emergent, cascading-effects, all-subsuming space - that we have absolutely no control over - and is now threatening to destroy us. I would go as far as to say that you are completely out of touch with technology if you think for a moment that the marketplace has longterm memory or stratagem ability. This is validated by the constant re-invention / regurgitation of the same ideas. It seems that abiding by 'greed is good' short-term, is not really a good way to wield the Promethean fire.