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I used to work at Cycorp, a holdover from the AI world of the 80s and to this day a classical (CL-like) Lisp shop. They have an old Symbolics box in their entry
by brundolf 6y ago
I used to work at Cycorp, a holdover from the AI world of the 80s and to this day a classical (CL-like) Lisp shop. They have an old Symbolics box in their entryway, positioned by a couch as a small coffee table :)
I find the whole idea of hardware that's specifically optimized for a totally different programming paradigm than what we're used to just fascinating. It's not hard to imagine why we haven't seen more of it: it's really expensive to iterate on a branch in the computing hardware tree, and you're probably better off just writing a runtime for mainline systems. But still, it's fun to think about.
I am a little surprised though that nobody's written an operating system like this for standard hardware. Still a big task, but an order of magnitude less ambitious than custom hardware and with many of the benefits people would've gotten from a Lisp machine.
- mepian 6y agoThere is Mezzano: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
- huachimingo 6y agoSome phones also were made with Java in mind, I think? Not sure if android or old nokias, or both.
- zokier 6y agoThat would be Jazelle, I think handful of Sony-Ericsson phones supported that. Nokia was not a big proponent of Java (they had Symbian to sell), and that was all before Androids time.
- randomifcpfan 6y agoI was told that Jazelle was not popular because it was complicated/expensive to license and slower than JITing. (Basically Jazelle was a hardware interpreter for a subset of Java byte code.)
- monocasa 6y agoIt was slower than JITing, but the kinds of J2ME feature phones that ran it weren't using JITing runtimes anyway. And it was for sure faster than interpreter loop they otherwise would have.
- pjmlp 6y agoAs ex-employee I can tell you that Nokia was surely a big proponent of Java, before LWT appeared, the Nokia UI framework was the best extension to J2ME, hardware accelerated on their devices. They also add J2ME extensions for Symbian capabilities and N95 was the first handset to have real hardware acceleration to J2ME 3D features. It was a big shock to everyone the communication to move beyond Java and C++ into C# and adopt WP7.
- setpatchaddress 6y agoI've never used it, but Oberon running on bare hardware might qualify if one is OK with Modula instead of Lisp. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_%28operating_system%29#Native_Oberon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oberon_%28operating_system%29#...
- pjmlp 6y agoOberon uses Oberon, for Modula-2 that would be Lillith.
- musicale 6y ago> I am a little surprised though that nobody's written an operating system like this for standard hardware You can run a bare metal Smalltalk-80 or Squeak on the Raspberry Pi. https://github.com/michaelengel/crosstalk https://github.com/michaelengel/crosstalk https://github.com/pablomarx/RaspberrySqueak https://github.com/pablomarx/RaspberrySqueak I think Pharo uses the Squeak VM so it could conceivably run on the bare metal Pi as well.
- mark_l_watson 6y agoThanks for mentioning Pharo Smalltalk, I wanted to widen the conversation also. I had a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine from 1982 to about 1986 (did a successful commercial expert system product and used it for technical demos for marketing). I think that Pharo is the closest thing today to that good old Lisp Machine feeling/experience. An amazing development environment. Today, I pay for LispWorks Professional that while a great developer experience, is not like a Lisp Machine. I find it easy to get people to pay me to do Lisp development, but not Smalltalk.
- pjmlp 6y agoPharo started as a Squeak fork, but I think they diverged quite a bit by now though.
- killingtime74 6y agoMaybe you can be that someone
- fidesomnes 6y agoI used to work with you there and you were interesting for the only person building useful software in the whole org. Soon you will learn to hide the fact you worked there.