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The Lisperati1000 is a cyberdeck terminal dedicated to Lisp programming
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- kratom_sandwich 5y agoWhat's with the recent wave of portable terminals? Has any of these made it ever into the hands of customers? I believe the only device that actually came out is the Cosmo Communicator (https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/cosmo-communicator https://www.www3.planetcom.co.uk/cosmo-communicator) There's also Devterm - https://www.clockworkpi.com/devterm https://www.clockworkpi.com/devterm Popcorn Pocket - https://pocket.popcorncomputer.com/ https://pocket.popcorncomputer.com/ Teenyserv - https://expanscape.com/teenyserv/the-teenyserv-prototypes/ https://expanscape.com/teenyserv/the-teenyserv-prototypes/
- daniellarusso 5y agoCyberdecks have been popular for at least a year or so, but, yes, not sure why this one in particular made it to the frontpage. Hackaday has quite a bit of cyberdeck projects on their blog, here: https://hackaday.com/tag/cyberdeck/ https://hackaday.com/tag/cyberdeck/ I am guessing part of the appeal is having a portable device with a QWERTY tactile keyboard that does not have a locked-down OS. Also, it is much easier to replace a damaged screen when compared to an iPad.
- nanna 5y ago> not sure why this one in particular made it to the frontpage Because of HNs connection to Lisp via Paul Graham, but also because Lisperati1000's creator Conrad Barski is a bit of a legend in Lisp circles, having authored Land of Lisp (LOL) http://landoflisp.com/ http://landoflisp.com/ Of LOL, PG said, "Turns out the border between genius and insanity is a pretty cheery place". So now you see why HN holds the Lisperati1000 especially dear :)
- eigenhombre 5y agoBarski's music video[1] might give some more flavor to PG's comment. Brightens my day every time I watch it. [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM1Zb3xmvMc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HM1Zb3xmvMc
- nanna 5y agoHow could I forget! "Simple but refined, guaranteed to blow your mind! The Land of Lisp. Minimal and sleek but so clever you'll freak! The land of Lisp." Now I too eat parentheses for breakfast, and lunch. (Or at least I aspire to.)
- daniellarusso 5y agoThank you. I did not make the association with viaweb. Yay RTML. I now have a deeper appreciation for the ethos of his particular cyberdeck implementation.
- pjmlp 5y agoI guess many miss the days of: https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/898/Psion/ https://www.computinghistory.org.uk/det/898/Psion/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Atari_Portfolio https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_Communicator https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Toshiba_Libretto Among plenty of other ones.
- zentiggr 5y agoMy Psion Series 3A got lots of use until the third time I dropped it and wrecked the wiring in the hinge area, and it refused to power up again. Was sad.
- cestith 5y agoHP LX series was a big one. The AlphaSmart Dana almost fits, too - it was a Palm device rather than just the dedicated word processor and keyboard functions.
- smackeyacky 5y agoThe king of them all, of course, is the Radio Shack TRS-80 PC-2 pocket computer. Much cooler than the Sharp ones because Radio Shack.
- daniellarusso 5y agoThe Gemini PDA from your planetcom link looks interesting.
- dTal 5y agoDon't. I got a Cosmo Communicator, the successor device. The good: the keyboard is great (At first - see below). It can be taken apart, which is great because you'll be doing that a lot... The bad: Everything else. The device is fragile and impractical and the build quality is questionable. The case is sheet metal held in with tiny tabs - the hinge and bottom cover often pop off spontaneously. Breakages are common and no spares are available except by emailing support and begging; and if they agree, they will charge you the earth. The cover display cracked entirely by itself - a design flaw. Most unforgivably, after a year, the keyboard has worn in such a way that it frequently misses keystrokes. And - the coup-de-gras for me - there's no overcurrent protection on the right USB port, so it will melt the first time some lint shorts it (ask me how I know!).
- daniellarusso 5y agoWell, now I understand why people build their own. ;) Thank you for the deterrent and inspiration to roll-my-own. Adafruit and Sparkfun get ready.
- RodgerTheGreat 5y agoApparently Adafruit will be selling a device inspired by the PocketCHIP: https://www.hackster.io/news/diodes-delight-s-next-raspberry-pi-compute-module-4-carrier-is-inspired-by-the-late-pocket-chip-993ff48da066 https://www.hackster.io/news/diodes-delight-s-next-raspberry...
- codezero 5y agoI love my PocketCHIP - but I wouldn't go with that form factor again - or at the very least, not with the type of physical keyboard they included. It was very unwieldy and generally not fun to use, I always connected an external keyboard. The game controls were also garbage with that type of input sensor. It would have benefited greatly from a better keyboard, or a gamepad and doing away with the keyboard entirely. Glad to see it coming back though!
- throwaway316943 5y agoIt seems to be a collision of custom keyboards, cheap and capable SoCs, easy access to displays and driver boards and a dose of nostalgia and tech weariness. I like this one but I’d suffer it to be a bit larger to accommodate a standard keyboard and a pi4. I love the display, seems like you can buy them on Amazon and elsewhere since they are targeted at case modders and the like.
- lallysingh 5y agoI don't see where the parens are on the keyboard. No number row. Is it another shift/fn level down?
- dTal 5y agoFn + K/L I think it's a strange choice not to have them be first class, unshifted characters - and yet have such a dizzying array of modifier keys.
- deleted 5y ago[deleted]
- nerdponx 5y agoThis looks like a Vortex Core keyboard, with the default layout.
- alpaca128 5y agoCustom keyboards often seem to follow different rules when it comes to ergonomics and intuitive keybindings. I have my arrow keys on Fn+h/j/k/l and they're much faster and more comfortable to reach than on any standard keyboard. I have my number row behind the Fn key and yet I'm faster and more accurate at entering numbers because the physical keys are placed better. It's very hard to predict how well a key combination works. Also, tiny keyboards are usually programmable, so the key labels might not be correct. If your layout is custom enough it becomes very hard to find keycaps which match the setup(and basically impossible if you don't want to wait >6 months).
- lallysingh 5y agoFn + home row isn't bad.
- fouric 5y agoI agree with you. I also think that the keyboard was likely designed to be familiar to those comfortable with the standardized keyboard layout, as opposed to being efficient. From an efficiency perspective, there's a lot that you can improve on, both in the general case (layout for English typing) and in the special case of Lisp programming - but I don't think that was their goal. I wouldn't buy one of these myself, but I can understand why someone else would. As a software hack, there's always Shift Parentheses[1]. [1] https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/#s17-shift-parentheses https://stevelosh.com/blog/2012/10/a-modern-space-cadet/#s17...
- blue1 5y agowhat exactly is a cyberdeck (outside of Neuromancer)?
- lmohseni 5y agoIt’s a custom built quasi portable computer, sometimes based on a ras pi or other cheap and small dev board. Check out old.reddit.com/r/cyberdeck!
- numpad0 5y agoA growing trend of Neuromancer-inspired, utilitarian-looking, retro-themed, console-focused, low-volume or one-off art projects.
- creamytaco 5y agoPlastic waste.
- jakearmitage 5y agoYou must be fun at parties.
- jmrm 5y agoI really don't like the keyboard, but at least it's always nice to see a brand new LISP machine :-)
- sunsipples 5y agoI have no use for this but want one. is that it's purpose?
- FearNotDaniel 5y agoYes. From the same site's review of a different device: "Cyberdecks are, almost by their very definition, mostly about aesthetics. There are very few of them that are designed to serve a real, practical purpose that can’t be done better by a modern laptop or tablet." https://www.hackster.io/news/the-griz-sextant-is-a-raspberry-pi-cyberdeck-with-beautiful-80s-styling-b37d71284eae https://www.hackster.io/news/the-griz-sextant-is-a-raspberry...
- sunsipples 5y agothank you, im looking at my old netbook which i still use from time to time and wondering how i can maybe lessen it's usefulness while making it more aesthetically interesting. I was thinking e-ink and mechanical keys with a lightweight battery and retractable antennas now I have some shopping to do
- snemvalts 5y agoI don't understand how any neck holds up to sustained use of devices with this screen placement.
- drcode 5y agoThis is a common concern with this form factor, but I think there's a lot of variability between people on how comfortable they are with a "book reading" posture, such as required by a cyberdeck. It will work for some people, not so much for other people.
- matheusmoreira 5y agoWhat exactly is a cyberdeck?
- drcode 5y agoIt has many different definitions, but in this case I mean a flat portable computer, without a hinge.
- detaro 5y agoIt comes from cyberpunk literature, where a "deck" is whatever portable device someone uses to access cyberspace/hack stuff/..., and has recently become somewhat of a catchall for DIY/customized/unusual "cool" portable computing devices that don't fit in the common laptop/tablet/... categories.
- fouric 5y agoWhat do you define as "book reading posture"? Book at eye level, arms holding it up?
- drcode 5y agoWell, I think most people read a book in one of two postures: (1) placing the book on a desk (2) sitting on a couch or bed, with legs raised, book resting on legs https://images.theconversation.com/files/361577/original/file-20201005-18-lmf7w7.jpg https://images.theconversation.com/files/361577/original/fil... The Lisperati1000 can function in either posture. (I would argue that holding a book in front of you in the air is not a common way to read long-form books, due to arm fatigue.)
- drcode 5y agoHi, I'm with Lisperati and we're working hard to manufacture these. Feel free to ask any questions. No, we don't know when they'll be ready, but when they are ready we will sell them directly (no presale/crowdfunding/etc) Also: we already have DIY build instructions with STL files available at lisperaticomputers.com. However, the official device will have an aluminum enclosure.
- nanna 5y ago> we're working hard to manufacture these. Really exciting! Assumedly it's Linux under the hood, and you'd be able to install whatever packages normally available through, say apt? So this could this be used for writing LaTeX, for example? Also and tangentially, has there been any progress with Walking Dream? http://walkingdre.am/ http://walkingdre.am/
- slim 5y agoIt's raspbian under the hood
- nanna 5y agoApologies, read the post too quickly. Thanks.
- drcode 5y agoLOL I've built a lot of tech for walkingdre.am, but my best prototype so far just isn't "fun" enough (based on a highly subjective definition of "fun") so I'm stuck at the moment, trying to improve that aspect of the game (particularly, the combat and crafting system)
- ribs 5y agoPost updates sign-up page is broken, so I’m not sure if I’m subscribed. I’m an Oculus Quest user and really want to try a redirected walking game so I need those updates!
- agumonkey 5y agoI have a feeling that the Casio post not long ago motivated this submission. Or maybe it's the Zeitgeist
- dkersten 5y ago> Lisp is one of the oldest programming languages that is still in use today I don’t like that this keeps getting repeated. Common Lisp is different from the original Lisp and other modern Lisps are even more different. It’s like saying Algol is one of the oldest programming languages still in use today, because many Algol-descendants are quite popular still.
- lispm 5y agoCommon Lisp may be expanded, but it still has the core of early Lisp, and its ancestors trace back to it: ZetaLisp, Maclisp, Lisp 1.5, Lisp 1. It still has the old operators: car, cdr, cons, eval, apply, append, cond, quote, lambda, set, setq, atom, and, eq, equal, list, map, mapcon, maplist, nconc, not, null, or, print, prog, read, remprop, rplaca, rplacd, ... It has the old data structures like symbols and cons cells. Thus programs from 1960 often can be made running in Common Lisp, unless they make use of system specific functions.
- kragen 5y agoThere were no system specific functions in 01960 because there was only one system, which is to say, one implementation of LISP. EVAL was dynamically scoped. And good luck getting any FEXPR-based code from 01960 to run!
- lispm 5y agoLucky us, writing FEXPRs was not a documented feature in the Lisp 1 manual from 1960.
- rowland66 5y agoFrom the article: > But if you need some complex algorithms — particularly algorithms that do a lot of heavy mathematical lifting — then Lisp is the ideal choice. Is this right? I never thought of LISP as good fit for numerical processing.
- lispm 5y agoIt may not be the fastest, but something like Common Lisp has extensive numeric capabilities built-in like computing with floats, bignums, complex, ratios, ... Extensive mathematical software has been written in Lisp like Reduce (written in Standard Lisp), Macsyma, Axiom, ... In education for a while something like Derive, MuSimp/MuMath, ... was used. Derive should also have been used in pocket calculators, which would be in the spirit of Lisperati1000.
- olodus 5y agoLisp was the favored language for programming AI back in the day. Though the kind of AI problems focused on then was much more symbolic-themed than numerical themed as they are now. Lisp is highly regarded when solving complex problems, though would probably not get hailed as the fastest language.
- vincent-manis 5y agoSomebody (Guy Steele?) once did a benchmark of Maclisp and the DEC PDP-10 Fortran compiler on numerical problems. As I recall Maclisp came out ahead.
- bitwize 5y agoIf you stick to floats and arrays of floats, Fortran is probably still faster. But Common Lisp and fully conformant Schemes have an extensive numeric tower including arbitrary precision integers, rationals, and complex numbers built in, making Lisp useful for some kinds of numeric computing that would be cumbersome even in Fortran. Plus, I once heard of a guy who wrote an FFT implementation in Gambit Scheme that beat FFTW in speed...
- sedachv 5y agoCommon Lisp is the best calculator because it handles rational and complex numbers, and transcendental functions over them, correctly.
- grae_QED 5y agoWow, I remember commenting on the original r/cyberdeck post three months ago. Pretty wild that it's on hacker news now.
- Slackwise 5y agoIf this were a 60% board instead that could fold the display over to cover the keys for transportation, this would be an instant sell for me.
- shimonabi 5y agoThe idea isn't new. It was even featured on HN a few days ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-yuZ2pejGU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-yuZ2pejGU
- vessenes 5y agoGiving up on assembly language was the apple in our Garden of Eden: Languages whose use squanders machine cycles are sinful. The LISP machine now permits LISP programmers to abandon bra and fig-leaf. Alan Perlis, Epigrams in Programming, ACM SIGPLAN Sept. 1982
- dang 5y agoOne related thread: The Lisperati1000 Computer - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26022797 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26022797 - Feb 2021 (25 comments)
- niccl 5y agoTotally Off Topic, but I really appreciate all the curating you do on these threads. Thanks dang
- gorgoiler 5y agoWhat are the best cyberdecks I can buy right now? I love the idea of a good keyboard + xterm + browser. A lot.
- na85 5y agoYou know for a dedicated lisp machine, I'm surprised to see it doesn't have ( and ) accessible without using a modifier key.
- neallindsay 5y agoNot the point of the article, but I literally laughed out loud when I read the first line: "There are dozens of programming languages out there..."