6 ms·

Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine (2014)

94 points by gjvc 5y ago

avmich 5y ago
Can we have a simulation of that? Ideally from the hardware level of chips and mechanical design of keyboard?
- jonathanstrange 5y ago
  I think that the best way to get a similar experience would be to grab SBCL and write a high-level virtual machine on top of it that serves as a common GUI, application framework, editor, database, and provides other OS-related functions to make the developer experience 100% within Lisp. No Emacs or anything else from the outside, everything from audio over the graphics and the monitor sizes to networking needs to be abstracted away from the real machine. For example, every GUI and graphics feature needs to be freely scalable and resolution-invariant, based on virtual screens with their own coordinate systems. Aspect ratio is a problem, though, it probably needs to be taken from the real machine. Anyone who wants to develop such a thing would have to take care to also abstract away from common mechanisms that are not very useful. For example, there seems to be absolutely no need to speak about files in such a system except for legacy support with the outside world. Likewise, standard network access should be on a self-configuring virtual p2p network whereas normal networking is a legacy system to the outside world. Well, that's just my idea of a good Lisp machine. I don't mind if it runs on Linux as long as it doesn't feel like it. On the contrary, having such a large ecosystem underneath would allow the VM developers to integrate existing technologies freely into the VM. All it takes is to write a Lisp abstraction layer that deliberately prohibits any direct access to the underlying non-Lispy implementation. (If you grant too much access to the outside from the VM, then you destroy the VM's purpose - guaranteed interoperability, full reflection, and interactivity.) However, I don't see such a truly interactive environment to happen because it's a lot of work.
  - lispm 5y ago
    https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/ https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/ Alternatively a complete OS (not based on SBCL): https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
    - jonathanstrange 5y ago
      Yes, I know these but my suggestion was pretty much the opposite, to use Linux as a basis and abstract away from it entirely. The result is better and much more usable. That's just my opinion, of course, and ymmv.
      - lispm 5y ago
        McCLIM runs on Linux, but it has tools like debugger, editor, listener and others written on top of it. Applications are possible. The UI is similar to that what a Symbolics had. It can serve as the UI part of a larger solution like you mentioned, where some services are provided by Linux, or tools on top of Unix (database, etc).
      - rjsw 5y ago
        An alternative could be to build SBCL into a unikernel.
- Animats 5y ago
  Well, if you made one, it would be much better than the original. We had one refrigerator-sized Symbolics machine at the aerospace company, during the false AI boom of the 1980s. I used it a few times, but it had one LISP fan who used it a lot for a specific project. It broke down a lot, and Symbolics service was very poor. The early versions had a really slow garbage collector. Minutes. With everything in one address space, you had to wait out the GC; you couldn't kill your program and start over. Many of those special-purpose buttons on the Space Cadet-derived keyboard didn't actually do anything. Unless, of course, someone rebound them in EMACS. I did LISP work then, but mostly using Franz LISP on VAXen and Sun Workstations. I was never really into the LISP cult, though I wrote a lot of LISP. Franz LISP could compile to .o files, but you couldn't just link them and make an executable. You had to load them back into the LISP environment. I asked the Franz people why they didn't package up the run time so that you could just link the thing and make an executable without debug break and interpreter capability. They were puzzled at the question. Delivering a finished product was totally alien to them. Eventually, hard-compiled LISP on microprocessors became faster than custom LISP hardware, and LISP machines went away. And, eventually, other languages got enough dynamism that LISP was no longer needed. It's one of those things which was better in retrospect.
  - chris_st 5y ago
    I worked for about four years on Symbolics machines in the AI summer of the mid 80's. We were, perhaps, lucky in that I don't remember them breaking down at all, and our service guy was competent and entertaining. I remember when the generational GC was released. Before that, we just used to reboot at the end of the day... but the generational GC just worked, and we didn't have to worry about memory (so much). Our rep installed the GC thermometer (that showed in the overscan area so you didn't lose any screen real estate), and that really showed the difference. And, by the way, it was Zmacs, not Emacs on the Symbolics.
    - p_l 5y ago
      Refrigerator size suggests to me one of the very early models, which in fact could have been much more problematic than any of the latter. I seem to recall being warned in case of "free to good home" 3600 about how delicate it was.
- jdboyd 5y ago
  From a historical interest perspective, I would love to see some Symbolics simulators. From a productivity and ergonomics perspective, I don't think chip level simulation would be the way two go. First, Genera has been ported forward to new system. First OpenGenera was released for Tru/64 on the DEC Alpha platform as an official product. The fastest Symbolics hardware was about 6 times faster than the original Symbolics hardware. OpenGenera on a 533mhz Alpha was about 3 times faster still. There is a project called VLM to let you run OpenGenera on x86 or ARM and I would imagine it is many times faster still. Also, to my understanding, OpenGenera can still be purchased from symbolics-dks.com for a heft fee. Second, I think that productivity will be limited by how much it is stuck in the past. If nothing else, crypto being behind the times seems likely to be an issue with networking with the rest of the world. I would love to see a more modern system like OpenGenera. I also would love to see Symbolics style keyboards be made and possibly upgraded with things like better keyswitches and USB. That should be doable for someone who wants to make a custom layout, circuit board for that layout, and keycaps but based on QMK compatible hardware.
  - bitwize 5y ago
    > First OpenGenera was released for Tru/64 on the DEC Alpha platform as an official product. The fastest Symbolics hardware was about 6 times faster than the original Symbolics hardware. OpenGenera on a 533mhz Alpha was about 3 times faster still. Open Genera was soft emulation of the Symbolics Ivory hardware on Alpha. I believe they didn't even do anything fancy like dynarec; which is why it was such a doddle to port it (from binaries?!) to amd64. > Second, I think that productivity will be limited by how much it is stuck in the past. If nothing else, crypto being behind the times seems likely to be an issue with networking with the rest of the world. A modern developer running Visual Studio Code has most of the features the Lisp Machines had, and then some. Edit and continue can even be had under Java and C#.
    - diskzero 5y ago
      Are you saying a modern developer running Lisp has most of the same features of a Lisp Machine? If not, what language(s) are you referring to?
- throwaway81523 5y ago
  The Symbolics software is still proprietary, I think. The MIT CADR software is available and can run under emulation, but last I heard it was not all the way there. I'm sure some people here know more about it than I do.
  - imglorp 5y ago
    Yes, see http://symbolics-dks.com http://symbolics-dks.com I once spoke to David once asking if they would open source the UI for posterity and he politely replied in the negative. There are a few MacIvory installations left floating around so they might have a support contract stream (I'm guessing) although I'm not sure what other possible income they hope will be coming. The preservation part is becoming most acute as there will soon be zero hardware and zero people who can get this into digital museum status.
  - rjsw 5y ago
    The MIT CADR software can also run on an FPGA. The main problem with it is that we only have a saved image from a pre-Common Lisp version, there are sources and compiled files for a later version that does implement Common Lisp as well but so far we have not worked out a way to get an updated image. There is an emulator for the LMI Lambda hardware that can run an improved version of the final LMI software.
lukego 5y ago
I really wonder how this compares with modern Smalltalk environments like GToolkit? Are Smalltalkers of today living the Lisp Machine dream here and now? (Should Lisp programmers pining for the Symbolics era put aside their parenthesis and join them?)
- Qem 5y ago
  I have no experience on the Lisp side. But on Smalltalk side, my firsthand experience tells Pharo is awesome.
  - rmckayfleming 5y ago
    Have you used it extensively by chance? I was recently exploring Pharo with "Pharo by Example", but found it really hard to approach because the UI seems to change every major version (with things like the System Browser changing names). Squeak on the other hand was a lot smoother to get started with. I'm also not really sure how to best compare Squeak and Pharo.
    - Qem 5y ago
      Just scratched the surface, no extensive experience with it. Python is what I use at work, but I miss the Pharo environment a lot. It was forked from Squeak, and indeed still evolves at a fast pace. I think one of the reasons for the fork + name change was to give room for breaking changes from the Smalltalk roots. But it's still mostly compatible.
zgs 5y ago
No mention of Smalltalk that did something quite similar a little earlier.
- gumby 5y ago
  This is specifically a site about the symbolics machines, so that’s not a huge surprise but neither PARC nor MIT were at all insular back then and you can see the influence of the interactive MACLISP environment in the Smalltalk (and Interlisp-D) work, and the Smalltalk/Interlisp-D approach on the CADR.
jdboyd 5y ago
This appears to be from 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20140614152722/http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics https://web.archive.org/web/20140614152722/http://lispm.de/s...
- gjvc 5y ago
  yup
- dang 5y ago
  Added above. Thanks!
gumby 5y ago
It was by far the most productive environment I ever used. I was the architect of the lower levels of cyc (Guha the higher levels) and in a short time I was able to write enormous amounts of code that was used for years. There aren’t really other exploratory development environments like that any more. I actually switched the team from D machines to symbolics machines (I had previously worked on D machines at PARC so it wasn’t a familiarity thing). As for speed, cost and reliability: I had two such machines (two computer tables in my office), one with a color screen, each with a massive 8 MW of ram (40 MB). And MCC had an on site symbolics tech who was conveniently across the hall from me. Not really a scalable approach, but this relates to Dan Luu’s post that is currently also on the front page). It was absurdly slow by today’s standards, but not by the standards of the era. Now I do all my development on a MacBook Air. And as with the lispm, I mostly use it in full screen mode.
- neilv 5y ago
  Cyc is legendary. I wouldn't be surprised to see some recurring HN posts on it. Maybe especially for the benefit of people first arriving in the era of DNNs, but also the rest of us.
  - thom 5y ago
    I’d be interested in modern perspectives on Cyc and Eurisko. Hopefully I’ll be forgiven for this impression, but I’ve only heard of Cyc being legendary for basically wasting Lenat’s career after the promising results from Eurisko. It’d be an interesting debate, whether recent advancements like GPT-3 confirmed or refuted the intuition that architecture isn’t enough, we need to encode knowledge. Feels like we have settled on the idea that a good enough architecture (and enough compute time) can take care of the latter. But it’d still be valid to claim GPT-3 lacks common sense. I still think Eurisko is fascinating. Stochastic, heuristic systems seemed to reach their highest point with random forests and subsequent gradient boosting approaches. But we’re still obsessed with quite static models over living, learning agents.
    - gumby 5y ago
dang 5y ago
A couple past threads: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16459477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16459477 - Feb 2018 (10 comments) Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878679 - June 2014 (91 comments)
daly 5y ago
I worked on a Symbolics machine for years. There has never been a more productive environment. I truly miss it.
- guenthert 5y ago
  Other then the obvious (not being easily able to see / change the code of the OS, FS, GUI, networking stack and the editor using its own, pre-CL Lisp dialect), what's missing from a Linux/MacOS + Emacs + Slime + SBCL/CmuCL/CCL environment? Does it really make a difference to an application developer? How do the offerings of Allegro or LispWorks compare?
linguae 5y ago
I'm wondering if there have been any efforts to create a FOSS clone of the Genera operating system for commodity architectures? I was born during the beginning of the 1980's AI winter, and while I've heard a lot of amazing things about Symbolics from this website and other places (especially the development environment), I've never used a Symbolics Lisp machine, and unfortunately I lack the money and the space to own a Symbolics Lisp machine, and sadly Genera is still proprietary. A Genera clone would make this technology much more accessible to those who either can't afford Symbolics Lisp machines or who don't want to pirate Open Genera.
- LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
  The maybe next best thing would be [1] https://interlisp.org/ https://interlisp.org/ & [2] https://github.com/Interlisp https://github.com/Interlisp This 'also ran', but with much less hype. And because the stars aligned right, the full source is out in the open, without any legal hurdles.
jll29 5y ago
Thanks for sharing this detailed post. Looking forward to the next visionary project in creating a new environment for developers, if there will ever be another one pushing the state of the art further. I guess we could now build workstations with 2 TB RAM and 10 TB SSD, but what is the wish list on the software side beyond getting back to past sophistication? Has anyone written a side-by-side comparison of modern (e.g. Intelli-J) environments versus Symbolics or other LISP machines as a research paper?

94 points by gjvc 5y ago

avmich 5y ago

Can we have a simulation of that? Ideally from the hardware level of chips and mechanical design of keyboard?

jonathanstrange 5y ago
I think that the best way to get a similar experience would be to grab SBCL and write a high-level virtual machine on top of it that serves as a common GUI, application framework, editor, database, and provides other OS-related functions to make the developer experience 100% within Lisp. No Emacs or anything else from the outside, everything from audio over the graphics and the monitor sizes to networking needs to be abstracted away from the real machine. For example, every GUI and graphics feature needs to be freely scalable and resolution-invariant, based on virtual screens with their own coordinate systems. Aspect ratio is a problem, though, it probably needs to be taken from the real machine. Anyone who wants to develop such a thing would have to take care to also abstract away from common mechanisms that are not very useful. For example, there seems to be absolutely no need to speak about files in such a system except for legacy support with the outside world. Likewise, standard network access should be on a self-configuring virtual p2p network whereas normal networking is a legacy system to the outside world. Well, that's just my idea of a good Lisp machine. I don't mind if it runs on Linux as long as it doesn't feel like it. On the contrary, having such a large ecosystem underneath would allow the VM developers to integrate existing technologies freely into the VM. All it takes is to write a Lisp abstraction layer that deliberately prohibits any direct access to the underlying non-Lispy implementation. (If you grant too much access to the outside from the VM, then you destroy the VM's purpose - guaranteed interoperability, full reflection, and interactivity.) However, I don't see such a truly interactive environment to happen because it's a lot of work.
- lispm 5y ago
  https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/ https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/ Alternatively a complete OS (not based on SBCL): https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
  - jonathanstrange 5y ago
    Yes, I know these but my suggestion was pretty much the opposite, to use Linux as a basis and abstract away from it entirely. The result is better and much more usable. That's just my opinion, of course, and ymmv.
    - lispm 5y ago
      McCLIM runs on Linux, but it has tools like debugger, editor, listener and others written on top of it. Applications are possible. The UI is similar to that what a Symbolics had. It can serve as the UI part of a larger solution like you mentioned, where some services are provided by Linux, or tools on top of Unix (database, etc).
    - rjsw 5y ago
      An alternative could be to build SBCL into a unikernel.
Animats 5y ago
Well, if you made one, it would be much better than the original. We had one refrigerator-sized Symbolics machine at the aerospace company, during the false AI boom of the 1980s. I used it a few times, but it had one LISP fan who used it a lot for a specific project. It broke down a lot, and Symbolics service was very poor. The early versions had a really slow garbage collector. Minutes. With everything in one address space, you had to wait out the GC; you couldn't kill your program and start over. Many of those special-purpose buttons on the Space Cadet-derived keyboard didn't actually do anything. Unless, of course, someone rebound them in EMACS. I did LISP work then, but mostly using Franz LISP on VAXen and Sun Workstations. I was never really into the LISP cult, though I wrote a lot of LISP. Franz LISP could compile to .o files, but you couldn't just link them and make an executable. You had to load them back into the LISP environment. I asked the Franz people why they didn't package up the run time so that you could just link the thing and make an executable without debug break and interpreter capability. They were puzzled at the question. Delivering a finished product was totally alien to them. Eventually, hard-compiled LISP on microprocessors became faster than custom LISP hardware, and LISP machines went away. And, eventually, other languages got enough dynamism that LISP was no longer needed. It's one of those things which was better in retrospect.
- chris_st 5y ago
  I worked for about four years on Symbolics machines in the AI summer of the mid 80's. We were, perhaps, lucky in that I don't remember them breaking down at all, and our service guy was competent and entertaining. I remember when the generational GC was released. Before that, we just used to reboot at the end of the day... but the generational GC just worked, and we didn't have to worry about memory (so much). Our rep installed the GC thermometer (that showed in the overscan area so you didn't lose any screen real estate), and that really showed the difference. And, by the way, it was Zmacs, not Emacs on the Symbolics.
  - p_l 5y ago
    Refrigerator size suggests to me one of the very early models, which in fact could have been much more problematic than any of the latter. I seem to recall being warned in case of "free to good home" 3600 about how delicate it was.
jdboyd 5y ago
From a historical interest perspective, I would love to see some Symbolics simulators. From a productivity and ergonomics perspective, I don't think chip level simulation would be the way two go. First, Genera has been ported forward to new system. First OpenGenera was released for Tru/64 on the DEC Alpha platform as an official product. The fastest Symbolics hardware was about 6 times faster than the original Symbolics hardware. OpenGenera on a 533mhz Alpha was about 3 times faster still. There is a project called VLM to let you run OpenGenera on x86 or ARM and I would imagine it is many times faster still. Also, to my understanding, OpenGenera can still be purchased from symbolics-dks.com for a heft fee. Second, I think that productivity will be limited by how much it is stuck in the past. If nothing else, crypto being behind the times seems likely to be an issue with networking with the rest of the world. I would love to see a more modern system like OpenGenera. I also would love to see Symbolics style keyboards be made and possibly upgraded with things like better keyswitches and USB. That should be doable for someone who wants to make a custom layout, circuit board for that layout, and keycaps but based on QMK compatible hardware.
- bitwize 5y ago
  > First OpenGenera was released for Tru/64 on the DEC Alpha platform as an official product. The fastest Symbolics hardware was about 6 times faster than the original Symbolics hardware. OpenGenera on a 533mhz Alpha was about 3 times faster still. Open Genera was soft emulation of the Symbolics Ivory hardware on Alpha. I believe they didn't even do anything fancy like dynarec; which is why it was such a doddle to port it (from binaries?!) to amd64. > Second, I think that productivity will be limited by how much it is stuck in the past. If nothing else, crypto being behind the times seems likely to be an issue with networking with the rest of the world. A modern developer running Visual Studio Code has most of the features the Lisp Machines had, and then some. Edit and continue can even be had under Java and C#.
  - diskzero 5y ago
    Are you saying a modern developer running Lisp has most of the same features of a Lisp Machine? If not, what language(s) are you referring to?
throwaway81523 5y ago
The Symbolics software is still proprietary, I think. The MIT CADR software is available and can run under emulation, but last I heard it was not all the way there. I'm sure some people here know more about it than I do.
- imglorp 5y ago
  Yes, see http://symbolics-dks.com http://symbolics-dks.com I once spoke to David once asking if they would open source the UI for posterity and he politely replied in the negative. There are a few MacIvory installations left floating around so they might have a support contract stream (I'm guessing) although I'm not sure what other possible income they hope will be coming. The preservation part is becoming most acute as there will soon be zero hardware and zero people who can get this into digital museum status.
- rjsw 5y ago
  The MIT CADR software can also run on an FPGA. The main problem with it is that we only have a saved image from a pre-Common Lisp version, there are sources and compiled files for a later version that does implement Common Lisp as well but so far we have not worked out a way to get an updated image. There is an emulator for the LMI Lambda hardware that can run an improved version of the final LMI software.

lukego 5y ago

I really wonder how this compares with modern Smalltalk environments like GToolkit? Are Smalltalkers of today living the Lisp Machine dream here and now? (Should Lisp programmers pining for the Symbolics era put aside their parenthesis and join them?)

Qem 5y ago
I have no experience on the Lisp side. But on Smalltalk side, my firsthand experience tells Pharo is awesome.
- rmckayfleming 5y ago
  Have you used it extensively by chance? I was recently exploring Pharo with "Pharo by Example", but found it really hard to approach because the UI seems to change every major version (with things like the System Browser changing names). Squeak on the other hand was a lot smoother to get started with. I'm also not really sure how to best compare Squeak and Pharo.
  - Qem 5y ago
    Just scratched the surface, no extensive experience with it. Python is what I use at work, but I miss the Pharo environment a lot. It was forked from Squeak, and indeed still evolves at a fast pace. I think one of the reasons for the fork + name change was to give room for breaking changes from the Smalltalk roots. But it's still mostly compatible.

zgs 5y ago

No mention of Smalltalk that did something quite similar a little earlier.

gumby 5y ago
This is specifically a site about the symbolics machines, so that’s not a huge surprise but neither PARC nor MIT were at all insular back then and you can see the influence of the interactive MACLISP environment in the Smalltalk (and Interlisp-D) work, and the Smalltalk/Interlisp-D approach on the CADR.

jdboyd 5y ago

This appears to be from 2014: https://web.archive.org/web/20140614152722/http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics https://web.archive.org/web/20140614152722/http://lispm.de/s...

gjvc 5y ago
yup
dang 5y ago
Added above. Thanks!

gumby 5y ago

It was by far the most productive environment I ever used. I was the architect of the lower levels of cyc (Guha the higher levels) and in a short time I was able to write enormous amounts of code that was used for years. There aren’t really other exploratory development environments like that any more. I actually switched the team from D machines to symbolics machines (I had previously worked on D machines at PARC so it wasn’t a familiarity thing). As for speed, cost and reliability: I had two such machines (two computer tables in my office), one with a color screen, each with a massive 8 MW of ram (40 MB). And MCC had an on site symbolics tech who was conveniently across the hall from me. Not really a scalable approach, but this relates to Dan Luu’s post that is currently also on the front page). It was absurdly slow by today’s standards, but not by the standards of the era. Now I do all my development on a MacBook Air. And as with the lispm, I mostly use it in full screen mode.

neilv 5y ago
Cyc is legendary. I wouldn't be surprised to see some recurring HN posts on it. Maybe especially for the benefit of people first arriving in the era of DNNs, but also the rest of us.
- thom 5y ago
  I’d be interested in modern perspectives on Cyc and Eurisko. Hopefully I’ll be forgiven for this impression, but I’ve only heard of Cyc being legendary for basically wasting Lenat’s career after the promising results from Eurisko. It’d be an interesting debate, whether recent advancements like GPT-3 confirmed or refuted the intuition that architecture isn’t enough, we need to encode knowledge. Feels like we have settled on the idea that a good enough architecture (and enough compute time) can take care of the latter. But it’d still be valid to claim GPT-3 lacks common sense. I still think Eurisko is fascinating. Stochastic, heuristic systems seemed to reach their highest point with random forests and subsequent gradient boosting approaches. But we’re still obsessed with quite static models over living, learning agents.
  - gumby 5y ago

dang 5y ago

A couple past threads: Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16459477 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16459477 - Feb 2018 (10 comments) Ergonomics of the Symbolics Lisp Machine - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878679 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7878679 - June 2014 (91 comments)

daly 5y ago

I worked on a Symbolics machine for years. There has never been a more productive environment. I truly miss it.

guenthert 5y ago
Other then the obvious (not being easily able to see / change the code of the OS, FS, GUI, networking stack and the editor using its own, pre-CL Lisp dialect), what's missing from a Linux/MacOS + Emacs + Slime + SBCL/CmuCL/CCL environment? Does it really make a difference to an application developer? How do the offerings of Allegro or LispWorks compare?

linguae 5y ago

I'm wondering if there have been any efforts to create a FOSS clone of the Genera operating system for commodity architectures? I was born during the beginning of the 1980's AI winter, and while I've heard a lot of amazing things about Symbolics from this website and other places (especially the development environment), I've never used a Symbolics Lisp machine, and unfortunately I lack the money and the space to own a Symbolics Lisp machine, and sadly Genera is still proprietary. A Genera clone would make this technology much more accessible to those who either can't afford Symbolics Lisp machines or who don't want to pirate Open Genera.

LargoLasskhyfv 5y ago
The maybe next best thing would be [1] https://interlisp.org/ https://interlisp.org/ & [2] https://github.com/Interlisp https://github.com/Interlisp This 'also ran', but with much less hype. And because the stars aligned right, the full source is out in the open, without any legal hurdles.

jll29 5y ago

Thanks for sharing this detailed post. Looking forward to the next visionary project in creating a new environment for developers, if there will ever be another one pushing the state of the art further. I guess we could now build workstations with 2 TB RAM and 10 TB SSD, but what is the wish list on the software side beyond getting back to past sophistication? Has anyone written a side-by-side comparison of modern (e.g. Intelli-J) environments versus Symbolics or other LISP machines as a research paper?