4 ms·

Back in late '80's out of St Andrews and Glasgow, there was a bunch of research into persistent object environments. Here's a paper: https://archive.cs.st-andr

Back in late '80's out of St Andrews and Glasgow, there was a bunch of research into persistent object environments. Here's a paper: https://archive.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/papers/download/MBC+88.pdf https://archive.cs.st-andrews.ac.uk/papers/download/MBC+88.p... In short imagine Java or C++ objects, but they can live in a soup in a persistent database. Imagine if your programming assignments at school, were "open this database then write a client to talk to the object retrieved." That's what we actually had in PS-Algol in 86. Super cool!

jhgb 5y ago
> In short imagine Java or C++ objects, but they can live in a soup in a persistent database. AllegroCache still exists today. So at least Lisp people don't have to imagine that. I wonder if that is one of the reasons why CL people in the 1980s came up with UPDATE-INSTANCE-FOR-REDEFINED-CLASS.
- fiddlerwoaroof 5y ago
  Yeah, you could supposedly upgrade all the software on a lisp systems without having to restart anything (assuming the developers implemented the various redefinition protocols correctly.)
  - johnisgood 5y ago
    Ahh, how is StumpWM doing? The tiling window manager written in Common Lisp. You could hack it while it was running. I never got around to try. :(
  - jdougan 5y ago
    You can definitely do that in an image-based Smalltalk system, it is necessary to support the code browsers. I imagine the lispm devs had the same reason.
    - jhgb 5y ago
      What I had in mind was that this is also necessary to support an on-disk object database.
      - jdougan 5y ago
        That can be trickier, but Gemstone/S did it transactionally.