3 ms·
In the 80's and 90's Common Lisp compilers and editors were insanely expensive. The hardware was too, not even sure if those early implementations ran on x86..
by Mikeb85 4y ago
In the 80's and 90's Common Lisp compilers and editors were insanely expensive. The hardware was too, not even sure if those early implementations ran on x86... That's why they didn't take off. Easy to look back with rose coloured lenses now that we've had free implementations for awhile...
Meanwhile C/C++, Pascal and Java were all accessible and cheap if not free...
- Narishma 4y agoOther languages like Smalltalk and Ada suffered from this as well.
- pjmlp 4y agoWhat impacted Smalltalk, was its biggest backer (IBM), deciding to pivot into Java, porting their flagship IDE (Visual Age) into Eclipse, dropping OS/2 (where Smalltalk had a role similar to VB/Delphi and later .NET), and dropping Smalltalk consulting altoghether.
- lispm 4y agoThe commercial versions for Windows and Mac were not all "insanely expensive". Apple's MCL was sold for under $1000. Later the price was reduced even further. That's expensive, but far from a commercial UNIX workstation Lisp, which would be $4000 or more. On the PC there were also mid-priced offerings like Allegro CL, Golden Common Lisp, ... Still memory and early PCs were expensive. Like a good Compaq system or an Apple Mac IIfx / Quadra. A dev seat could easily cost $10k or much more with RAM, Disk, large screen.