4 ms·

It’s a pain to do the work associated, with no personal upside, so it’s probably neglect more than anything.

speed_spread 3y ago
Pain? The hardest part is probably finding a five inch floppy drive connected to a machine that can push to GitHub. Even that could be outsourced to some trusted resourceful LISP enthusiast.
- linguae 3y ago
  There's a lot of preparatory and legal work involved in preparing a proprietary software project for release as an open source project. It's not as simple as just pushing the source tree to GitHub and calling it a day. For example, if portions of the code were licensed by other other copyright holders, permission from them is required. There are other cases where the code needs to be examined before release in order to edit or remove materials that are personally identifying, embarrassing, or could cause legal issues if publicly disclosed.
  - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
    Then just put up a fundraiser. There's enough nerds that would pitch in I'm sure it could get covered and someone hired to do it. Though I think it's more than likely that once people had free access to it and saw what modern conveniences were missing etc the mystique would be lost and it would be kept more as an archaeological asset than as an ongoing thing people wanted to maintain and use.
    - lispm 3y ago
      > mystique would be lost People would also discover that the architecture is not simple, but grown over a decade while there was rapid development of the basics people take for granted: standards, languages, networking, operating systems, ... In the mid 80s TCP/IP was an expensive add on for Genera. Later it was made a part of the OS. But development stopped before it could add things like IPv6, Unicode, basic security, HTTPS, and other things. One could add it, but then one had to learn ZetaLisp (70s/80s), Flavors (early 80s), Symbolics Common Lisp (80s/90s), an object-oriented networking stack architecture from the 80s, ... You would have a second life in a technology stack somewhere between the past and the future, in a parallel world.
      - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        It makes more sense to me for some group to attempt to replicate the IDE experience in a modern Lisp (or similar) flavour. Still I also think these kinds of "live editing" environments don't translate well into some modern "best practices" around version control, deployment, versioning, etc. Remembering my experience with LambdaMOO & similar and then later Smalltalk/Squeak and recently with doing stuff with Julia's REPL, etc. They're fascinating and fairly productive, but I am not convinced about this technique's ability to scale.
        lispm 3y ago
        > It makes more sense to me for some group to attempt to replicate the IDE experience in a modern Lisp (or similar) flavour. It may not have the fancy UI, may not have a fancy user experience, may not be an operating system, may have a more primitive Lisp dialect, may not have a good multi-threading story, ... but it might exist and people put a lot of work into it: GNU Emacs and its extensions. That's how it is...
        cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        I think half the magic I associate with the Symbolics products is that they also made their own hardware, custom built for Lisp. Which is kinda neat and magical, if entirely impractical. That plus the lovely keyboards, nice case design, etc. etc.
        lispm 3y ago
        In the early days they had to - all the hardware was non-standard. Where would one get 36 bit memory cards? Where would one get CPUs which had a Lisp-specific instruction set? In those early days the computer (refrigerator size) would sit in a machine room (with enough power) and the user would be in his/her room with only a console (plus maybe a second monitor), keyboard and mouse - connected via a long console cable to the machine in the machine room. That was the experience for the programmer/user. The machine itself could have a lot of peripherals: network, tape drive, memory boards, color boards, frame grabber, disk drives, cpu accelerator, ... the programmer would see the driver code. At some point in time they produced cards for the SUN VMEBus and for the Mac Nubus. Then the only thing left was the keyboard. So, I agree, the Lisp Machine concept was a combination of Hard- and Software. The emulators of today only provide some of the software parts...
BaculumMeumEst 3y ago
Please. Dude could day “hey I want to open source this, someone do the work for me and show me where to sign” and people would trip over themselves rushing to make it happen.

Pain? The hardest part is probably finding a five inch floppy drive connected to a machine that can push to GitHub. Even that could be outsourced to some trusted resourceful LISP enthusiast.

linguae 3y ago
There's a lot of preparatory and legal work involved in preparing a proprietary software project for release as an open source project. It's not as simple as just pushing the source tree to GitHub and calling it a day. For example, if portions of the code were licensed by other other copyright holders, permission from them is required. There are other cases where the code needs to be examined before release in order to edit or remove materials that are personally identifying, embarrassing, or could cause legal issues if publicly disclosed.
- cmrdporcupine 3y ago
  Then just put up a fundraiser. There's enough nerds that would pitch in I'm sure it could get covered and someone hired to do it. Though I think it's more than likely that once people had free access to it and saw what modern conveniences were missing etc the mystique would be lost and it would be kept more as an archaeological asset than as an ongoing thing people wanted to maintain and use.
  - lispm 3y ago
    > mystique would be lost People would also discover that the architecture is not simple, but grown over a decade while there was rapid development of the basics people take for granted: standards, languages, networking, operating systems, ... In the mid 80s TCP/IP was an expensive add on for Genera. Later it was made a part of the OS. But development stopped before it could add things like IPv6, Unicode, basic security, HTTPS, and other things. One could add it, but then one had to learn ZetaLisp (70s/80s), Flavors (early 80s), Symbolics Common Lisp (80s/90s), an object-oriented networking stack architecture from the 80s, ... You would have a second life in a technology stack somewhere between the past and the future, in a parallel world.
    - cmrdporcupine 3y ago
      It makes more sense to me for some group to attempt to replicate the IDE experience in a modern Lisp (or similar) flavour. Still I also think these kinds of "live editing" environments don't translate well into some modern "best practices" around version control, deployment, versioning, etc. Remembering my experience with LambdaMOO & similar and then later Smalltalk/Squeak and recently with doing stuff with Julia's REPL, etc. They're fascinating and fairly productive, but I am not convinced about this technique's ability to scale.
      - lispm 3y ago
        > It makes more sense to me for some group to attempt to replicate the IDE experience in a modern Lisp (or similar) flavour. It may not have the fancy UI, may not have a fancy user experience, may not be an operating system, may have a more primitive Lisp dialect, may not have a good multi-threading story, ... but it might exist and people put a lot of work into it: GNU Emacs and its extensions. That's how it is...
        cmrdporcupine 3y ago
        I think half the magic I associate with the Symbolics products is that they also made their own hardware, custom built for Lisp. Which is kinda neat and magical, if entirely impractical. That plus the lovely keyboards, nice case design, etc. etc.
        lispm 3y ago
        In the early days they had to - all the hardware was non-standard. Where would one get 36 bit memory cards? Where would one get CPUs which had a Lisp-specific instruction set? In those early days the computer (refrigerator size) would sit in a machine room (with enough power) and the user would be in his/her room with only a console (plus maybe a second monitor), keyboard and mouse - connected via a long console cable to the machine in the machine room. That was the experience for the programmer/user. The machine itself could have a lot of peripherals: network, tape drive, memory boards, color boards, frame grabber, disk drives, cpu accelerator, ... the programmer would see the driver code. At some point in time they produced cards for the SUN VMEBus and for the Mac Nubus. Then the only thing left was the keyboard. So, I agree, the Lisp Machine concept was a combination of Hard- and Software. The emulators of today only provide some of the software parts...

BaculumMeumEst 3y ago

Please. Dude could day “hey I want to open source this, someone do the work for me and show me where to sign” and people would trip over themselves rushing to make it happen.