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Someone yesterday commented exactly about interlisp in mastodon regarding this article and they already hit a lot of these goals 40 years ago. It was super inte

Someone yesterday commented exactly about interlisp in mastodon regarding this article and they already hit a lot of these goals 40 years ago. It was super interesting to read about it and very humbling abiut all the ideas early programmers tried and managed to make work. It was commented by ine of the people currently working in the interlisp medley project. I will be testing interlisp today actually after reading about it last night.

lispm 3y ago
There is a lot to learn from it, but you would have difficulty right now to apply it to Common Lisp development. People are working on improvements, but for the most part we are beamed to the state of the art of 30+ years ago, which is impressive enough. If we stay on the Lisp side for a moment. Slighty different from Interlisp, then is Symbolics Genera. It's the OS and development environment of networked workstations for groups of Lisp programmers. The manual(s) has a chapter on the philosophy. I've put it online (the text is not by me, but from the manual): http://lispm.de/genera-concepts http://lispm.de/genera-concepts Then there is the idea to keep the developer "in the flow" while programming: http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics Then there are the commercial environments, which have a similar development environment. Allegro CL and LispWorks. One marketing slogan there was: the cost of change to the software most only depends on the size of the change, not on the size of the software under development. Both have the advantage that they support application "delivery" on normal computers: Windows, Macs, UNIX, Linux, ... Nowadays I think the combination of SBCL, SLIME + GNU Emacs (for the IDE), version controlled source code sites (Gitlab: https://common-lisp.net/project-intro https://common-lisp.net/project-intro ) , test suites, etc. makes for a very powerful development environment for groups. For example the SBCL implementation is a sizable and complex Lisp project itself, which is managed very well by the maintainers. There is a good build process and people have been porting SBCL, which is an optimizing native code compiler, to new platforms without much problems. In the Lisp history there was always also the idea to apply exploratory development environments to other languages, improving on what various Lisp systems did. Example from the past, improving on Lucid CL: Energize, foundation for a C++ environment. https://dreamsongs.com/Files/Energize.pdf https://dreamsongs.com/Files/Energize.pdf The development UI was Lucid Emacs, Objectstore was the code database, they had an incremental linker/compiler for C++.

lispm 3y ago

There is a lot to learn from it, but you would have difficulty right now to apply it to Common Lisp development. People are working on improvements, but for the most part we are beamed to the state of the art of 30+ years ago, which is impressive enough. If we stay on the Lisp side for a moment. Slighty different from Interlisp, then is Symbolics Genera. It's the OS and development environment of networked workstations for groups of Lisp programmers. The manual(s) has a chapter on the philosophy. I've put it online (the text is not by me, but from the manual): http://lispm.de/genera-concepts http://lispm.de/genera-concepts Then there is the idea to keep the developer "in the flow" while programming: http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics http://lispm.de/symbolics-lisp-machine-ergonomics Then there are the commercial environments, which have a similar development environment. Allegro CL and LispWorks. One marketing slogan there was: the cost of change to the software most only depends on the size of the change, not on the size of the software under development. Both have the advantage that they support application "delivery" on normal computers: Windows, Macs, UNIX, Linux, ... Nowadays I think the combination of SBCL, SLIME + GNU Emacs (for the IDE), version controlled source code sites (Gitlab: https://common-lisp.net/project-intro https://common-lisp.net/project-intro ) , test suites, etc. makes for a very powerful development environment for groups. For example the SBCL implementation is a sizable and complex Lisp project itself, which is managed very well by the maintainers. There is a good build process and people have been porting SBCL, which is an optimizing native code compiler, to new platforms without much problems. In the Lisp history there was always also the idea to apply exploratory development environments to other languages, improving on what various Lisp systems did. Example from the past, improving on Lucid CL: Energize, foundation for a C++ environment. https://dreamsongs.com/Files/Energize.pdf https://dreamsongs.com/Files/Energize.pdf The development UI was Lucid Emacs, Objectstore was the code database, they had an incremental linker/compiler for C++.