6 ms·

The Lisp Machine: Noble Experiment or Fabulous Failure? (1991) [pdf]

68 points by lelf 12y ago

dschiptsov 12y ago
Excellence in engineering, unattainable for modern punks.
- stplsd 12y ago
  Yeah, "it even had 16-bit digital stereo sound".
faragon 12y ago
Noble experiment and fabulous failure.
- agumonkey 12y ago
  Something I just heard in a documentary : "A new paradigm is always a tough sell, and ... would not prove a financial success" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxM9pMEnJQ0&index=3&list=PLOQZmjD6P2HlOoEVKOPaCFvLnjP865X1f https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxM9pMEnJQ0&index=3&list=PLO... To me Lisp still hold the number 1.5 (sic) place in programming languages top list. It still is a magnificent thing, combining minimal and abstract traits so well.
frik 12y ago
Lisp Machine was not alone, similar products exist/existed. Intel iAPX 432 run Ada, Pascal MicroEngine run Pascal, CreditCards (EU) run JavaMicro bytecode, ECOMP run Erlang, Burroughs Medium Systems run COBOL, etc. High-level language computer architecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_language_computer_architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_language_computer_ar... I could imagine a modern high-level computer architecture that is based on the LLVM intermediate representation (or GNU gcc RTL). A lot of transistors in a modern CPUs could be saved if we remove all the legacy x86 ASM. Especially as modern x86/x64 CPUs emulate an CISC, and are a RISC architecture.
- lispm 12y ago
  None of those were in any way 'similar' to Lisp Machines from Xerox, TI, LMI or Symbolics. Those were high-end workstations with a Lisp OS, coming in a lot of different form factors. They were developed from 1981 to 1992. The main similarities were that they all used electricity. Some of the computers with Java-processor were similar in that they provided an object-oriented garbage-collected language and OS.
  - frik 12y ago
    > None of those were in any way 'similar' to Lisp Machines It seems you misinterpreted my sentences. Read the linked Wikipedia. Basically not ASM/Assembler code (0, 1 form) is executed on the CPU but a specific higher level language like Lisp/Ada/Pascal/Java/etc. directly.
    - lispm 12y ago
      Lisp Machines did not run Lisp 'directly'. Lisp code was either running interpreted or usually compiled to machine code. This is an example from a Symbolics Lisp Machine with an Ivory CPU. (defun example-count (predicate list) (let ((count 0)) (dolist (i list count) (when (funcall predicate i) (incf count))))) The disassembled machine code for above function (for the Ivory microprocessor from Symbolics): Command: (disassemble (compile #'example-count)) 0 ENTRY: 2 REQUIRED, 0 OPTIONAL ;Creating PREDICATE and LIST 2 PUSH 0 ;Creating COUNT 3 PUSH FP|3 ;LIST 4 PUSH NIL ;Creating I 5 BRANCH 15 6 SET-TO-CDR-PUSH-CAR FP|5 7 SET-SP-TO-ADDRESS-SAVE-TOS SP|-1 10 START-CALL FP|2 ;PREDICATE 11 PUSH FP|6 ;I 12 FINISH-CALL-1-VALUE 13 BRANCH-FALSE 15 14 INCREMENT FP|4 ;COUNT 15 ENDP FP|5 16 BRANCH-FALSE 6 17 SET-SP-TO-ADDRESS SP|-2 20 RETURN-SINGLE-STACK This machine also had C, Pascal, Fortran, Ada and Prolog compilers.
      - crististm 12y ago
lispm 12y ago
I would not call it a complete failure. For example Symbolics created revenue of around 1 billion USD during the years it sold the machines in the 80s. That's quite impressive. A lot of impressive technology had been developed. Eventually the time was over and the technology was replaced. That happened to Apollo, DEC, SUN, Cray, Thinking Machines, SGI, Amiga, ... and a bunch of other tech companies. It was great while it lasted. With the cold war ending (and with it the government spending for military and civilian high-tech shifting) and with more versatile/cheaper technology capturing the market (C++, RISC computers, ...) the time was over. Basically the Lisp Machine tech was ripe for a full reboot (like Steve Jobs did with NeXT, but there was no money for that in the Lisp market anymore). The existing Lisp Machine software was not flexible enough and too limited in its capabilities. Lisp developers might have still like its capabilities, but for the average user/developer, it would have needed to be slimmed down. The emulator needed a DEC Alpha - and not a PC, where it would have found more users and cheaper hardware. Apple tried it with Dylan for mobile and application development, but that never entered the market. The Newton wasn't shipped with Dylan. Lucid tried it with C++/Energize. Sank the company. Harlequin tried it with DylanWorks. CMU tried to develop a Dylan environment. More was tried, but most failed.
- pjmlp 12y ago
  Personally I think that any of us that used one of those systems can only look at those that insist in doing PDP style programming as living in the pre-history. Environments like modern IDEs and languages like Wolfram might be the way forward to regain what was lost with the demise of Lisp Machines.
- hga 12y ago
  Lucid tried it with C++/Energize. Sank the company. Nope, it turned out the "business" person/people who arranged the contracts for OEM sales of Lucid's Lisp did them as essentially loans, against the OEM's actual sales as I recall, and when they came due Lucid's investors felt that the success of Energize was sufficiently iffy the extra investment was not worth it. Details can be found on Richard Gabriel's web site: http://dreamsongs.com/ http://dreamsongs.com/ In general my take on what happened is somewhat different. It starts from the observation that when the Lisp Machine was developed, there was a great deal to be said for a custom TTL processor laser focused on Lisp. It was a good way to squeeze a lot of performance out of the available technology, pretty much the only way unless you were crazy enough to try to do it in ECL. And people could see the utility of what became the engineering workstation from the success of Xerox's Alto (which added graphics to NLS). As it became practical to put enough gates on a single chip for a Lisp Machine, it would have taken a great deal of adroitness to make the transition, and that wasn't in the cards. LMI didn't have the capital to do so, in fact, TI bailed them out and invested in them just to keep the company alive so they could do their own gate array Lisp Machine, the TI Explorer. Don't know what happened with TI, but LMI was eventually killed by Canadian politics. Symbolics was very badly managed by then, and continued to make a number of very bad decisions. And then, going back to Gabriel, there's the whole worse is better thesis. Worse is better seems to have fantastically greater survival characteristics, in fact, nowadays the only wildly successful The Right Thing software ecosystem is Java.... If there's such a strong ... force, if you will, against the approach of Lisp and therefore Lisp Machines, then it's hard to see how they could have survived.
cmrdporcupine 12y ago
Like the Symbolics machines did, the RISC-V has tagged memory: http://www.lowrisc.org/downloads/lowRISC-memo-2014-001.pdf http://www.lowrisc.org/downloads/lowRISC-memo-2014-001.pdf As I understand it its proposed use is for security reasons, for preventing hostile memory corruption. But I imagine it could also be used for the kind of type and GC purposes that tagging in the Lisp machines was used for?
- hga 12y ago
  Let me clarify that this is a proposal for a particular implementation of RISC-V, and per a post on the mailing list yesterday the first cut of the tagging extension will be released very soon. It's intended primarily for security, essentially to allow hacks to let our current C type code bases to run ... less insecurely. It was proposed to allow the 2 tag bits to be used for other things like type and GC tagging, which is why I'm personally interested in it.
  - cmrdporcupine 12y ago
    Thanks for the clarification. I'm very eager to see the lowRISC stuff come to fruition.
- leoc 12y ago
  Apple's already using the ARMv8 tagged memory to speed up Objective C on the iPhone, right? https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-an...
  - lispm 12y ago
    I can't see that there is any hardware support. It just makes clever use of the CPU. Also 'tagged pointers' is something slightly different than 'tagged data'. Many Lisp systems have been using both, for decades.
    - pm215 12y ago
strlen 12y ago
There's an interesting conversation between several Lisp machine folks (including the late Dan Weinreb) and Azul's Cliff Click. This was at a time when Azul shipped custom hardware. Very interesting, re: hardware support for garbage collection.
- WallWextra 12y ago
  It is here: http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2008-11-18-brief-conversation-david-moon http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2008-11-18-brief-conve... It looks like Azul has basically given up on their custom hardware, I guess? They found a way to make their GC work on commodity x86.
  - cmrdporcupine 12y ago
    I haven't looked in a really long time but wasn't Azul's focus running the JVM directly on the hypervisor? That seemed like an interesting approach vs using custom hardware.
    - WallWextra 12y ago
      A lot less "interesting," in a very good way.
  - strlen 12y ago
    Thank you for posting that, I omitted the link. They did indeed ditch their custom hardware: the appliances were excellent, but not really a competitive proposition compared to "buy a cluster of commodity hardware and if one JVM instance goes for a coffee break, treat it as any other transient failure and route requests to another host."
amelius 12y ago
I wonder what the "lisp machine" would look like today (i.e., given today's knowledge of the execution of rewriting in the lambda calculus). Would it actually still make sense to make a dedicated design?
enupten 12y ago
I wish the CL standard was evolving today...
- mark_l_watson 12y ago
  With the QuickLisp package manager I would argue that the Common Lisp platform is evolving and thriving. Even though my (consulting) customers seem to favor Clojure now, Common Lisp is still a solid choice for some types of projects that benefit from rapid prototyping, image based development, and very fast runtime.
  - enupten 12y ago
    Agreed. I think CL is still an awesome platform. There are however things which can't be affected by packages, without a total rewrite (like Shen). Things like parametric-typing, and adding synergistic mechanisms with define-compiler-macro and inbuilt optimizations, would be extremely useful.
popvol 12y ago
I see the horse is not dead enough, we should continue beating it some more. The Lisp Machine is what happens when a group of engineers cannot distinguish vision from tunnel-vision. Probably because they have lived far too long in the self-congratulatory universe of Lisp, and believe in the divinity of S-expressions and CONS cells, never once questioning the foundations of their faith.
- PhantomGremlin 12y ago
  I briefly met the Symbolics engineers and I didn't get the feeling that they were zealots like you suggest. This all happened over 30 years ago. Intel didn't have a hegemony in CPUs. There was funding available to try new things in hardware. Some of it failed, some of it succeeded. Thirty years from now we will be rolling in laughter at the absurdity of so many of today's startups.
Animats 12y ago
LISP machines died because they came out near the end of the "expert systems" false boom, and the beginning of the "AI Winter". In the mid-1980s, the expert systems crowd were claiming strong AI was coming Real Soon Now. (I was at Stanford at the time; I met most of that crowd.) Didn't happen. When AI did start to work, it was statistical, neural net, and number-crunching based, using completely different technology. Tagged machines are interesting. There have been some good ones, most notably the Burroughs machines. What killed them was the triumph of C, which wants a big flat address space, and the triumph of UNIX/Linux, which wants a vanilla CPU. A tagged machine works best with languages, compilers, and operating systems which use the tags properly. A whole specialized ecosystem is needed, and the motivation for it is weak. Even the segmentation features in IA-32 were never used much. There's hardware intended to allow calls across protection boundaries in a controlled way. That stuff was left out of AMD-64, and is now almost forgotten.
mark_l_watson 12y ago
I owned a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine from about 1982 to 1986. It was an amazing software development platform, and as a business rode the wave of defense industry investment in AI technologies. I paid for my 1108 by selling a simple expert system tool for $5000 per machine license. While I felt good making my toy sort of cost free for my company, I didn't feel great about selling something simple for $5000. I continue to be surprised how much of my consulting work in the last 15 years has used a Lisp (either Common Lisp or Clojure). From my perspective, Lisp languages are thriving.

68 points by lelf 12y ago

dschiptsov 12y ago

Excellence in engineering, unattainable for modern punks.

stplsd 12y ago
Yeah, "it even had 16-bit digital stereo sound".

faragon 12y ago

Noble experiment and fabulous failure.

agumonkey 12y ago
Something I just heard in a documentary : "A new paradigm is always a tough sell, and ... would not prove a financial success" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxM9pMEnJQ0&index=3&list=PLOQZmjD6P2HlOoEVKOPaCFvLnjP865X1f https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qxM9pMEnJQ0&index=3&list=PLO... To me Lisp still hold the number 1.5 (sic) place in programming languages top list. It still is a magnificent thing, combining minimal and abstract traits so well.

frik 12y ago

Lisp Machine was not alone, similar products exist/existed. Intel iAPX 432 run Ada, Pascal MicroEngine run Pascal, CreditCards (EU) run JavaMicro bytecode, ECOMP run Erlang, Burroughs Medium Systems run COBOL, etc. High-level language computer architecture: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_language_computer_architecture http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High-level_language_computer_ar... I could imagine a modern high-level computer architecture that is based on the LLVM intermediate representation (or GNU gcc RTL). A lot of transistors in a modern CPUs could be saved if we remove all the legacy x86 ASM. Especially as modern x86/x64 CPUs emulate an CISC, and are a RISC architecture.

lispm 12y ago
None of those were in any way 'similar' to Lisp Machines from Xerox, TI, LMI or Symbolics. Those were high-end workstations with a Lisp OS, coming in a lot of different form factors. They were developed from 1981 to 1992. The main similarities were that they all used electricity. Some of the computers with Java-processor were similar in that they provided an object-oriented garbage-collected language and OS.
- frik 12y ago
  > None of those were in any way 'similar' to Lisp Machines It seems you misinterpreted my sentences. Read the linked Wikipedia. Basically not ASM/Assembler code (0, 1 form) is executed on the CPU but a specific higher level language like Lisp/Ada/Pascal/Java/etc. directly.
  - lispm 12y ago
    Lisp Machines did not run Lisp 'directly'. Lisp code was either running interpreted or usually compiled to machine code. This is an example from a Symbolics Lisp Machine with an Ivory CPU. (defun example-count (predicate list) (let ((count 0)) (dolist (i list count) (when (funcall predicate i) (incf count))))) The disassembled machine code for above function (for the Ivory microprocessor from Symbolics): Command: (disassemble (compile #'example-count)) 0 ENTRY: 2 REQUIRED, 0 OPTIONAL ;Creating PREDICATE and LIST 2 PUSH 0 ;Creating COUNT 3 PUSH FP|3 ;LIST 4 PUSH NIL ;Creating I 5 BRANCH 15 6 SET-TO-CDR-PUSH-CAR FP|5 7 SET-SP-TO-ADDRESS-SAVE-TOS SP|-1 10 START-CALL FP|2 ;PREDICATE 11 PUSH FP|6 ;I 12 FINISH-CALL-1-VALUE 13 BRANCH-FALSE 15 14 INCREMENT FP|4 ;COUNT 15 ENDP FP|5 16 BRANCH-FALSE 6 17 SET-SP-TO-ADDRESS SP|-2 20 RETURN-SINGLE-STACK This machine also had C, Pascal, Fortran, Ada and Prolog compilers.
    - crististm 12y ago

lispm 12y ago

I would not call it a complete failure. For example Symbolics created revenue of around 1 billion USD during the years it sold the machines in the 80s. That's quite impressive. A lot of impressive technology had been developed. Eventually the time was over and the technology was replaced. That happened to Apollo, DEC, SUN, Cray, Thinking Machines, SGI, Amiga, ... and a bunch of other tech companies. It was great while it lasted. With the cold war ending (and with it the government spending for military and civilian high-tech shifting) and with more versatile/cheaper technology capturing the market (C++, RISC computers, ...) the time was over. Basically the Lisp Machine tech was ripe for a full reboot (like Steve Jobs did with NeXT, but there was no money for that in the Lisp market anymore). The existing Lisp Machine software was not flexible enough and too limited in its capabilities. Lisp developers might have still like its capabilities, but for the average user/developer, it would have needed to be slimmed down. The emulator needed a DEC Alpha - and not a PC, where it would have found more users and cheaper hardware. Apple tried it with Dylan for mobile and application development, but that never entered the market. The Newton wasn't shipped with Dylan. Lucid tried it with C++/Energize. Sank the company. Harlequin tried it with DylanWorks. CMU tried to develop a Dylan environment. More was tried, but most failed.

pjmlp 12y ago
Personally I think that any of us that used one of those systems can only look at those that insist in doing PDP style programming as living in the pre-history. Environments like modern IDEs and languages like Wolfram might be the way forward to regain what was lost with the demise of Lisp Machines.
hga 12y ago
Lucid tried it with C++/Energize. Sank the company. Nope, it turned out the "business" person/people who arranged the contracts for OEM sales of Lucid's Lisp did them as essentially loans, against the OEM's actual sales as I recall, and when they came due Lucid's investors felt that the success of Energize was sufficiently iffy the extra investment was not worth it. Details can be found on Richard Gabriel's web site: http://dreamsongs.com/ http://dreamsongs.com/ In general my take on what happened is somewhat different. It starts from the observation that when the Lisp Machine was developed, there was a great deal to be said for a custom TTL processor laser focused on Lisp. It was a good way to squeeze a lot of performance out of the available technology, pretty much the only way unless you were crazy enough to try to do it in ECL. And people could see the utility of what became the engineering workstation from the success of Xerox's Alto (which added graphics to NLS). As it became practical to put enough gates on a single chip for a Lisp Machine, it would have taken a great deal of adroitness to make the transition, and that wasn't in the cards. LMI didn't have the capital to do so, in fact, TI bailed them out and invested in them just to keep the company alive so they could do their own gate array Lisp Machine, the TI Explorer. Don't know what happened with TI, but LMI was eventually killed by Canadian politics. Symbolics was very badly managed by then, and continued to make a number of very bad decisions. And then, going back to Gabriel, there's the whole worse is better thesis. Worse is better seems to have fantastically greater survival characteristics, in fact, nowadays the only wildly successful The Right Thing software ecosystem is Java.... If there's such a strong ... force, if you will, against the approach of Lisp and therefore Lisp Machines, then it's hard to see how they could have survived.

cmrdporcupine 12y ago

Like the Symbolics machines did, the RISC-V has tagged memory: http://www.lowrisc.org/downloads/lowRISC-memo-2014-001.pdf http://www.lowrisc.org/downloads/lowRISC-memo-2014-001.pdf As I understand it its proposed use is for security reasons, for preventing hostile memory corruption. But I imagine it could also be used for the kind of type and GC purposes that tagging in the Lisp machines was used for?

hga 12y ago
Let me clarify that this is a proposal for a particular implementation of RISC-V, and per a post on the mailing list yesterday the first cut of the tagging extension will be released very soon. It's intended primarily for security, essentially to allow hacks to let our current C type code bases to run ... less insecurely. It was proposed to allow the 2 tag bits to be used for other things like type and GC tagging, which is why I'm personally interested in it.
- cmrdporcupine 12y ago
  Thanks for the clarification. I'm very eager to see the lowRISC stuff come to fruition.
leoc 12y ago
Apple's already using the ARMv8 tagged memory to speed up Objective C on the iPhone, right? https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-and-you.html https://www.mikeash.com/pyblog/friday-qa-2013-09-27-arm64-an...
- lispm 12y ago
  I can't see that there is any hardware support. It just makes clever use of the CPU. Also 'tagged pointers' is something slightly different than 'tagged data'. Many Lisp systems have been using both, for decades.
  - pm215 12y ago

strlen 12y ago

There's an interesting conversation between several Lisp machine folks (including the late Dan Weinreb) and Azul's Cliff Click. This was at a time when Azul shipped custom hardware. Very interesting, re: hardware support for garbage collection.

WallWextra 12y ago
It is here: http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2008-11-18-brief-conversation-david-moon http://www.azulsystems.com/blog/cliff/2008-11-18-brief-conve... It looks like Azul has basically given up on their custom hardware, I guess? They found a way to make their GC work on commodity x86.
- cmrdporcupine 12y ago
  I haven't looked in a really long time but wasn't Azul's focus running the JVM directly on the hypervisor? That seemed like an interesting approach vs using custom hardware.
  - WallWextra 12y ago
    A lot less "interesting," in a very good way.
- strlen 12y ago
  Thank you for posting that, I omitted the link. They did indeed ditch their custom hardware: the appliances were excellent, but not really a competitive proposition compared to "buy a cluster of commodity hardware and if one JVM instance goes for a coffee break, treat it as any other transient failure and route requests to another host."

amelius 12y ago

I wonder what the "lisp machine" would look like today (i.e., given today's knowledge of the execution of rewriting in the lambda calculus). Would it actually still make sense to make a dedicated design?

enupten 12y ago

I wish the CL standard was evolving today...

mark_l_watson 12y ago
With the QuickLisp package manager I would argue that the Common Lisp platform is evolving and thriving. Even though my (consulting) customers seem to favor Clojure now, Common Lisp is still a solid choice for some types of projects that benefit from rapid prototyping, image based development, and very fast runtime.
- enupten 12y ago
  Agreed. I think CL is still an awesome platform. There are however things which can't be affected by packages, without a total rewrite (like Shen). Things like parametric-typing, and adding synergistic mechanisms with define-compiler-macro and inbuilt optimizations, would be extremely useful.

popvol 12y ago

I see the horse is not dead enough, we should continue beating it some more. The Lisp Machine is what happens when a group of engineers cannot distinguish vision from tunnel-vision. Probably because they have lived far too long in the self-congratulatory universe of Lisp, and believe in the divinity of S-expressions and CONS cells, never once questioning the foundations of their faith.

PhantomGremlin 12y ago
I briefly met the Symbolics engineers and I didn't get the feeling that they were zealots like you suggest. This all happened over 30 years ago. Intel didn't have a hegemony in CPUs. There was funding available to try new things in hardware. Some of it failed, some of it succeeded. Thirty years from now we will be rolling in laughter at the absurdity of so many of today's startups.

Animats 12y ago

LISP machines died because they came out near the end of the "expert systems" false boom, and the beginning of the "AI Winter". In the mid-1980s, the expert systems crowd were claiming strong AI was coming Real Soon Now. (I was at Stanford at the time; I met most of that crowd.) Didn't happen. When AI did start to work, it was statistical, neural net, and number-crunching based, using completely different technology. Tagged machines are interesting. There have been some good ones, most notably the Burroughs machines. What killed them was the triumph of C, which wants a big flat address space, and the triumph of UNIX/Linux, which wants a vanilla CPU. A tagged machine works best with languages, compilers, and operating systems which use the tags properly. A whole specialized ecosystem is needed, and the motivation for it is weak. Even the segmentation features in IA-32 were never used much. There's hardware intended to allow calls across protection boundaries in a controlled way. That stuff was left out of AMD-64, and is now almost forgotten.

mark_l_watson 12y ago

I owned a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine from about 1982 to 1986. It was an amazing software development platform, and as a business rode the wave of defense industry investment in AI technologies. I paid for my 1108 by selling a simple expert system tool for $5000 per machine license. While I felt good making my toy sort of cost free for my company, I didn't feel great about selling something simple for $5000. I continue to be surprised how much of my consulting work in the last 15 years has used a Lisp (either Common Lisp or Clojure). From my perspective, Lisp languages are thriving.