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 d

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.