4 ms·
While not very familiar to many, this is highly similar to the old Lisp Machine environments. Those were similarly a clean break from prior OSes, with: - a
by white-flame 11y ago
While not very familiar to many, this is highly similar to the old Lisp Machine environments. Those were similarly a clean break from prior OSes, with:
- a powerful REPL to call either apps, inline tools, or direct commands
- interactive shells made up of mouse-interactable graphical components being
printed to the screen
- compilation of source code directly into the running image
etc.
They were also single-user, but did networking as well. People logged into a machine remotely could have the same interactive graphical sessions in their own context.
Given the history of computing from the 50s - 80s, this desktop architecture idea comes naturally to a lot of people. The major OSes, however, all have their ancestral lineage which prevents major rethinking. But another issue is that these ideas are at least power-user oriented.
While the mobile market did some major rethinks about the UIs, they're still *nix inspired descendants underneath, and don't expose anything but pre-baked applications to their users.
- api 11y agoWindows NT is sad for its missed opportunity. MS could have done something inspired by these newer architectures. They did depart from Unix, but to do something in no way better and in many ways worse.
- kayamon 11y agoMS were very inspired, unfortunately by VMS.
- wolfgke 11y agoWhy do you consider being inspired by VMS (which NT is to my knowledge) as unfortunate (serious question)?
- kayamon 11y agoIt's just... sigh... I dunno. It's like COBOL. Or COM. There's nothing in any way pleasant about it. It's undeniable that it works, and perhaps gets things done in a practical manner. But there's no love in it. Just my 2c though.
- yenda 11y agoI had the same feeling, the good news for PU is that there is still one (virtual) lisp machine standing called GNU/emacs.
- lispm 11y agoA Lisp Machine is a real computer with a Lisp OS, applications, libraries and tools. An editor is just a part of that experience. But not the central part. Typically the environment of Lisp Machines was NOT written around the editor. They had a window/mouse/GUI oriented user interface with a lot of support for keyboard use. If you take for example the Lisp Listener in Symbolics Genera, it is not a Zmacs application and it does not use Zmacs in any way - other than that you can switch to Zmacs windows. GNU Emacs is an editor written in some more primitive Lisp with extensive libraries and applications. It lacks the extensive low-level features, multi-threading, Flavors/CLOS etc of Zetalisp or Interlisp. GNU Emacs implements all their applications inside the editor. Lisp Machines did not do that. If you've ever used a Lisp Machine, the look&feel was quite different from GNU Emacs.