Symbolics Lisp Machine Museum
smbx.org
smbx.org
They all believed that the loss of the lisp machine was a serious loss to society and were all very much saddened by it. I never used the system enough to come to my own conclusions in that regard, but it was interesting food for thought. As somebody for whom Linux/POSIX is very deeply entrenched, would I even recognize a truly superior system if it was dropped in my lap? More importantly, would society in general? The superior technology is rarely the "winner"
The closest I've used were the three environments at PARC when I was there: Smalltalk, Mesa/Cedar and Interlisp-D. When I use Xcode or Eclipse I feel removed from the machine. In these other environments I felt simultaneously able to think at a higher level and yet more tightly coupled to the hardware.
I've used various GNU Emacs modes and the coupling between them and the runtime environment is not tight enough. Today I use SLIME+SBCL and it's OK. It too lacks the tight coupling of the lispm. However for production we'll end up re-coding in C++ for performance.
PS: A good friend of mine scorns the lispm-style of development as "programming by successive approximation." There's some truth in that.
For example I talked about the Lisp implementation of the code I'm working on: for deployment it looks like it'll be be an implementation in C++ based on what we end up learning about performance; certain implementation decisions that were particularly good or particularly bad, or that we iterated on several times before settling on something good; and that handles memory management more directly.
That's called 'Agile' nowadays...
From my Native Oberon experience and having devoured all Xerox PARC related papers, I imagine it was a great experience.
But having used the real thing is quite different assessment.
I really just experimented in it and the (more welcoming to me) Smalltalk environment. I used InterLisp-D as my "day job" language (actually we implemented 3-Lisp in it, with some custom microcode).
BTW there was a good paper from the Mesa group which I can't find online (my copy must be buried in a box someplace) comparing the performance of counted strings vs delimited strings (e.g. [3, 'f', 'o', 'o'] vs ['f', 'o', 'o', \0] in C syntax). According to the paper the bounded strings were much faster. All three languages (Smalltalk, Mesa and Lisp) used counted strings.
Thanks for the feedback.
Nowadays I use .NET and Java environments as an "almost like" experience of what mainstream computing could have looked like.
But when I see companies like Apple releasing playgrounds, Oracle adding a REPL and the edit/continue and REPL in .NET, there is some hope left.
No, this was simply counted vs terminated strings. I would like to find that paper and revisit the data again to see if it is still true.
True dat. Unfortunately, as Theo de Raadt once said:
"In some industry markets, high quality can be tied to making more money, but I am sure by now all of us know the computer industry is not like that."
I think the only thing we can do is follow the trend. This whole industry is not perfect anyway.
shivers
Scheme kind of gets you thinking in a way that works iteratively, but gets expressed recursively. Its easy to read, and can make for some great optimisation without being premature.
The JVM does not really support this style of programming - despite LISP's syntax leading towards it.
I really wish I could get my hands on a LISP Machine.
I love the idea of LISP being so close to the metal, but that power means some design tradeoffs.
Scheme makes sense with TCE.
I'm not sure InterLISP and the like need it - memory is limited and you work without so many of the system overheads I'm used to with modern systems. Iteration is less costly here, and that makes it easier to not need recursive design. (Which is more expensive).
In simple terms:
Why worry about blowing up a stack you don't need, when you've thought long and hard before you allocated it?
However, a named let in Scheme is not a loop. Its still a lambda.
Which means you can have nested lets with TCE, and you can construct them on the fly, depending on what your needs are, usung patterns like currying.
That flexibility just doesn't work on the JVM. You can force it, but it'll be slow and horrible compared to another pattern - and I don't think a LISP should tell me how to do something. That's Python's ideology.
So who knows, maybe some day the JVM finally gets it.
The problem with all languages that decide to implement their own runtime, instead of building it on top of JVM or .NET eco-systems is that their native code generation and GC implementation are always going to be worse.
Also there is the issue of having to implement the whole set of third party libraries from scratch, just like PyPy and JRuby have issues using libraries that rely on CPython or Ruby FFI.
So unless you get a set of developers really committed to go through the efforts of making it succeed, everyone will ignore it.
>Pixie implements its own virtual machine. It does not run on the JVM, CLR or Python VM. It implements its own bytecode, has its own GC and JIT. And it's small. Currently the interpreter, JIT, GC, and stdlib clock in at about 10.3MB once compiled down to an executable.
You only get tooling comparable to Visual VM or Mission Control in commercial Common Lisps.
Also I think many that bash Java don't realise it is the only language ecosystem that matches C and C++ in availability across OSes, including many embedded ones.
I imagine you never had the pleasure of doing enterprise distributed computing projects via CORBA, DCOM, SUN-RPC, DCE in C, C++, Visual Basic and Smalltalk.
Guess where those enterprise architects moved on.
EDIT: Should have mentioned Delphi and Objective-C as well.
It would be nicer if the performance was better though, many that only know Java via Clojure don't realize the performance impact of Clojure.
At least 1.8 did had some improvements in that direction.
Nonetheless, I have huge respect for CL. I think I'm gonna learn it well once and for all. (maybe use it for back-end).
I prefer Scheme to CL. The tooling isn't as developed, but Chicken and Guile are both plenty usable, and Scheme is less crufty than CL.
Richard P. Gabriel's famous "Lisp: The Good News, The Bad News, And How To Win Big" (aka "Worse is Better") discusses this very thing. I'd reccomend reading it.
But frankly, it's hard to say that an environment is objectively better. What one person may view as a step up, another may view as a step down, and we all have a kneejerk reaction to unfamiliar environments. The lispm is a really nice environment, to be sure, but I'll likely never know if it's better. Emacs will have to be good enough (which it certainly is).
I once used a 3600. :-) It greets with "Yes, master" when you turn it on.
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/symbolics/3600_series...
It has a display on the machine. That display shows the message.
Instead, go look at what Symbolics did (or try: it's quite hard to get the emulator running), and learn. That system lost, and it's never coming back, but you can learn from what they did well when building your own system.
But when you have, don't complain about the inferiority of our systems. It may be true (I can't get the emulator running to find out), but it gets annoying pretty fast. Take the energy you would use doing that, and put it into making your system that much better.
> Take the energy you would use doing that, and put it into making your system that much better.
It's not easy, but people are/were doing it: CMUCL, SBCL, McCLIM, Mezzano, the commercial Lisp systems like LispWorks and Allegro CL, ... all of them were/are efforts to bring some of the ideas/features. People were even developing emulators for the various Lisp Machines to make some of the old software runnable. MIT open sourced their original Lisp Machine software.
One of the most important things currently is to preserve the history of these and other machines / operating systems / applications. So that they are not lost and people can study them and learn. Lots of stuff is already lost.
>It's not easy, but people are/were doing it...
That's actually great. I'm tremendously excited by those systems. I tend to prefer Scheme to CL (less cruft), but I'm excited all the same. Those systems and environments are really cool.
Although it is telling that SLIME (which is excellent, by the way) is one of the most popular ways to write Lisp code.
There is a lot of software out there which needs powerful and/or different IDEs to be written.
> Although it is telling that SLIME (which is excellent, by the way) is one of the most popular ways to write Lisp code.
Guess where the inspiration for some of the SLIME features is coming from... Slime also does many cool new things, but it is still missing a lot of features and usability from the old environments. Part of the reason is GNU Emacs. It is what it is: a programmable editor with zillions of features. But its base, its UI, its interaction model, its integration idea is limiting in many ways. Many of the defining/leading IDEs were very different: Smalltalk 80, Interlisp-D, Symbolics Genera, ... Turbo Pascal, Visual Basic, Hypercard, ... NeXT ..., IntelliJ, ... (and a lot of others)
As for IDEs, I have a marked distaste for special purpose tools: I want to be able to use on tool to edit all text. And not all IDEs are good: IntelliJ is pretty rubbish (although that's more to do with Java than IJ itself...)
Emacs's limitations tend to line up with the length you can go before you start becoming a special purpose tool, tightly tied to your environment, or the point at which the Unix model doesn't really work, and you're going to have to go build your own little world (like Smalltalk did). They certainly aren't perfect, and could go a bit farther (something work is being done on, last I checked), but it usually works well enough, and it's so extensible, and has had so many extensions written for it, that it can beat just about any other general purpose editor, and sometimes even some of the special purpose ones.
Obviously not. SLIME's inspiration comes from various other integrations of Lisp into Emacs editors, especially Emacs Lisp and ILISP. SOME of its inspirations comes from the Lisp Machine, direct or indirect. SOME. Not ALL and not even MOST. For example the Lisp Machine does NOT use Zmacs as a Lisp REPL, like ILISP/SLIME/... does. The Lisp Machine has a REPL, which is called a 'Listener', which is a separate application and which is not based on a Zmacs editor buffer. The Lisp Machine listener has a very different feature set and look&feel, from an ILISP/SLIME repl.
The LispWorks listener is a mix of both: it is based on an Emacs substrate, but offers slightly more Lisp Machine like interaction. SLIME though adds a simple presentation system, which LispWorks does not use in the listener.
> I want to be able to use on tool to edit all text.
A Lisp system is not text-based.
Lisp is based on data. Code is data and data can be code.
Using an editor to work with text is only half of the story. A good Lisp IDE lets me more or less directly interact with the data.
Interlisp-D worked with Lisp data throughout the IDE. That's a whole different interaction.
> IntelliJ is pretty rubbish
It isn't. It's actually quite good at what it does.
...And what makes you say that? I was actually aware, in any case.
>A Lisp system is not text-based.
>Lisp is based on data. Code is data and data can be code.
>Using an editor to work with text is only half of the story. A good Lisp IDE lets me more or less directly interact with the data.
I'm aware of that, but text is a fairly convenient representation of Lisp data. In fact, I'm unsure what you mean by directly interacting with the data, as you can't have bytes fly from your fingertips, AFAIK.
In addition, files are a pretty good metaphor as well: If you want to store your code as something textual, they're indispensible. And sure, you can use image storage and navigate in other ways, but Lisp isn't Smalltalk: The way Lisp is written isn't as unified, so that wouldn't work as well, AFAIK.
And sure, IntelliJ does what it does well, but I don't think that what it does is especially good, and most of it is just making up for Java's sins, things that don't exist in other languages: A good development environment is imperative, but if it's painful to write code in the language without the tools IDEs provide, than there's something wrong with the language.
Some Lisp data does not have a textual representation, it might have a graphical representation or the textual representation may not be very helpful (Lisp data being a graph might be better displayed as a 2d or even 3d graph, than as a textual representation). The Symbolics UI of the REPL/Listener would allow you to interact with the 2d/3d graph as it were Lisp data, which it actually is underneath.
> In fact, I'm unsure what you mean by directly interacting with the data, as you can't have bytes fly from your fingertips, AFAIK.
GNU Emacs pushes characters around.
S-Edit manipulates S-expressions.
GNU Emacs lets you pretend that you edit s-expressions, by pushing characters in a buffer around. But you don't. All you do is push text around.
S-Edit directly manipulates the data. It's a structure editor.
Symbolics Genera uses 'presentations' to record for every output (graphical or not) the original Lisp data. When you interact with the interface, you interact with these data objects. For example in a Listener (the REPL) programs and the Listener itself display presentations, which then can be acted on. It also parses text into data objects and then runs the commands on the data objects and not on text.
SLIME provides a very simple and partial reconstruction of that - which is a nice feature.
> In addition, files are a pretty good metaphor as well: If you want to store your code as something textual, they're indispensible. And sure, you can use image storage and navigate in other ways, but Lisp isn't Smalltalk: The way Lisp is written isn't as unified, so that wouldn't work as well, AFAIK.
Smalltalk does not use data as representation for source code. It uses text as representation for source code.
Interlisp-D is more radical than Smalltalk 80. The Smalltalk editor edits text. The Interlisp-D editor S-Edit edits s-expressions as data.
Interlisp-D treats the files as a code database similar to Smalltalk, but the source code loaded remains data and you can run the program from that data directly via the Lisp interpreter. Smalltalk execution does not provide something like that. The so-called interpreter in Smalltalk executes bytecode. This is different from a Lisp interpreter, which works over the Lisp source data.
The combination of a s-expression editor with an s-expression interpreter (plus optional compilation) is very different, from what Smalltalk 80 did.
When you mark an expression in Smalltalk 80 and execute it via a menu command, then the expression gets compiled to bytecode and the bytecode interpreter then runs it.
If you mark an expression in S-Edit, the s-expression data is extracted from the data structure you edit and you can run that s-expression data with an interpreter, walking directly over that s-expression data.
There was an emacsy interface made by Kelly ??? in the office next to me which I extended into a real Emacs clone (with modes and everything) which a bunch of us used. In retrospect I should have gone native and adopted D-edit directly but what can I say I was a snot-nosed 20 year old kid.
In any case, I don't really want my editor editing sexps. The moment my editor is working with sexps rather than characters, it's no longer a general-purpose tool.
Imagine the editor and the runtime work on the same data:
EDIT <-> data <-> EVAL
Emacs EDIT -> text -> Emacs SAVE FILE
SBCL LOAD FILE -> SBCL READ -> SBCL EXECUTE
Emacs EDIT -> text -> Emacs TRANSFER to SBCL
-> SBCL READ > SBCL EXECUTE ->
SBCL generate TEXT -> SBCL TRANSFER to Emacs
-> Emacs DISPLAY -> text
That's a lot of indirection, a lot of conversions, different runtimes, etc.
S-Edit feels like working with clay. A text editor feels like working with instruments, manipulating something which then manipulates the clay and you are watching the result through goggles.
Could you link me some information about S-Edit? I can't find anything on it, and it might help me understand what you mean.
Chapter 16 describes DEdit, the display oriented structure editor of Interlisp-D.
ALso see for general philosophy of interactive Lisp systems this article from 1978 (!!!):
http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/interactive_c/b...
But that's just me. You use your cool lispm tools, I'll resign myself to never acheiving ultimate productivity.
But I was resigned to that already, pretty much.
From the sidelines, your approach is "all I have are nails and all I need is the biggest hammer you can get me".
>From the sidelines, your approach is "all I have are nails and all I need is the biggest hammer you can get me".
From my perspective, my approach is "that development environment sounds really unpleasant, and while I can appreciare the elegance, I'm having trouble finding the relative upshot."
Data representation is not the data. It's just this: "re" presenting. And when this representation is disconnected from the source by means of showing only the raw text and not allowing access to the source you get what you describe as "unpleasant".
You may find it enjoyable to work only with raw text but you're missing out on working with what that text is supposed to represent.
>And when this representation is disconnected from the source by means of showing only the raw text and not allowing access to the source you get what you describe as "unpleasant".
First off, pleasantness of an interaction is a matter of personal opinion. If you like DEdit, great: I'm not stopping you. But I don't enjoy DEdit and its like. That's my prerogative.
Secondly, I'm not working "only with raw text." Paredit &co let me manipulate the sexpr data structure more directly (or less directly, depending on how you look at it). Geiser and SLIME let me evaluate and manipulate the code as code. But at the end of the day, I'm also operating on text, so I have all of the textual data tools as well, and because Paredit is actually operating on text, it can be used outside of the context of Lisp: As Perlis said, "It is better to have 100 functions operate on one data structure than 10 functions on 10 data structures."
There's no reason it can't come back. It requires a massive amount of programming work and possibly new hardware but it's definitely possible and people are already working towards it. It's actually quite possible to build upon it and even surpass it.
...Unless, of course, one of the popular embedded or mobile systems companies (Apple, etc.) Suddenly rewrote everything in lisp, and forced all 3rd-party devs to do the same, creating a massive market only reachable by Lisp programmers.
What a wonderful dream.
If you think I have a problem with you, or something, I don't. So don't worry about it.
Sorry for giving you grief over... everything, but I can't say I entirely regret it. I learned a lot that I wouldn't have otherwise, which is why I use HN in the first place.
The IDE was really written in CL? Huh. I'd have thought that they would have gone the self-hosting route.
The first version of the OS for Newton was written in a language called Ralph (named for Ralph Ellison, the author of Invisible Man). Someone persuaded John Sculley that writing an OS in Lisp was a crazy idea, so he ordered Larry Tesler to redo it in C++. Larry asked a small group of us to see if we could find a role for Ralph on Newton. We probably took that mandate more broadly than Larry intended; we wrote another whole OS (except for the microkernel and the graphics kernel; we reused the the same ones that the C++ effort was using). It was probably the most intense and rewarding 18 months of my programming career. There were some really cool things that happened, and some really tragic ones.
Later it was decided that "Ralph" was not a good name for the language, and we chose "Dylan" in a process that yielded a few mildly funny stories.
Ralph was basically a subset of Scheme with a few special forms renamed, plus a subset of CLOS, plus a few additional extensions. All built-in Ralph datatypes were CLOS-style classes.
The native-code compiler was written in Macintosh Common Lisp. The development environment was an extended version of MCL called "Leibniz". Besides the usual MCL features, it additionally had a parallel set of tools--for example, in addition to the Lisp Listener, there was a Ralph Listener. Common Lisp code was compiled to native code and ran on the Mac's CPU. Ralph code was compiled to native code and ran on the Newton's CPU. At first the Newton motherboard was a big honking PC board jammed into a Nubus slot, so big that I had to leave the top off my Macintosh IIfx when it was installed. Later a ribbon cable connected the Nubus to a prototype Newton tablet-type device.
Making Ralph self-hosting on Newton would have been a lot more work, we would have had to live without a host of useful development features for a long time, and it would have required special target hardware with much more storage than Newton was intended to have. Using a cross-compiler written in Common Lisp neatly solved all those problems, plus it also gave us all of MCL's rather nice tools plus whatever extensions we chose to add.
Apple did do a bunch of stuff in Lisp around that time. For example, it did GATE, a knowledge-based automated testing system invented by Matt Maclaurin (I worked on that for a while), and SK8, the fabled "HyperCard on Steroids" invented by Ruben Kleiman (I worked on that for a while, too).
However, Lisp was never really a mainstream tool at Apple, except in certain groups in ATG (the Advanced Technology Group, which no longer exists). In fact, the only mainstream languages at Apple were, in rough chronological order, 6502 assembler, 68000 assembler, Pascal, C, C++, Objective-C, and now, of course, Swift. All kinds of languages were used here and there, but only the ones on the mainstream list had any great general acceptance.
Yeah, I'm a pretty big fan of Scheme, so I would have probably liked Ralph. We do actually have CLOS-type classes over in schemeland (although not everything is an object by default, of course) now, and by "subset of scheme," most people mean "no call/cc," which I likely wouldn't miss too much.
Scheme implementations of CLOS are much more common now than they were in 1992. The only ones I remember from around then are RScheme, Oaklisp, and of course Gregor Kiczales' tinyclos.
As far as language features, I still like Ralph the best of any language I've used, though there are things from newer languages I would want it to incorporate if it still existed today. But the actual usable language I like best today is Common Lisp.
There are a handful of other languages I like a lot--Scheme, Haskell, and ML are at the top of the list--but when I use them seriously, I miss Common Lisp. I don't miss any of them when I use Common Lisp.
I didn't miss Common Lisp or any other language when I was using Ralph.
Woz mentions some apps:
No, it's not just you. Most Lisper thought that way. But the target weren't Lisp developers, it were C++/Apple Pascal developers. Basically similar purposes which Java was designed for: general 'mainstream' application/OS developers from mobile systems upwards. Management did not think that an s-expression-based syntax would be a success with developers used to use Pascal, C and C++.
> The IDE was really written in CL? Huh. I'd have thought that they would have gone the self-hosting route.
The new language was emerging and targeting the new hardware platforms.
You can think of it that it was similar with the Playstation games from Naughty Dog - for example Crash Bandicoot. The platform for the software was the Game Object Oriented Lisp on Playstation and the development environment were desktop computers running and IDE based on Allegro Common Lisp.
The dev environment were Macs. The developers were often Lisper and Apple bought the technology and the people. Even the later product version development environment 'Newton Toolkit' was originally developed in Common Lisp.
There were stranger things then. I once saw a version of Microsoft Word for Macintosh on a developer CD, written in Common Lisp. It was a relatively sophisticated User Interface mockup. It looked like the real MS Word for Mac, but lacked much of the functionality. But when you looked at the application file on the bit level, you could see that it was a Macintosh Common Lisp runtime/image. It was written by or for Microsoft. Long ago.
But it's weird to think about how much Lisp/Smalltalk related stuff came out of Apple in the 80s and 90s. I can't imagine them doing that stuff now.
At that time there were key Lisp (and Smalltalk) people in Apple's management, especially Larry Tesler: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Larry_Tesler
He described why they were working on Dylan:
http://lispm.de/docs/prefix-dylan/book.annotated/foreword.ht...
HyperCard development floundered before Steve came back partly because of bad management decisions and partly because it required a total ground-up rewrite to bring it up to even 1988's graphic standards (it was obsolete pretty much as soon as it was released, thanks to the appearance of the Macintosh II, which supported larger screens and RGB color).
Apple management started talking about cutting it pretty much immediately. It didn't directly generate any revenue--Apple gave it away for free. It didn't fit into any familiar product category. It wasn't on anybody's list of must-have features. Basically, Apple management didn't understand what it was or why it existed.
Apple's programmers and other makers were an entirely different matter. They used it for all sorts of things. So did third-party developers. So did people who discovered how to make software through working with HyperCard. Projects sprouted in Apple that either extended HyperCard or implemented new software in the same spirit with expanded capabilities--but all those projects had the same problem as HyperCard: management didn't see what they were supposed to be for. Furthermore, the other projects didn't benefit from Apple management's promise to Bill Atkinson that HyperCard would be given away to Apple customers.
HyperCard's days were numbered from the beginning; that much is true. But to call it "obsolete" from the beginning misunderstands a lot.
Re. not requiring a tithe to Apple, it's significant that their most popular OS (by orders of magnitude?):
* requires a tithe
* is not user programmable
That definitely was not the case at the time HyperCard was being developed. I know because I was there. I even worked on the HyperCard team for a while.
HyperCard's troubles had nothing to do with an Apple policy against user programmability, and everything to do with the fact that management couldn't figure out how to make it into a product that paid for itself.
If you want to argue that Apple has a policy against user programming now, well, maybe they do. I don't know. The last time I worked there was in the 1990s. But they didn't have any such policy when HyperCard was being shipped.
Hint, for Swift, Objective-C, Java, JavaScript, Android, Dart, .NET, the kernel doesn't matter at all from the API surface point of view.
And I am only listing the official mobile OS SDK languages being forced on 3rd-party devs as you say.
Many C++ users are finally enjoying environments like Clion and incremental compilers, well this was a C++ environment in 1993:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pQQTScuApWk
Built on top of Lucid Common Lisp infrastructure, as Lucid pivoted their business to C++.
IBM had a similar one, that imported C++ into a database, offering a Smalltalk like development experience for C++, called VisualAge C++ Professional 4.0
http://www.edm2.com/index.php/IBM_VAC_3.0
So yeah, we are grey hair dogs disappointed how things evolve.
If you want a future, build it. If you're already doing it, keep doing so, and find ways to win people over, not alienate them.
By the way, almost none of this is aimed directly at you...
And I am building something better—think AS/400 with an APL-inspired Forth dialect. It is certainly alienating, but (hopefully) the system will have enough fun demos to hook people, and the language runs on other OSes to tempt people in. ;)
As for your opinions on perf, I can see where you're coming from, but I'm a Lisp programmer. If I agreed with you, I likely wouldn't be one.
It is perfectly valid to tell the creators of the systems you use that you'd would prefer them to be more like X.
Grady Booch once at an Eclipse conference:
"For those of you looking at the future of development environments, I encourage you to go back and review some of the Xerox documentation for InterLisp-D."
This isn't, by the way, a slight on you. Nor do I dislike you in any way. I do tend to argue with you a lot, but that's because I disagree with you, and I am of the firm belief that you can learn a lot by discussing subjects with people who disagree with you regarding them.
Any examples of your own lisp systems?
I have watched some videos of open genera. I don't see the appeal. It was neat for the time, but I have a hard time seeing what problems it solves for today. I'm not trolling, if someone can give some specifics, I'd be interested to read them.
https://www.reddit.com/r/programming/comments/1a4wvf/kalman_...