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Comment by lispm | Hacker News Reader

Haskell appeared in 1990.

Around 1987 I was as a student sitting in front of a real Lisp Machine, a Symbolics 3600, running in an AI research lab for natural language interaction. The machine with a stack-based CPU ran an object-oriented operating system written in a million lines of Lisp, with full source code and runtime changes.

There is nothing which will blow your mind like that.

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Those amazing Lisp machines were far ahead of their time. Unfortunately the hardware was very expensive, and it lacked power. Today we have the right cheap hardware. Actually, there is a Lisp revival going on in the OSS community. Consider McClim [1] for instance which attempts to port the amazing GUI of the Lisp Machines to PCs. It already works.

[1] https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/

McClim existed for decades and it's still struggling to become production-ready, a poor example of the "revival".

> it's still struggling to become production-ready

McClim is not a business case. It is just a project to revive the most sophisticated GUI for Lisp. The graphical shell [1] for instance which already works gives a remarkable impression.

[1] https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/static/media/screensh...

Truly amazing. https://common-lisp.net/project/mcclim/static/media/screensh...

At that time the machine didn't lack power. There was nothing similar. Large disks, large virtual memory, a 68k processor for driving the frontend IO, large bitmap screen, 10+ bus slots, tape drive, ethernet, ... all for a single user. It's hard to imagine, but 10MB RAM were amazingly expensive in the early 80s. Similar for harddisks with 100MB... On a timeshared VAX 10-100 people had to share this amount of RAM...

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