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Comment by undershirt | Hacker News Reader

I missed the golden age of lisp, but i know this project for its legendary structural editor, SEdit[1], released the year I was born. i found it mentioned in an old paredit readme, something poignant like “paredit is only a shadow of what interlisp was: true structural editing”.

[1]:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2qsmF8HHskg

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What I find fascinating is less the balancing and structural editing, but that these old lisps _strongly_ embraced the absence of source files. The environment was being edited, and not some text documents.

This is how Smalltalk is and was. Source-code is there but mostly for the purpose of restoring changes from the file change.log in case the "image" crashed.

Now, add the change.log file to the version control and you have a block-chain?

Aye, the thing is... I just haven't "clicked" with the ergonomics of Smalltalk systems. The language isn't too appealing, for starters; if feels too much like I'm using reverse polish notation, or a stack-based programming language. ;)

> The environment was being edited, and not some text documents.

That's all very well until you want to put your code in source control.

Well, some older Lisps not only did support files, but also file versioning on operating systems allowing for that. You still have provisions for that in ANSI Common Lisp spec.

Where? I’d be curious to read it.

http://www.lispworks.com/documentation/HyperSpec/Body/f_pn_h...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Versioning_file_system

I don't see why the environment itself couldn't be adapted to have modern revision control.

This is in fact exactly how modern Smalltalk systems interact with source control.

Which Smalltalk environments and SQL databases have tackled already for a couple of decades.

The golden age of Lisp is now.

You might not have been one of the lucky few people to have access to the institutional hardware running Lisp during the golden age of Lisp you're referring to.

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