Comment by jdboyd | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jdboyd | Hacker News Reader

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From a historical interest perspective, I would love to see some Symbolics simulators.

From a productivity and ergonomics perspective, I don't think chip level simulation would be the way two go. First, Genera has been ported forward to new system. First OpenGenera was released for Tru/64 on the DEC Alpha platform as an official product. The fastest Symbolics hardware was about 6 times faster than the original Symbolics hardware. OpenGenera on a 533mhz Alpha was about 3 times faster still. There is a project called VLM to let you run OpenGenera on x86 or ARM and I would imagine it is many times faster still. Also, to my understanding, OpenGenera can still be purchased from symbolics-dks.com for a heft fee.

Second, I think that productivity will be limited by how much it is stuck in the past. If nothing else, crypto being behind the times seems likely to be an issue with networking with the rest of the world.

I would love to see a more modern system like OpenGenera. I also would love to see Symbolics style keyboards be made and possibly upgraded with things like better keyswitches and USB. That should be doable for someone who wants to make a custom layout, circuit board for that layout, and keycaps but based on QMK compatible hardware.

Portable Genera on a current MacBook is about 80 times faster than the last hardware-based Genera.

If only mere mortals could get hold of it…

There is the possibility of ending the snobbery of the entitled by going this way:

[1] https://interlisp.org/ &

[2] https://github.com/interlisp

Thereby uplifting this environment to current systems without layers upon layers of emulation, fully and legally open-sourced.

This is also an emulator. Interlisp uses an emulator written in C and output goes to X11.

Open Genera and Portable Genera use an emulator written in assembler (running on DEC Alpha, X86-64 and ARM64 - for the CPU emulation) and output goes to X11.

As far as I understood it, at first people used the Tru64 emulated Open Genera under Alpha emulation running on some older Ubuntu running on X86-64. That was years ago. Maybe that got some refinements. Is the portable Genera directly retargeted to X86-64 now? And does it matter if it's practically unavailable?

edit: OFC i know Interlisp-D/Medley is also an emulation. But directly retargeted, and legally open source. And not 'production ready', for now. But seems to be only a matter of time.

> at first people used used the Tru64 emulated Open Genera

People I know used it on original DEC Alphas and on Alpha emulators running under Windows.

The new version, called Portable Genera, has three assembler Ivory emulator versions: DEC Alpha, Intel x86-64 and ARM64.

> And does it matter if it's practically unavailable?

There are a few users.

Good for them. Uninteresting for the rest of us, if it's unavailable.

Depends who that 'us' is. If 'us' is a typical Lisp user, then I doubt that any of the older systems is actually 'interesting' beyond software archeology. I think this 'us' better uses something like SBCL (+ whatever), instead of the old systems, available or not. Or Racket, CLojure, or whatever new language has enough mindshare to create an eco-system.

While that is a pragmatic point of view I can perfectly understand, this doesn't satisfy the urge to bask in the nimbus of the 'awesome integration', and thereby the gained power & speed of doing whatever ones whims compel one to dabble within such environments.

Without having to break the bank, or being otherwise artificially constrained.

Yes? ;-)

Just making sure to innocent readers here: the stuff is really old and it shows. The software was developed, designed and grown in another time. Understanding the 'awesome integration' or the 'power & speed' isn't easy. One can look at that stuff for a long time and still have no idea why these features are there, how to use them in actual programming and how they were hacked into the big pile of mud one has just downloaded from the Internet. The Lisp software was designed for customers with deep pockets to get development & maintenance done. Once the money went away, this stuff died. Some early and some slightly later. It's like finding another old Egyptian pyramid and thinking 'let's clean it and use it again'. Unfortunately the builders and original users are mostly no longer there.

So, on a scale of 1 to 5, where would you put it compared to open/portable Genera regarding

1.) (potential) portability, speed

2.) amount of delivered/contained applications

3.) look&feel/usability

4.) access to full source

5.) price (ignoring time)

edit: or use %, 1 to 10, whatever you like

To make sure what my point was: any old Lisp Machine software is largely outdated.

The MIT Lispm software is BSD. http://www.heeltoe.com/retro/mit/mit_cadr_lmss.html It's very old (>40 years) , had never more than a low hundred users. Dead for decades. No Common Lisp. No TCP/IP.

LMI Lispm Software: old, license unclear. TI Lispm software: leaked, uncomplete, no license.

Symbolics Lispm software: partly leaked, no license, owner exists, commercially available. Has a Common Lisp implementation. Best Lispm software. Most development stopped mid 90s. Some updates in the last years, due to a new emulator. Emulator was a commercial product.

Interlisp/Medley: open sourced after a long time being not available. A Common Lisp version which very few people ever used. Emulator was a commercial product. The software is largely written in Interlisp, a Lisp dialect which has been mostly dead for 35 years with almost no users, no libraries, ...

All of these have some very cool technology, but much of it is between 50 and 30 years old.

It's not the Lisp for the 'rest of us', it's for hobby software archeologists, for the few people who have capabilities to update them and for the <100 actual users/developers using them for work.

Thank you for the explanation. But initially I posted that in answer to https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29238005 where someone asked about if it would make sense to clone/reimplement somthing like Genera.

And I pointed out that maybe the next best thing would be https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29245984

With the intent to not having to start from scratch, not necessarily using it as is, but to take inspiration from. Or not, and really pushing it forward instead, but that depends on so many factors. However, it is possible.

Besides that, did you really have the impression 'innocent people' had to be warned of the consequences, wasted time, whatever? ;-)

Furthermore, either Common Lisp is Common Lisp, or not. So what does it matter, if only few people ever used that?

As soon as it's getting graphical there is nothing besides the two commercial vendors(so proprietary), and old McCLIM.

So who really cares? There is Movitz and Mezzano, why should there be no effort to make Medley modern?

Would McCLIM on steroids be better for SBCL and Clozure? Who knows?

I for my part like to look deep into such things, to see how I can adapt the concepts(not necessarily code) into my dabblings on FPGAs.

Sometimes I had my mind blown, by things I haven't seen before, didn't even know the possibility thereof. Learning new concepts, applying them.

Like this https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bM3Gut1hIk (not related to topic)

Anyway, I like to go back into the roads not taken, to at least partially re-branch from there. There is much to learn from. From that what we have now, not so much.

> Furthermore, either Common Lisp is Common Lisp, or not.

Not really. Currently the most Common Lisp is SBCL. There is software out there and the probability of being able to run it on a Lisp implementation depends on its compatibility (and the effort that has been taken to make it compatible). Medley is very different from most other Lisps, even from other Lisp Machines, so it would be interesting how get software in and out of it, make it compatible, etc. Actual software depends on more than just 'Common Lisp' (which itself has a lot of differences between implementations): file system, I/O system, characters, networking, threading, FFI, TCO, ... Lisp Machines have a very different operating system and very different development environments. Lots of basic assumptions don't apply there.

> why should there be no effort to make Medley modern

There is already some. We'll see what it brings.

> Anyway, I like to go back into the roads not taken, to at least partially re-branch from there. There is much to learn from. From that what we have now, not so much.

Even though the past stuff interest me (and I remember a time, when there were active Lisp Machine users around), I learn a lot from stuff we have now, too.

> First OpenGenera was released for Tru/64 on the DEC Alpha platform as an official product. The fastest Symbolics hardware was about 6 times faster than the original Symbolics hardware. OpenGenera on a 533mhz Alpha was about 3 times faster still.

Open Genera was soft emulation of the Symbolics Ivory hardware on Alpha. I believe they didn't even do anything fancy like dynarec; which is why it was such a doddle to port it (from binaries?!) to amd64.

> Second, I think that productivity will be limited by how much it is stuck in the past. If nothing else, crypto being behind the times seems likely to be an issue with networking with the rest of the world.

A modern developer running Visual Studio Code has most of the features the Lisp Machines had, and then some. Edit and continue can even be had under Java and C#.

Are you saying a modern developer running Lisp has most of the same features of a Lisp Machine? If not, what language(s) are you referring to?

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