Hacker News Reader

Comment by zeroclicks | Hacker News Reader

This sounds like a terrible way to run a lisp emulator. One shell command after another which assume one has the apt(1) package manager available on their system.

Maybe the title of the article is poorly done.

The easiest way to run a lisp machine is just to start emacs (there are ports for various operating systems) or try something like racket where you have a REPL with graphics and other goodies installed.

I know HN loves lisp, but putting this article on the front page is a good way to deter lisp adoption.

View on HN

There are a lot of simple ways to run a Lisp system.

This is a very different thing, it's a Lisp Machine operating system running on a CPU emulator (~ from mid 90s). With its own Lisp, process scheduler, garbage collector, GUI, X11 client, file systems, network stacks, various network client and servers, configuration system, integrated development environment, database, ...

No, the title is absolutely fine. It is you who are confused. Neither Emacs nor Racket are Lisp machines. Open Genera is the official emulator of the last actual "machine" (a physical item that sits on your desk) series that was designed by the people who originally invented the term "Lisp machine" before someone started to misuse it.

You can argue that Emacs is a "Lisp machine", in that it's an environment you could conceivably think of as a kind of virtual "machine" in which you can run a particular Lisp (although arguably Elisp isn't what most people mean by Lisp), but this is about Lisp Machines[0], which are very specific historical computers.

I hope it would go without saying to anyone looking to adopt Lisp that this is for historical interest* only and you should instead install a modern Lisp like SBCL or what have you.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lisp_Machines

* (nd IMO its the sort of historical interest that indeed belongs on the front page of HN)

You're right that "Lisp Machines" refer to a very peculiar point in time, available to only a very small number of people.

The article even mentions: > This was all accurate as of around 2018, but please be aware that things may have changed since then!

There's no reason this should appear on the frontpage of a "news" site.

Based on the age of your account, you're new here, so...for better or worse, things that aren't "News" regularly are popular on Hacker News. Even if it's not new, it's can still be new to one of the lucky 10,000.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com