
Ask HN: How many of you have used or even heard of a Lisp Machine? - asciilifeform
The Lisp Machines (admittedly a dead branch of the evolutionary tree) embodied plenty of good ideas, many of which have yet to spread to the rest of the computing universe:<p>http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc30c3e5f?hl=en&#38;dmode=source&#38;output=gplain<p><i>"We owe it to the losers in these little skirmishes to make sure that, if nothing else, the good ideas are not lost along with the framework.  And we do not accomplish that by defining that there was nothing lost.  That's both callous to those who worked hard on these other things and short-sighted to the future, which might one day care about the things that got lost."</i><p>Yet most programmers seem to be entirely unaware that these marvels ever existed. Even Ted Nelson's "Geeks Bearing Gifts", the supposedly iconoclastic "we're doing it all wrong" history of computing <i>leaves them out entirely.</i><p>How many people here have ever programmed on a Lisp Machine? I recall that PG once wrote about his experiences. Has anyone else? Why is there scarcely any <i>memory</i> left in the community of what it was like to use one?
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wglb
There are a few hanging out on #lisp that have the machines (operational).

If one does not care about lisp, then one would likely not care about lisp
machines.

And there is memory left in the community--just not everywhere. I don't recall
Ted Nelson's stuff saying that we are doing anything right, but I could be
mistaken.

There is a bit of cognitive dissonance as well--if you like your current IDE
and you are programming in java and it solves refactoring nicely for you, then
you might not be likely to look elsewhere for good IDE ideas.

And with non-lisp languages, it is a lot harder to get the IDE to "understand"
the program in the way that lisp IDEs do, even slime/emacs combined.

I would think that a side-by-side comparison of "modern" IDE and lisp machines
would favor the lisp machine.

That being said, I recall that pg once wrote that they spent too much time on
those fancy features.

------
Tangurena
I've heard about them. Way back when, I tried to get the card for the Mac 2.
However a Mac2 + lisp engine card had a price tag of a luxury car.

They were as much a dead end as JavaStations.
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaStation>

------
ableal
That c.l.lisp post was from 1999. You might want to invite Kent (or anyone
with the experience) to give his opinion on a modern IDE vs. the mythical
LispM. I don't think that something like C# on Visual Studio (or equivalent)
is very far.

I don't care much, personally. I gave up fiddling Emacs many moons ago, and
Python with a semi-competent text editor (nedit will do) is good enough for
me. IDEs can write, but cannot read code for you.

~~~
asciilifeform
> I don't think that something like C# on Visual Studio (or equivalent) is
> very far.

Please try the Symbolics emulator. (Not as hard to find as it once was.)
Modern tools don't even come close, from the standpoint of elegance, debugging
power and "turtles all the way down."

~~~
icey
From what I've collected, Smalltalk is pretty close (the non GNU varieties, at
least).

------
rplevy
I predict the Lisp Machine will return, with Android OS Clojure hacking as its
embryonic beginning of life.

~~~
asciilifeform
The Lisp Machine wasn't simply a piece of hardware which happened to run Lisp:

[http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-
info/dev...](http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-
info/development-environment/index.html)

[http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-
info/doc...](http://www.sts.tu-harburg.de/~r.f.moeller/symbolics-
info/docex/docex.html)

The Android OS is not written in Lisp. The turtles do _not_ go all the way
down. Therefore it is not and will never be a Lisp Machine in any reasonable
sense.

~~~
rplevy
It's written in Java, so can be trivially ported to Clojure and made
incrementally more Lispish, no? The kernel is still Linux but that could be
fixed too, why not?

