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:
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.lang.lisp/msg/b2c0190dc30c3e5f?hl=en&dmode=source&output=gplain
"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."
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 leaves them out entirely.
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 memory left in the community of what it was like to use one?
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.