> Portable Genera, an official port of the VLM to Intel and ARM done under contract for existing customers. While this version isn't publicly available as of this writing, it's still actively developed.
The jury is still out of how much official this is, seeing that the legal situation for Genera is a quagmire.
Wilder is that the MIT Lisp Machine branch is also being actively developed, and it has a clear legal situation today. To the point that there are several (simulated) CADR's on the Chaosnet talking to each other over the Internet. :-)
When I was working on trying to update the CADR software, I found it helped to check in to a VCS all the versions of a particular source file over the previous version, what was your reason for going back to checking them in separately?
Is there any good literature on building keyboards? I’d love to try my hand at building vintage-like keyboards for things like DEC terminals, workstations (Xerox Star and Apollo Domain rely so much on their keyboards it’s hard to experience them on regular PC keyboards).
I've just completed a keyboard inspired by the Lisp machine keyboards but aimed toward use on a modern Unix system. Making your own one-off hand-wired keyboard is time consuming but pretty easy if you can solder. I probably spent $400 all told, including a fully custom keycap set from https://fkcaps.com/custom/
I've been meaning to write a blog post about it but I'm still finishing shakedown (currently chasing a wiring problem that messes up multi-key chords on the homerow)
No idea, this is sorta the project that runs on fumes right now. Wanna do something together? The keycaps are always the issue, making, remaking the PCB for the keyboard is just a days work even making it work with something like QMK or some Arduino thing.
But then you want the keycaps, and each special keyboard has its own set .. double injection moulds are expensive unless you do a large batch.
I know very little about keyboards (not much beyond reading a matrix, which is something I did once, 30+ years ago), but I’m in.
I would imagine by now there would be a KiCAD wizard that would generate a standard keyboard with extra rows and columns if needed and all customisation would be dragging the switch footprints to their positions for the non 1:1 keys.
Keycaps can be blank, laser eroded and resin filled, dye sub, or any other technique.
injection molding is intractable for small runs, but there are services for one-off UV printing and dye sub; you'll have to compromise on accuracy to the original, but could still make something nice
I joined a discord for keyboard makers. I'm trying to learn electronics and circuit design and thought it would be a nice way to get into it.
The conclusion I drew after researching the subject and talking to people was it's not viable unless you're planning to turn it into an actual product and sell large numbers later on. Looks like the manufacturers are assuming you'll follow up with large orders.
So many mysteries: which customers, and which customers with the capacity to pay not only for an ongoing service contract but a port? Some unknown wealthy benefactor? Someone managing 30 year-old ICBMs?
There were some financial giants that used Symbolics for fraud detection; possibly it just makes sense to keep it running than to rewrite it. I remember American Express being a large customer, from what I read.
From what I recall of various discussions over time:
Around 2001, AMEX fraud detection system was still developed on Genera, then OpenGenera running on Alpha workstations, but for deployment it was compiled using Franz's Allegro Common Lisp to run on "normal" servers.
About 2014-2015? I remember seeing more than 100k USD in publicly visible support contracts for US federal agencies related to Symbolics systems, which might have been related to the part stock and repairs done by symbolics remnant mentioned in the article - I know for certain that repair work continued to happen until at least 2018 (I talked with one of the people doing the repairs on contract).
> Emacs got rewritten separately for the Lisp machine as EINE (EINE Is Not EMACS), parallel with Multics Emacs also written in Lisp, and an improved EINE later became ZWEI (ZWEI Was EINE Initially).
These recursive acronyms are causing a stack overflow in my brain.
I'm not German, but if I recall correctly:
- "Eins" is for the actual number "one"
- "Ein" is "a" for masculine/neuter genders
- "Ein" is also used for expressing the amount, e.g. "ein Auto, zwei Autos"
That said, high school was a long time ago, so I might be way off :)
I wish these weren't so unobtanium... I've been slowly gathering sources and information in the hopes of maybe writing a book about the Lisp Machines, and as part of that I'd like to spend time hands-on with the real hardware, but it's hard and expensive to find the damn things.
Much of the user experience of the Lisp Machine was just the console. Users would seldom interact directly with the actual hardware which would be in some lab or hall.
You had special key sequences so you could even hard reboot the machine if it got stuck. Both the CADR and Lambda have simulators that work very well and are Free Software.
You won’t be missing out much by using a simulator. :-)
The TI Explorers were much more common to be deployed in separate room than Symbolics, AFAIK, due to consoles being equipped with fiber-optic cable by default (an optional thing for symbolics which used IIRC BNC). I remember seeing photos of rows of them being shuffled around at some point at one of the NASA sites. Explorer also had some interesting hardware options that probably evolved from LMI Lambda support for running Unix on separate board, for example I've seen documentation about pretty big stack of DSP as special compute accelerator usable from Lisp environment for dealing with live signal processing.
> due to consoles being equipped with fiber-optic cable by default
I would NEVER imagine a graphical console that’s connected that way to a machine. This is why preserving these machines is so important - it’s hard to even know the tech we’d lose (and be doomed to reinvent) when the machines are lost to time.
Significant part of extant, or at least longer-surviving, Matrox business once they mostly got out of GPU space was in devices like that - displays connected by long cables, things like specialized GPUs with 8P8C or fiber connectors that provided DisplayPort + USB over longer range, to connect users to computer running elsewhere.
The Open Genera version for the Alpha is a lot easier to obtain. There's also a bootleg version that ported the Alpha assembly to C. It apparently run on Linux x64 at some point. IIRC, it depends on some removed X11 features, so it may be difficult to run on a current OS.
Another thing you might choose to do is run another (closer) descendant of one the last MIT AI Lab versions of Lisp machine system software, pieced together from tape backups of the AI Lab. Like Plan 9, the community seems to have spun itself its own living distro, still running on MIT CADR simulators. [1], [2].
I'll try configuring a FreeBSD VM and see if I can get NFSv2 running there, then it's just the trick of figuring out how to make the Genera VM talk on my actual network instead of just that tap...
Yeah, you need an old Linux version IIRC because it depends on a particular NFS version... I think it's important to get a feel for how the actual hardware felt, though.
It needs NFSv2 in the images as distributed on OpenGenera 2.0 distribution CDs - there exist patches for NFSv3, but there are also userland NFSv2 servers that can be used.
For integration of some of the network details, you need NIS (aka Yellow Pages).
The big issue is X11, because around X.Org R7 they have made changes that result in hangs of the Genera X11 client in certain conditions, including IIRC handling of modifier keys - and crucially it will hang on shutting down the machine (for example to save new image).
There are patches for everything other than NIS (and you can avoid using NIS), but you have to hunt for them. AFAIK they are included as part of Portable Genera.
It seems nfs-ganesha which used to have v2 support dropped it since then, but you might be able to compile 1.5.x release tree which is still on github.
As for patched systems, I know I have seen places which had patched images to load from, but there's non-trivial chance that they are slightly bitrotted.
Same here; I've been fascinated by Lisp machines for the past decade, but they are very difficult to get a hold of, and when they do show up for sale, they are prohibitively expensive. When I went to the now-defunct Living Computer Museum in Seattle back in 2019, I saw that there were no Lisp machines available, though I did get to see and use other rare machines such as the Xerox Alto, the Apple Lisa, and the original NeXT cube (I'm glad I finally got to add one to my collection a few years ago). MIT CADR has been made open source for quite some time (https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/), and I'm glad that Xerox Interlisp-D is now open source (https://interlisp.org/). However, the holy grail of Lisp machine environments, Symbolics Genera, is still not available as FOSS. Funnily enough, this is fitting since Richard Stallman's frustrations with Symbolics was one of the catalysts behind his starting the GNU Project.
One of the interesting "what could have been" moments of computing history is Apple's exploration of Lisp in the late 1980s and during the first half of the 1990s. Such projects include:
- Apple's original plans for the Newton, which included an OS written in Lisp.
- The Dylan programming language, which I've heard can be thought of as Scheme with the Common Lisp Object System. Dylan was originally designed to be the official language used to develop Newton apps. Originally Dylan had an S-expression syntax, but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt. However, the Newton ended up using a C++-based operating system, and NewtonScript, which wasn't based on a Lisp, was created as the language for developing Newton apps.
In an alternate timeline, we could've been using Apple devices built on a Lisp foundation. This is probably the closest we've gotten to Lisp machines on the desktop, as opposed to specialized AI workstations that cost five figures in 1980s dollars.
Then again, things worked out well for Apple after the NeXT purchase. The OpenStep API (which became Cocoa) and Objective-C was (and still is) solid infrastructure than can be thought of as a "pragmatic Smalltalk" desktop, though in recent years I feel Apple has been moving on from NeXT influences and is doing its own thing now with Swift.
> had an S-expression syntax, but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt.
They can be forgiven, at the time. Now we have evidence that thinking is wrong. Today we have half of everyone and their dog, as Web programmers, using a syntax originally chosen by very technical systems programmers. (Bell Labs researchers -> C -> Oak -> Java -> JavaScript.)
Almost no Web developers are systems programmers, and this is just a poor syntax for the work, and needlessly cryptic, but they can pick up even this bad syntax just fine.
Now we know that, whether you use curly braces, parentheses, whitespace, or something else is not the barrier to learning a programming language. It's one of the most absolutely trivial things about it to learn.
Knowing this, the next time I hear someone say "We can't use this syntax, because it will just totally break people's brains, even though the higher grammar, semantics, libraries, domain frameworks, and everything else are different anyway, and are orders of magnitude harder to learn, we need to make it look superficially like something it's not, because people are full of poo"... I'm ready to appropriate the Lily Allen song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUHqFhnen0U
> (Bell Labs researchers -> C -> Oak -> Java -> JavaScript.)
It seems like Javascript inherits more directly from lisp than any of the other languages mentioned, except for the syntax. As a result Javascript is a lisp without macros, which is a sad concept. (In this sense, I very much agree with you.)
If you're already a seasoned programmer, maybe different syntax causes little friction.
But for people new to the craft, syntax matters: Chris Okasaki found that the one thing that helped students get over the hump and really start to understand scopes and blocks was significant whitespace.
Matthias Felleisen, et al., also found that syntax is one of the barriers to new students with zero prior programming experience.
Strangely enough, they found that Lisp syntax was easier to pick up, because it was simpler. (In general, the first word in the parentheses tells you what to do with the rest. Not other punctuation to remember, precedence parsing rules, etc.)
We're usually not developing languages for people with zero experience, but if someone wants to twist my arm to use Lisp syntax...
*Some* people behind Rhombus think that lisp syntax is a problem - we will see. My prediction is that it will not even leave a dent - people get all kind of strange ideas without having any kind of data to prove their claims. To me it looks like just another python:
Back in the day, Lisps and Schemes has had all sorts of excuses for not being used. To slow, GC is slow, too big, no libraries, too old, etc. etc. etc. All reasons that had some merit at one time.
But today, all of those excuses have been long gone for a long time.
Clojure is as mainstream and box checking as you can get, much less all of the other zillion projects out there.
And yet.
No great renaissance. Still talked about in hushed tones. "Only those snobby hacker guys use that."
And what single thing has remained and controversial about Lisps?
The syntax.
JavaScript demonstrated that a dynamic language with garbage collection, closures, and functional elements, and native data structures, can be used for everything from web pages to enterprise backends. Many of the things folks complained about in Lisp environments, JavaScript "suffers" from as well.
I know I'm not completely on top of things, but I think JavaScript has been reasonably successful and gained some popularity.
And behold, of all the things it does not share with Lisps: the syntax.
I'm reasonably confident if the hackers at Netscape came out with "S-Script" for their browser, it would be a historical curiosity. As desperate as people were to get scripting in browsers, they would have likely stuck with Explorer, VBA, and everything would be in a VBA clone today.
S-expressions have had their chance, and the wisdom of the crowds have not bought into them.
Ah, what would be a lisp thread without the inevitable lisps-decline-because-of-the-syntax-explainer, who will write a small roman about how bad lisp is and how no one cares about them /s
On a more serious note, anecdotes are not data, correlation has to be proven. Lisps may not be popular (a fate they share with most c-syntax language without corporate money) but also absolutely un-dead at that point. I am fine with it. In fact, as someone who earns good money with mostly JS, I couldn’t care less, I wouldn’t touch JS with a stick for my personal projects.
It's a longstanding error to think Lisp would benefit from a more conventional syntax. People have been making this mistake since the very beginning (McCarthy).
Rhombus is research. IMHO, Honu parsing stuff is interesting (e.g., maybe it helps add richer syntax extension to languages with syntax that traditionally makes that hard).
For the others: According to James Gosling's intentions, by retaining the familiar syntax of C programming with its use of curly braces, Java aimed to build upon the existing skills and knowledge of a larger community of developers who were already well-versed in C. This decision was meant to make the transition to Java as smooth as possible for those programmers, thereby increasing their adoption of the new language and its associated ecosystem (VM etc.). By the way, JavaScript was originally an embedded Scheme and had nothing in common with Java, except for the Sun marketing team (Brendan Eich was brave and took no pride...).
Additionally, Java (and .NET for historical reasons), also benefit from that Objective-C / NeXTStep linage.
The C++ like syntax was a kind of honey trap for C++ devs, the actual runtime and language semantics are closer those from Smalltalk/Objective-C, hence why Strongtalk and SELF JIT research did fit so well into Hotspot.
There don't seem to even be many screenshots of Sk8 and Apple Dylan out there, so please, if you can, mirror this stuff online somewhere.
One day the world of computing will realise the mistakes it made and having at least maps of the forks in the road that it didn't take will help it to find its way out of the jungle.
> but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt
It did cripple them in the sense that it took forever to actually fully implement the Algol-style syntax and the necessarily much more complex macro system that such a syntax requires.
That one to two year delay absolutely destroyed any momentum Dylan could have had, and also made implementation of a Dylan-compatible language much more (needlessly) complex for a perceived benefit that never materialized.
Instead of being able to focus on implementing optimizations, tools, and frameworks, everyone trying to participate in the Dylan ecosystem had to spend that time on syntax bullshit instead, and still do. It really pains me that the other Dylan ecosystem players didn't immediately drop the Algol-style syntax for the much simpler Lisp-style one when Apple dropped Dylan, and to this day OpenDylan uses the infix syntax.
I remember bumping into a Lisp Machine in the 90's. It was at my university, SFU. A door to a storage room at the rear of the computing science lab was left ajar and I took a look inside. Imagine my delight when I saw a Lisp Machine that towered over me! We had NeXT machines and SUN workstations in the lab so I imagine the Lisp Machine was mothballed.
Cathode Ray Dude on YouTube had a video with a guy calling himself tr0n(?) showing off his Symbolics machine. I can't find the video, but it's out there and it's good.
Not as dramatic but buying Casio ai-1000 a Lisp calculator due to discussion here got me nowhere so far. Finally get a similar Casio hoping to develop serial driver so to communicate with it … this kind of project expand even the owner may have to ask. Why?
This is wild:
> Portable Genera, an official port of the VLM to Intel and ARM done under contract for existing customers. While this version isn't publicly available as of this writing, it's still actively developed.
The jury is still out of how much official this is, seeing that the legal situation for Genera is a quagmire.
Wilder is that the MIT Lisp Machine branch is also being actively developed, and it has a clear legal situation today. To the point that there are several (simulated) CADR's on the Chaosnet talking to each other over the Internet. :-)
When I was working on trying to update the CADR software, I found it helped to check in to a VCS all the versions of a particular source file over the previous version, what was your reason for going back to checking them in separately?
Is https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/ the project you're referring to?
Yup! Feel free to prod me if you need help (forum, chat, mail ...).
Someone needs to sell a Space Cadet USB keyboard (but with arrows).
Is this close enough?
https://keymacs.com/
Wow how cool, but $1,171 for the basic, non-soldered one? Guess it's not for the mass market...
Horrendously expensive doesn’t count.
Oh, man, I want one.
(I am slowly working on making a replica ... without arrows though)
Is there any good literature on building keyboards? I’d love to try my hand at building vintage-like keyboards for things like DEC terminals, workstations (Xerox Star and Apollo Domain rely so much on their keyboards it’s hard to experience them on regular PC keyboards).
I've just completed a keyboard inspired by the Lisp machine keyboards but aimed toward use on a modern Unix system. Making your own one-off hand-wired keyboard is time consuming but pretty easy if you can solder. I probably spent $400 all told, including a fully custom keycap set from https://fkcaps.com/custom/
I've been meaning to write a blog post about it but I'm still finishing shakedown (currently chasing a wiring problem that messes up multi-key chords on the homerow)
No idea, this is sorta the project that runs on fumes right now. Wanna do something together? The keycaps are always the issue, making, remaking the PCB for the keyboard is just a days work even making it work with something like QMK or some Arduino thing.
But then you want the keycaps, and each special keyboard has its own set .. double injection moulds are expensive unless you do a large batch.
> Wanna do something together?
I know very little about keyboards (not much beyond reading a matrix, which is something I did once, 30+ years ago), but I’m in.
I would imagine by now there would be a KiCAD wizard that would generate a standard keyboard with extra rows and columns if needed and all customisation would be dragging the switch footprints to their positions for the non 1:1 keys.
Keycaps can be blank, laser eroded and resin filled, dye sub, or any other technique.
injection molding is intractable for small runs, but there are services for one-off UV printing and dye sub; you'll have to compromise on accuracy to the original, but could still make something nice
Do you have any links or pointers to read up on that? How small runs and how much of a compromise on accuracy are we talking about?
You can always use dye sublimation.
Sandpaper off the markings on a regular keyboard and write the keycaps with a Sharpie.
That, or order blanks.
I joined a discord for keyboard makers. I'm trying to learn electronics and circuit design and thought it would be a nice way to get into it.
The conclusion I drew after researching the subject and talking to people was it's not viable unless you're planning to turn it into an actual product and sell large numbers later on. Looks like the manufacturers are assuming you'll follow up with large orders.
*angry r/MechanicalKeyboards 60% noises*
So many mysteries: which customers, and which customers with the capacity to pay not only for an ongoing service contract but a port? Some unknown wealthy benefactor? Someone managing 30 year-old ICBMs?
There were some financial giants that used Symbolics for fraud detection; possibly it just makes sense to keep it running than to rewrite it. I remember American Express being a large customer, from what I read.
From what I recall of various discussions over time:
Around 2001, AMEX fraud detection system was still developed on Genera, then OpenGenera running on Alpha workstations, but for deployment it was compiled using Franz's Allegro Common Lisp to run on "normal" servers.
About 2014-2015? I remember seeing more than 100k USD in publicly visible support contracts for US federal agencies related to Symbolics systems, which might have been related to the part stock and repairs done by symbolics remnant mentioned in the article - I know for certain that repair work continued to happen until at least 2018 (I talked with one of the people doing the repairs on contract).
I’d love to know how many Lisp machines are still in the wild and will eventually be available after decommissioning.
I knew some hedge funds running systems on them, but can’t imagine those haven’t been ported/rewritten to something not antidiluvian.
I think we need the word "postdiluvian". You wanted "ante", not "anti", btw
Obviously we now know what OpenAI is really running on.
> Emacs got rewritten separately for the Lisp machine as EINE (EINE Is Not EMACS), parallel with Multics Emacs also written in Lisp, and an improved EINE later became ZWEI (ZWEI Was EINE Initially).
These recursive acronyms are causing a stack overflow in my brain.
Very well played.
The clever part isn't just the recursion. These translate (almost) as "one" and "two" in German.
Indeed. Erbsenzähler comment: "eine" is the singular "a" for a feminine object, "zwei" is actually just "two". "Ein" is "one".
I'm not German, but if I recall correctly: - "Eins" is for the actual number "one" - "Ein" is "a" for masculine/neuter genders - "Ein" is also used for expressing the amount, e.g. "ein Auto, zwei Autos"
That said, high school was a long time ago, so I might be way off :)
I wish these weren't so unobtanium... I've been slowly gathering sources and information in the hopes of maybe writing a book about the Lisp Machines, and as part of that I'd like to spend time hands-on with the real hardware, but it's hard and expensive to find the damn things.
Much of the user experience of the Lisp Machine was just the console. Users would seldom interact directly with the actual hardware which would be in some lab or hall.
You had special key sequences so you could even hard reboot the machine if it got stuck. Both the CADR and Lambda have simulators that work very well and are Free Software.
You won’t be missing out much by using a simulator. :-)
A Symbolics MacIvory or a TI MicroExplorer would typically sit at/under/on the desk.
The TI Explorers were much more common to be deployed in separate room than Symbolics, AFAIK, due to consoles being equipped with fiber-optic cable by default (an optional thing for symbolics which used IIRC BNC). I remember seeing photos of rows of them being shuffled around at some point at one of the NASA sites. Explorer also had some interesting hardware options that probably evolved from LMI Lambda support for running Unix on separate board, for example I've seen documentation about pretty big stack of DSP as special compute accelerator usable from Lisp environment for dealing with live signal processing.
> due to consoles being equipped with fiber-optic cable by default
I would NEVER imagine a graphical console that’s connected that way to a machine. This is why preserving these machines is so important - it’s hard to even know the tech we’d lose (and be doomed to reinvent) when the machines are lost to time.
Significant part of extant, or at least longer-surviving, Matrox business once they mostly got out of GPU space was in devices like that - displays connected by long cables, things like specialized GPUs with 8P8C or fiber connectors that provided DisplayPort + USB over longer range, to connect users to computer running elsewhere.
That is pretty cool. I think I remember small boxes with PS/2 and VGA ports and ethernet connections.
The Open Genera version for the Alpha is a lot easier to obtain. There's also a bootleg version that ported the Alpha assembly to C. It apparently run on Linux x64 at some point. IIRC, it depends on some removed X11 features, so it may be difficult to run on a current OS.
Another thing you might choose to do is run another (closer) descendant of one the last MIT AI Lab versions of Lisp machine system software, pieced together from tape backups of the AI Lab. Like Plan 9, the community seems to have spun itself its own living distro, still running on MIT CADR simulators. [1], [2].
[1] https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/
[2] https://metebalci.com/blog/cadr-lisp-machine-and-cadr-proces...
https://archives.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html
Howto:
https://gist.github.com/oubiwann/1e7aadfc22e3ae908921aeaccf2...
I've followed the loomcom instructions before, but the problem is that as far as I can tell, Debian has entirely removed the ability to run NFSv2 servers from their distribution: https://salsa.debian.org/kernel-team/nfs-utils/-/commit/2c2c...
I'll try configuring a FreeBSD VM and see if I can get NFSv2 running there, then it's just the trick of figuring out how to make the Genera VM talk on my actual network instead of just that tap...
At least once my approach for running involved having an Solaris 10 VM running Xsun for the console, might try that again with lx branded zone :V
Yeah, you need an old Linux version IIRC because it depends on a particular NFS version... I think it's important to get a feel for how the actual hardware felt, though.
It needs NFSv2 in the images as distributed on OpenGenera 2.0 distribution CDs - there exist patches for NFSv3, but there are also userland NFSv2 servers that can be used.
For integration of some of the network details, you need NIS (aka Yellow Pages).
The big issue is X11, because around X.Org R7 they have made changes that result in hangs of the Genera X11 client in certain conditions, including IIRC handling of modifier keys - and crucially it will hang on shutting down the machine (for example to save new image).
There are patches for everything other than NIS (and you can avoid using NIS), but you have to hunt for them. AFAIK they are included as part of Portable Genera.
Are the NFSv3 patches available anywhere in a form I can use without having an existing running Genera system?
Also if you can recommend me a userland NFSv2 server I'll give that a shot too.
It seems nfs-ganesha which used to have v2 support dropped it since then, but you might be able to compile 1.5.x release tree which is still on github.
As for patched systems, I know I have seen places which had patched images to load from, but there's non-trivial chance that they are slightly bitrotted.
One place is here http://www.jachemich.de/vlm/genera.html
Of course, Portable Genera has official patches for the issues involved.
Same here; I've been fascinated by Lisp machines for the past decade, but they are very difficult to get a hold of, and when they do show up for sale, they are prohibitively expensive. When I went to the now-defunct Living Computer Museum in Seattle back in 2019, I saw that there were no Lisp machines available, though I did get to see and use other rare machines such as the Xerox Alto, the Apple Lisa, and the original NeXT cube (I'm glad I finally got to add one to my collection a few years ago). MIT CADR has been made open source for quite some time (https://tumbleweed.nu/lm-3/), and I'm glad that Xerox Interlisp-D is now open source (https://interlisp.org/). However, the holy grail of Lisp machine environments, Symbolics Genera, is still not available as FOSS. Funnily enough, this is fitting since Richard Stallman's frustrations with Symbolics was one of the catalysts behind his starting the GNU Project.
One of the interesting "what could have been" moments of computing history is Apple's exploration of Lisp in the late 1980s and during the first half of the 1990s. Such projects include:
- Apple's original plans for the Newton, which included an OS written in Lisp.
- The Dylan programming language, which I've heard can be thought of as Scheme with the Common Lisp Object System. Dylan was originally designed to be the official language used to develop Newton apps. Originally Dylan had an S-expression syntax, but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt. However, the Newton ended up using a C++-based operating system, and NewtonScript, which wasn't based on a Lisp, was created as the language for developing Newton apps.
- SK8 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SK8_(programming_language) ), which was dubbed "HyperCard on steroids," was written in Common Lisp.
In an alternate timeline, we could've been using Apple devices built on a Lisp foundation. This is probably the closest we've gotten to Lisp machines on the desktop, as opposed to specialized AI workstations that cost five figures in 1980s dollars.
Then again, things worked out well for Apple after the NeXT purchase. The OpenStep API (which became Cocoa) and Objective-C was (and still is) solid infrastructure than can be thought of as a "pragmatic Smalltalk" desktop, though in recent years I feel Apple has been moving on from NeXT influences and is doing its own thing now with Swift.
> had an S-expression syntax, but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt.
They can be forgiven, at the time. Now we have evidence that thinking is wrong. Today we have half of everyone and their dog, as Web programmers, using a syntax originally chosen by very technical systems programmers. (Bell Labs researchers -> C -> Oak -> Java -> JavaScript.)
Almost no Web developers are systems programmers, and this is just a poor syntax for the work, and needlessly cryptic, but they can pick up even this bad syntax just fine.
Now we know that, whether you use curly braces, parentheses, whitespace, or something else is not the barrier to learning a programming language. It's one of the most absolutely trivial things about it to learn.
Knowing this, the next time I hear someone say "We can't use this syntax, because it will just totally break people's brains, even though the higher grammar, semantics, libraries, domain frameworks, and everything else are different anyway, and are orders of magnitude harder to learn, we need to make it look superficially like something it's not, because people are full of poo"... I'm ready to appropriate the Lily Allen song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KUHqFhnen0U
> (Bell Labs researchers -> C -> Oak -> Java -> JavaScript.)
It seems like Javascript inherits more directly from lisp than any of the other languages mentioned, except for the syntax. As a result Javascript is a lisp without macros, which is a sad concept. (In this sense, I very much agree with you.)
If you're already a seasoned programmer, maybe different syntax causes little friction.
But for people new to the craft, syntax matters: Chris Okasaki found that the one thing that helped students get over the hump and really start to understand scopes and blocks was significant whitespace.
Matthias Felleisen, et al., also found that syntax is one of the barriers to new students with zero prior programming experience.
Strangely enough, they found that Lisp syntax was easier to pick up, because it was simpler. (In general, the first word in the parentheses tells you what to do with the rest. Not other punctuation to remember, precedence parsing rules, etc.)
We're usually not developing languages for people with zero experience, but if someone wants to twist my arm to use Lisp syntax...
Racket now gets a new, non-s-expression, syntax. The Lisp syntax is said to be a problem hindering wider adoption.
*Some* people behind Rhombus think that lisp syntax is a problem - we will see. My prediction is that it will not even leave a dent - people get all kind of strange ideas without having any kind of data to prove their claims. To me it looks like just another python:
https://docs.racket-lang.org/rhombus/index.html
Python with extensible syntax and not afraid of functional programming.
Back in the day, Lisps and Schemes has had all sorts of excuses for not being used. To slow, GC is slow, too big, no libraries, too old, etc. etc. etc. All reasons that had some merit at one time.
But today, all of those excuses have been long gone for a long time.
Clojure is as mainstream and box checking as you can get, much less all of the other zillion projects out there.
And yet.
No great renaissance. Still talked about in hushed tones. "Only those snobby hacker guys use that."
And what single thing has remained and controversial about Lisps?
The syntax.
JavaScript demonstrated that a dynamic language with garbage collection, closures, and functional elements, and native data structures, can be used for everything from web pages to enterprise backends. Many of the things folks complained about in Lisp environments, JavaScript "suffers" from as well.
I know I'm not completely on top of things, but I think JavaScript has been reasonably successful and gained some popularity.
And behold, of all the things it does not share with Lisps: the syntax.
I'm reasonably confident if the hackers at Netscape came out with "S-Script" for their browser, it would be a historical curiosity. As desperate as people were to get scripting in browsers, they would have likely stuck with Explorer, VBA, and everything would be in a VBA clone today.
S-expressions have had their chance, and the wisdom of the crowds have not bought into them.
Ah, what would be a lisp thread without the inevitable lisps-decline-because-of-the-syntax-explainer, who will write a small roman about how bad lisp is and how no one cares about them /s
On a more serious note, anecdotes are not data, correlation has to be proven. Lisps may not be popular (a fate they share with most c-syntax language without corporate money) but also absolutely un-dead at that point. I am fine with it. In fact, as someone who earns good money with mostly JS, I couldn’t care less, I wouldn’t touch JS with a stick for my personal projects.
It's a longstanding error to think Lisp would benefit from a more conventional syntax. People have been making this mistake since the very beginning (McCarthy).
Rhombus is research. IMHO, Honu parsing stuff is interesting (e.g., maybe it helps add richer syntax extension to languages with syntax that traditionally makes that hard).
For the others: According to James Gosling's intentions, by retaining the familiar syntax of C programming with its use of curly braces, Java aimed to build upon the existing skills and knowledge of a larger community of developers who were already well-versed in C. This decision was meant to make the transition to Java as smooth as possible for those programmers, thereby increasing their adoption of the new language and its associated ecosystem (VM etc.). By the way, JavaScript was originally an embedded Scheme and had nothing in common with Java, except for the Sun marketing team (Brendan Eich was brave and took no pride...).
Additionally, Java (and .NET for historical reasons), also benefit from that Objective-C / NeXTStep linage.
The C++ like syntax was a kind of honey trap for C++ devs, the actual runtime and language semantics are closer those from Smalltalk/Objective-C, hence why Strongtalk and SELF JIT research did fit so well into Hotspot.
I still have my Dylan development kit from Appple. I was also into Sk8.
There don't seem to even be many screenshots of Sk8 and Apple Dylan out there, so please, if you can, mirror this stuff online somewhere.
One day the world of computing will realise the mistakes it made and having at least maps of the forks in the road that it didn't take will help it to find its way out of the jungle.
Both Dylan and Sk8 were available on Macintosh Garden last I checked.
Even better.
I totally understand and if the next 5 years go as planned I can do it. I have all the hardware as was.
I’m pretty sure by the time I got Sk8 it was download only.
Eloquently put, as ever.
> but this was changed to a more Algol-like syntax due to the prevailing opinion among many that an Algol-like syntax would be easier for C/Pascal/C++ programmers to adopt
Did this not cripple macros?
No. Dylan has macros. They’re much like Schemes syntax-case macros vs just ad hoc list building like Common Lisp.
It did cripple them in the sense that it took forever to actually fully implement the Algol-style syntax and the necessarily much more complex macro system that such a syntax requires.
That one to two year delay absolutely destroyed any momentum Dylan could have had, and also made implementation of a Dylan-compatible language much more (needlessly) complex for a perceived benefit that never materialized.
Instead of being able to focus on implementing optimizations, tools, and frameworks, everyone trying to participate in the Dylan ecosystem had to spend that time on syntax bullshit instead, and still do. It really pains me that the other Dylan ecosystem players didn't immediately drop the Algol-style syntax for the much simpler Lisp-style one when Apple dropped Dylan, and to this day OpenDylan uses the infix syntax.
I know someone in the US with Symbolics hardware (actual Lisp machines and MacIvory) as well as TI MicroExplorer for quiet sale. Email is in profile.
I remember bumping into a Lisp Machine in the 90's. It was at my university, SFU. A door to a storage room at the rear of the computing science lab was left ajar and I took a look inside. Imagine my delight when I saw a Lisp Machine that towered over me! We had NeXT machines and SUN workstations in the lab so I imagine the Lisp Machine was mothballed.
Cathode Ray Dude on YouTube had a video with a guy calling himself tr0n(?) showing off his Symbolics machine. I can't find the video, but it's out there and it's good.
Here's that video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SY8ACu24nGs
trinitr0n is a very knowledgeable person when it comes to symbolics lisp machines, indeed.
Not as dramatic but buying Casio ai-1000 a Lisp calculator due to discussion here got me nowhere so far. Finally get a similar Casio hoping to develop serial driver so to communicate with it … this kind of project expand even the owner may have to ask. Why?
I have one of these! I will read this article closely for guidance.
Kind of crazy how right RMS was. Nothing killed the lisp machine quite like IP law.