[HN Gopher] Symbolics Lisp Machine demo Jan 2013
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Symbolics Lisp Machine demo Jan 2013
Author : lelf
Score : 58 points
Date : 2021-04-27 16:04 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.youtube.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.youtube.com)
| abhinav22 wrote:
| Man that looks so _cool_. What a beautiful, clean user interface
| and I assume an amazing experience, with the full power of Lisp.
|
| Is there any chance to get a Lisp Machine as an image that we can
| load in a VM?
|
| All I need is a connection the internet and I would be happy to
| spend all my spare hobby programming time dialed away in my own
| small corner of a Lisp Machine. No distractions, only Lisp.
| capableweb wrote:
| You can give OpenGenera a try.
|
| https://github.com/ynniv/vagrant-opengenera has some
| instructions to get started.
|
| http://3e8.org/blog/2016/04/04/symbolics-concordia-in-a-virt...
| can take you a bit further.
|
| You should give smalltalk a try too, same idea but OOP focus
| ("defining" maybe rather) https://squeak.org/
| dmd wrote:
| Kalman was a coworker of mine at my previous job, and is just an
| amazing, stunning hacker.
| natas wrote:
| I wish such system was still being commercialized.
| brundolf wrote:
| I used to work at Cycorp, a holdover from the AI world of the 80s
| and to this day a classical (CL-like) Lisp shop. They have an old
| Symbolics box in their entryway, positioned by a couch as a small
| coffee table :)
|
| I find the whole idea of hardware that's specifically optimized
| for a totally different programming paradigm than what we're used
| to just fascinating. It's not hard to imagine why we haven't seen
| more of it: it's really expensive to iterate on a branch in the
| computing hardware tree, and you're probably better off just
| writing a runtime for mainline systems. But still, it's fun to
| think about.
|
| I am a little surprised though that nobody's written an
| _operating system_ like this for standard hardware. Still a big
| task, but an order of magnitude less ambitious than custom
| hardware and with many of the benefits people would 've gotten
| from a Lisp machine.
| mepian wrote:
| There is Mezzano: https://github.com/froggey/Mezzano
| brundolf wrote:
| Nice, that does look like a similar idea
| huachimingo wrote:
| Some phones also were made with Java in mind, I think?
|
| Not sure if android or old nokias, or both.
| zokier wrote:
| That would be Jazelle, I think handful of Sony-Ericsson
| phones supported that. Nokia was not a big proponent of Java
| (they had Symbian to sell), and that was all before Androids
| time.
| natas wrote:
| is this legal? (without a genera license?)
| segmondy wrote:
| maybe, maybe not.
|
| https://archives.loomcom.com/genera/genera-install.html
| mepian wrote:
| The author of the video works for Symbolics (or rather, for
| what's left of Symbolics today).
| natas wrote:
| oh sweet, I wonder who are their customers today.
| capableweb wrote:
| Well, their arguments[1] are quite compelling in general,
| rest of the software[2][3] seems to be highly specialized
| and specific, I'm guessing there is a lot of maintenance
| that has to be done still.
|
| - [1] http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Genera-why-1.htm
|
| - [2] http://www.symbolics-dks.com/Macsyma-1.htm (general
| purpose symbolic-numerical-graphical mathematics software
| product)
|
| - [3] http://www.symbolics-dks.com/PDease-1.htm (general
| purpose software that uses Finite Element Analysis to
| obtain numerical solutions to a large class of partial
| differential equations)
| segmondy wrote:
| For those who don't get the lisp machine. imagine how you can
| inspect your browser, see the html/js, go to console, run
| commands modify programs etc. Imagine doing that on your OS,
| that's the experience of Lisp machine.
| Blikkentrekker wrote:
| Certainly that is the experience of a specific operating
| system, not a specific processor architecture.
|
| Such an operating system could conceivably run on any machine;
| it simply ran more efficiently on a _Lisp machine_.
| posobin wrote:
| There are 30(!) comments on HN linking to this video, including
| discussions of Bret Victor's "Learnable programming", using Lisp
| in production from last year, comparisons with Smalltalk, a
| thread with examples of beautiful software, and more:
| https://ampie.app/url-context?url=https://www.youtube.com/wa...
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