[HN Gopher] Interlisp-D and MIT CADR Lisp Machine demos for IJCA...
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Interlisp-D and MIT CADR Lisp Machine demos for IJCAI Conference
(1981)
Author : lispm
Score : 45 points
Date : 2024-03-02 17:49 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (archive.org)
(TXT) w3m dump (archive.org)
| lispm wrote:
| Two different very early Lisp Machines (a Xerox Dolphin and a MIT
| CADR), which are personal workstations running a Lisp operating
| system with early graphical user interfaces, are being
| demonstrated, from Xerox PARC. Both machines are integrated into
| the early 3 Mhz Ethernet there. The Interlisp-D / Xerox Dolphin
| demo begins at 00:20 and the Lisp Machine Lisp / MIT CADR demo
| begins at 25:00.
|
| Includes noises from Lisp Machine keyboards. The use of the
| Interlisp-D structure editor for source code is shown.
|
| The demo was for the IJCAI (International Joint Conference on
| Artificial Intelligence) in Vancouver, 1981
|
| I've watched the H.264 version.
| shrubble wrote:
| It's interesting to see the differences - the Interlisp machine
| is pretty much a "graphical workstation" which is recognizable
| today, though in monochrome; the CADR is more spartan on the GUI
| side.
|
| I am slowly learning Lisp and have the Interlisp VM running on my
| system, and it executes very quickly on even 10 year old
| hardware; which of course is 1000 or more times faster than what
| it originally ran on.
| lispm wrote:
| One of the differences is that Interlisp-D used smaller
| windows. For example the structure editor we see in the video
| edits one function. The MIT CADR uses often full-screen windows
| and EINE/ZWEI/Zmacs usually edit files with several
| definitions. The MIT CADR demo showed how to split the screen
| into several windows, like several editors and listeners
| (REPLs). Thus splitting the screen into windows or panes was
| normal, but you don't have to. You can place windows with the
| mouse (and reposition/resize them) as well.
|
| I was a bit surprised to see that they could demo an early MIT
| CADR at Xerox PARC. These were large, fragile and rare machines
| at that time. The MIT CADR was about to be commercialized by
| LMI, Inc. and Symbolics, Inc..
|
| One other thing to note is that a lot of research went into the
| Interlisp-D IDE (not just the graphical version): interactive
| help, source code management, programming by example, window
| manager, programmer's assistants, ... The video for example
| shows how refactor Lisp programs using the source code
| management tools.
| gumby wrote:
| > I was a bit surprised to see that they could demo an early
| MIT CADR at Xerox PARC. These were large, fragile and rare
| machines at that time.
|
| They weren't extraordinarily fragile; robot wirewrapping is
| pretty robust. The next year we shipped a couple of them to
| Paris and I used them just fine, along with a KL-20 that also
| made the trip OK.
| DonHopkins wrote:
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35663742
|
| DonHopkins 10 months ago | parent | context | favorite | on: PHP
| Popularity: Is it decreasing and what to do ab...
|
| That's exactly Jeff Atwood's point, which I quoted above (and
| will repeat here): "From my perspective, the point of all these
| "PHP is broken" rants is not just to complain, but to help
| educate and potentially warn off new coders starting new
| codebases. Some fine, even historic work has been done in PHP
| despite the madness, unquestionably. But now we need to work
| together to fix what is broken. The best way to fix the PHP
| problem at this point is to make the alternatives so outstanding
| that the choice of the better hammer becomes obvious." -Jeff
| Atwood
|
| https://blog.codinghorror.com/the-php-singularity/
|
| Leaning hard into the IDE (or ChatGPT these days) because your
| language design is flawed is a hella/totally stereotypical "West
| Coast" thing to do, as described in "Evolution of Lisp", "Worse
| is Better", and "History of T", and exemplified by Interlisp and
| Warren Teitelman's "pervasive philosophy of user interface
| design" and implementation of "DWIM".
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DWIM
|
| https://www.techfak.uni-bielefeld.de/~joern/jargon/DWIM.HTML
|
| https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6492j904
|
| If your language isn't terribly designed, then your IDE doesn't
| have to be such a complex non-deterministic Rube Goldberg
| machine, papering over the languages flaws, haphazardly guessing
| about your intent, "yelling at you" all the time about potential
| foot-guns and misunderstandings.
|
| As you might guess, I'm firmly in the "East Coast" MacLisp /
| Emacs camp, because that's what I learned to program in the 80's.
| I can't stand most IDEs (except for the original Lisp Machines,
| and Emacs of course), especially when they keep popping up
| hyperactive completion menus that steal the keyboard input focus
| and spew paragraphs of unexpected boilerplate diarrhea into my
| buffer whenever I dare to type ahead quickly and hit return.
|
| But my point is that you can have and should demand the best of
| both coasts, unless you start off with a Shitty West Coast
| Programming Language or a Shitty East Coast IDE.
|
| (Of course those philosophies are no longer bound to the
| geographical coasts they're named after, that's just how those
| papers describe their origin.)
|
| Jeff Atwood's point an my point is that we should demand both
| well designed programming languages AND well designed IDEs, not
| make excuses for and paper over the flaws of shitty ones.
|
| There are historic existence proofs, like Lisp Machines and
| Smalltalk, and we should be able to do much better now, instead
| of getting stuck in the past with Lisp or PHP.
|
| I mentioned the East/West Coast dichotomy in the discussion about
| the conversation between Guido, James, Anders and Larry:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19568860
|
| >DonHopkins on April 4, 2019 | parent | context | favorite | on:
| A Conversation with Language Creators: Guido, Jame...
|
| >Anders Hejlsberg also made the point that types are
| documentation. Programming language design is user interface
| design because programmers are programming language users.
|
| >"East Coast" MacLisp tended to solve problems at a linguistic
| level that you could hack with text editors like Emacs, while
| "West Cost" Interlisp-D tended to solve the same problems with
| tooling like WYSIWYG DWIM IDEs.
|
| >But if you start with a well designed linguistically sound
| language (Perl, PHP and C++ need not apply), then your IDE
| doesn't need to waste so much of its energy and complexity and
| coherence on papering over problems and making up for the
| deficiencies of the programming language design. (Like debugging
| mish-mashes of C++ templates and macros in header files!)
|
| More discussion of West Coast -vs- East Coast language design:
|
| Evolution of Lisp:
|
| https://redirect.cs.umbc.edu/courses/331/papers/Evolution-of...
|
| Worse is Better:
|
| https://dreamsongs.com/WorseIsBetter.html
|
| History of T:
|
| http://www.paulgraham.com/thist.html?viewfullsite=1
|
| The Interlisp Programming Environment
|
| http://www.ics.uci.edu/~andre/ics228s2006/teitelmanmasinter....
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966328
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5966399
|
| >gruseom on June 30, 2013 | parent | context | favorite | on: The
| Interlisp Programming Environment (1981) [pdf]
|
| >Interlisp was the so-called "west coast" Lisp that emphasized an
| interactive programming environment and in retrospect looks more
| like a hybrid between Smalltalk and Lisp than modern Lisp
| implementations. It was developed at PARC for a while. I don't
| know if there was cross-pollination between Interlisp and
| Smalltalk or if the similarity was a zeitgeist thing.
|
| >This article talks about the design values of the system and
| communicates the flavour of what a Smalltalkish Lisp would have
| been like.
|
| >As someone who's only read about this, I'd be interested in
| hearing from people who actually used it.
| shrubble wrote:
| Don, have you played around with the Interlisp.org "try Medley
| in your browser" or the downloadable version? And if so, what
| did you think of it?
| DonHopkins wrote:
| No, I have't had a chance to check that out. Thanks for the
| tip!
| pfdietz wrote:
| "Interlisp is a very large software system and large software
| systems are not easy to construct. Interlisp-D has on the order
| of 17,000 lines of Lisp code, 6,000 lines of Bcpl, and 4,000
| lines of microcode."
|
| from Interlisp-D: Overview and Status
|
| https://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/document?repid=rep1&type=pdf&d...
|
| Ah, the days when a "very large software system" had 27K lines of
| code. :)
| lispm wrote:
| They also had "relatively large main memories" ;-) "(~1
| megabyte) and virtual address spaces (4-16M 16 bit words)". I
| would guess the CPU speed would be rated less than 1 MIPS.
| crest wrote:
| Even today 17,000 lines of Lisp can be dauntingly complex ;-).
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