Symbolics Lisp Machine demo Jan 2013

There's this recent video showing a little of what the Pharo Smalltalk environment is like: [link] The video was made by a Ruby programmer, rather than an experience Smalltalker, so it's more a newbie showing you cool things he's discovered, rather than an expert showing the power of the system. On the other hand, there's this one: [this video] That one is an expert, Kalman Reti, showing some of what it's like to work with a Symbolics Lisp Machine. (It's not a real Lisp machine; they're all at least thirty years old now; this is an emulator running the old Symbolics OS on Linux). Go to YouTube and search for Rainer Joswig and you'll find a few video demos of Lisp Machines and MCL and so forth. Finally, here are a few images from about eighteen years ago, also from Rainer. They show various views of the Macintosh Common Lisp and SK8 environments. It's not an experienced user showing you around, but at least you can get some idea what the environments looked like: [link]

>My dream is to make everything visualizable at runtime. Check out demos of the old Lisp Machines, [1] is a brief overview demo, [2] links to a timestamp with a view of some simple diagramming, but I’ve seen TI-Symbolics beasts routinely display complex relationships in Lisp code on their massive (for the time) bitmapped screens. The limitation was the end user managing the visualization complexity. With open source llvm, clang and similar making available abstract syntax trees and even semantic analysis and type checking results, LLM’s assisting with decompiling binary blobs, and modern hardware (goggles, graphics cards, and so on), I sometimes wonder how close we can come to reproducing that aspect of the Lisp Machine experience on open source operating systems. [1] [this video] [2] [link]

Xerox controlled the whole stack, they invented it for their systems. So these workstations where an whole stack OS. You can read about their implementations on the links I provided before. Additionally, you can get the original Smalltalk-80 from from Stephane's web site. [link] This is a very ruft idea how it felt to use a Smalltalk workstation: [link] [link] The REPL was what is known in Smalltalk as transcript. Similarly the Interlisp-D workstation also had they own mixture of REPL and editing [link] Some of the ideas that lived on the Lisp Machines afterwards [link] [this video] Mesa was a memory safe system programming language created at Xerox, as an evolution from Extended Algol to replace BCPL. Niklaus Wirth based his Modula-2 design on it. Shortly thereafter they updated Mesa into Cedar, which added support for RC with local GC for cycle collection. The system then got called Mesa/Cedar. It allowed the same interactive experience as the other workstations, but using a GC enabled systems programming language. The REPL provided nice features, like auto-suggestion when a typo would cause a compilation failure. It is also probably the first graphical debugger for a strong typed language. Any OS API could be used on the REPL by typing modulename.procedure , which could use other OS APIs to get its input from different sources. An idea Wirth adopted into Oberon. You can see how all three environments looked like here: [link] And yes, Powershell alongside .NET is probably the cl

The terminal is exactly an example of an app-centric workflow and why it is easier to build and/or easier to use than an API focused one. If you want to see a no-apps workflow, something like the Genera LISP OS was probably much closer[0]. People choose to use apps like ls, cat, less, echo, touch, find instead of using the FILE* object directly with readdir(), stat(), read(), write(), open(), creat() etc. All of the apps are designed to have human-readable output first, lots of options for controlling that output to make it as readable as possible etc. However, none of them exposes a rich model for its output that would make it possible to easily integrate it into more complex workflows. Instead, we rely on yet other apps, like sed, grep, xargs and essentially copy-pasting text between these apps (this is all that pipes really are, essentially). This becomes even more obvious when you use stuff like gcc or gdb, which have extremely rich and potentially useful layers of representation that they refuse to expose at all, even as APIs - only text is allowed in the interaction. Hell, the MS Office suite is a better example of a no-apps workflow, since each of the Office UIs has a deep understanding of the data produced by the others, and you can combine these in meaningful ways - much more so than terminal apps (for example, Word can show a portion of a spreadsheet without you having to guess at what contents it might have and how to parse it, like you would if you want to expose

The key thing about those type of systems was the ability to reach down into the system and edit the code of the system currently in operation. Here's a demonstration of Symbolics Open Genera (TM) 2.0, demonstrated running in a virtual machine. It is noted by the author of the video in the first minute or so that even in emulation, it is much faster than the original machines. - [this video] Oberon also had a similar attribute, in that they kept the names of functions to operate on objects visible. The same was true of the Canon Cat, Hypercard, Ted Nelson's Xanadu project, Smalltalk, and a number of other early computing systems. The main feature common to all of these systems is that they all preserve context . In Genera, Oberon, Canon Cat, Hypercard, and SmallTalk the source was always available. (as far as I know). In Xanadu, the main functionality of the web was present, but it wouldn't allow the broken links (and lost context) that now plague the web. I think a future platform could take code in a number of languages, compile it to an abstract syntax tree, but preserve the context required to recreate the source. In fact, it's reasonable that you could import a routine in a language you aren't familiar with, and reverse the compilation to get it expressed in an equivalent (but less elegant) form in your language of choice, along with the original comments. There's nothing stopping an open source project from taking elements of these existing systems and moving forward from th

You are aware that Lisp machines understood several different flavors of Lisp? The Symbolics ones understood Zetalisp and Common Lisp at least. Were they on the market today they could be convinced to run Clojure and Scheme as well. There are a few old-timers developing Common Lisp applications to run on modern hardware, using Symbolics hardware. In fact, Symbolics shipped compilers for other non-Lisp programming languages, including C and Ada. These interoperated smoothly with Lisp code, much more so than they do under Unix. In this demo, Kalman Reti compiles a JPEG decoder written in C, and replaces the Lisp JPEG decoder that came with the system with it, yielding a performance boost: [this video]