why is there not a lisp pc?
in [Lisp]
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From: Tim Bradshaw on 15 Jan 2010 18:50 On 2010-01-13 02:36:02 +0000, Ray <bear(a)sonic.net> said: > Presumably by way of Xerox PARC. I don't think so. X was associated with MIT which was also where the (east-coast) Lisp machines generally came from, so I think the influence was much more direct.
From: Scott Burson on 18 Jan 2010 12:20 On Dec 29 2009, 4:41 am, Tamas K Papp <tkp...(a)gmail.com> wrote: > > I have noticed that some people are nostalgic about Lisp Machines, and > I appreciate the sentiment, but to me they look like nothing but a > glorious dead end. There was a level of integration there that we no longer see in today's systems. If you're using a program and it does something you don't like, hit c-m-Suspend and bam, you're in the debugger. Click on a frame and hit c-E and bam, you're editing the source. Change something and hit c-sh-C and bam, your change is installed. Switch back to the debugger and hit Resume and bam, the app is running with your mod. The elapsed time could be well under 30 seconds if the bug or change is a really obvious one. Contrast what you have to do nowadays: track down the source, maybe puzzle over the configure options, make sure you have the right versions of dependent components, build the thing with debugging enabled, fire it up under the debugger to see what it's doing, edit and rebuild. Elapsed time: at least half an hour if you've never hacked this app before. Maybe several hours. It's this level of integration that made the LispMs so wonderful to work on. The fact that the code was all in Lisp was, to some extent, just a means to that end, though it certainly required a dynamic language of some kind. -- Scott
From: Tamas K Papp on 18 Jan 2010 12:31 On Mon, 18 Jan 2010 09:20:08 -0800, Scott Burson wrote: > On Dec 29 2009, 4:41 am, Tamas K Papp <tkp...(a)gmail.com> wrote: >> >> I have noticed that some people are nostalgic about Lisp Machines, and >> I appreciate the sentiment, but to me they look like nothing but a >> glorious dead end. > > There was a level of integration there that we no longer see in today's I also recall reading that it had no user separation or privilege containment. Is that true? I know that this was before the internet became ubiquitous, but is this a good security model? If not, could one remedy this (in principle) and still have something similar to a Lisp machine? > Contrast what you have to do nowadays: track down the source, maybe > puzzle over the configure options, make sure you have the right versions > of dependent components, build the thing with debugging enabled, fire it I think that managing software components is an orthogonal issue. Lispers have full control over ASDF and its ilk, and we didn't do such a great job with those. Did the Lisp Machine have a framework for managing software updates (think Debian or similar), or was is so cozy because the issue didn't arise? Tamas
From: Robert Uhl on 18 Jan 2010 13:09 Tamas K Papp <tkpapp(a)gmail.com> writes: >>> >>> I have noticed that some people are nostalgic about Lisp Machines, and >>> I appreciate the sentiment, but to me they look like nothing but a >>> glorious dead end. >> >> There was a level of integration there that we no longer see in today's > > I also recall reading that it had no user separation or privilege > containment. Is that true? I know that this was before the internet > became ubiquitous, but is this a good security model? If not, could > one remedy this (in principle) and still have something similar to a > Lisp machine? I think so. Consider something like Plan 9's overlay filesystems, and apply that to code. Any user could, say, view the source code of any running program, but when he modifies it then he's updating his own copy of it. There'd have to be some privileged mechanism to push individual changes into the base image. There would be some issues when User A updates the base image and User B has his own updates to the older base image, but this sort of thing has been solved for the general case by DVCSes--certainly it could be solved for the particular case of an S-expression language. -- Robert A. Uhl There is no place for nationalism in the Church. All are one in Christ. --Blessed Martyr Philoumenos of Jacob's Well, +1979
From: Tim Bradshaw on 18 Jan 2010 15:31
On 2010-01-18 17:31:00 +0000, Tamas K Papp <tkpapp(a)gmail.com> said: > I also recall reading that it had no user separation or privilege > containment. Is that true? I know that this was before the internet > became ubiquitous, but is this a good security model? If not, could > one remedy this (in principle) and still have something similar to a > Lisp machine? Yes, everything was in a single address space and anyone could do anything. No, it wasn't a good security model - it wasn't really a security model at all. Things were made much better by bounds & type checking of course. I guess they were a bit like what JavaScript environments look like now that way. I think you could do better without going to complete separation. > > I think that managing software components is an orthogonal issue. > Lispers have full control over ASDF and its ilk, and we didn't do such > a great job with those. Did the Lisp Machine have a framework for > managing software updates (think Debian or similar), or was is so cozy > because the issue didn't arise? They had patches and a mechanism for managing them. I don't think there was any automated update-getting thing (but this is pretty recent actually - Debian may have been the first sorted out example of it). |