What Was the Lisp Machine?

09 Aug 2025 - 12 Aug 2025
Open in Logseq
    • Remembrance of programming environments past.
    • The Lisp Machine was developed at the MIT AI Lab and later commercialized by Symbolics, LMI, and Texas Instruments. It was well-loved but a commercial failure, and today is dead although various retrocomputing efforts exist. It was a computer system build from the ground up by hackers and as a result provided a level of power and flexibility that (rather suprisingly) hasn't really been matched in newer systems. It's kind of shameful that its wonderful features can't be found in present-day environments.
    • What does Clojure need to be more LispM like?

    • CLOS
    • Better error handling (in-context repl, dynamic restarts, etc)
    • Dynamic Windows (object-based REPL)
    • Some kind of standard persistent store
    • Aside from error handling, these all seem pretty doable.