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- Hacker News
- > Is there an Interlisp echo in today’s development culture?
Emacs not mentioned. It better have been.
by akater - Getting "too many requests" at the moment.by emmelaich
- "Residential programming" isn't it similar to interepreter!! Difference I can think of is it can completely rewrite something instead of updating or extending it. ex. rewrite the existing function instead of re-defining it.by virajk_31
- The Interlisp manual defines residential programming like this:
«The "residential" style, where you stay inside the environment throughout the development, is essential for these tools to operate.»
by pamoroso - It turned out in practice that a Lisp Machine was basically a Lisp interpreter implemented in hardware. A better and much more pragmatic solution was to compile Lisp to efficient machine code and then run it on any traditional CPU. Which is what we do today.
- I had a Xerox 1108 Lisp Machine, ran InterLisp-D on it for about two years, then slowed it down by installing Common Lisp on it.
Wonderful for Larry et.,al. to keep it going as open source.
- You can have the residential programming feel with SBCL; it's a pleasure.by anonzzzies
- Rory Sutherland [0] has a great quote:
"If you really want to great phenomenal items here is the plan:
- enter a market
- become a monopoly
- use those monopoly profits to fund R&D/building items of incredible quality"
A recent example of that is Apple TV. Apple makes so much money that they can fund the creation of incredibly high quality shows with basically minimal advertising.
0 - https://www.tiktok.com/@rorysutherlandclips/video/7314765561...
by alexpotato - In other words:
- enter a market
- become a monopoly
- use those monopoly profits to maintain your monopoly
A playbook that's very much alive in all big tech companies, from Apple to Oracle.
by sph - > use those monopoly profits to fund R&D/building items of incredible quality
But why would a corporation do that when it could simply distribute those profits to shareholders?
- > Apple makes so much money that they can fund the creation of incredibly high quality shows with basically minimal advertising.
But Apple has not created any high quality shows.
Simply throwing money at something does not automatically make it good.
by dosisking - I wasn’t familiar with the term “Residential programming,” but it reminds me of the talk “Stop Writing Dead Programs” (https://jackrusher.com/strange-loop-2022/)
Increasingly, I think that an agent (and I) would work much better in a malleable, notebook-like, inspectable program, than it would with its current file-based “edit and re-run” primitives.
“Marimo pair” (built into their notebook-like primitive) is an attempt at this. And they have program introspection tools built in.
I also think that Glamorous Toolkit (https://gtoolkit.com/) might be a similar live environment, but I haven’t investigated it too much other than reading about it.
Is anyone else familiar with “modern” attempts at this?
by TheTaytay - > Is anyone else familiar with “modern” attempts at this?
Glamorous Toolkit is the main one I have found, yah.
The TruffleSqueak demos are pretty cool: https://github.com/hpi-swa/trufflesqueak
Enso Analytics also runs on GraalVM: https://ensoanalytics.com/
Love the "Stop Writing Dead Programs" talk - and of course "Inventing on Principle" by Bret Victor is required viewing for anyone that hasn't seen it yet. https://youtu.be/PUv66718DII
by pturing - A great tech book on symbolic computers in general and Lisp machines, is Peter Kogge's 1991, "The Architecture of Symbolic Computers". I believe new efforts by people like Yann LeCun will counter the "LLMs or bust" monoculture along with SOC/ASICs, in-memory compute, neuromorphic chips, dataflow, optical/analog hybrids , etc. that will bring a healthy correction or alternatives to the Von Neumann architecture.by eggy
- If you find PARC interesting, and especially if you're interested in symbolic computation, I can highly recommend digging as deep as you can possibly stomach into the FGCS:
https://www.airc.aist.go.jp/aitec-icot/ICOT/HomePage.html
As a public research initiative, pretty much everything was published when the initiative was completed. PIMs are absolute engineering marvels. The ICOT had command of an army of the absolute best talent in the entire country, and unified them towards a goal of pure exploratory research with no market pressure, with all the excesses of 1980s Japan.
by ux266478 - More Japanese excesses from the '80s: the Tron computing project.by imglorp
- FGCS: the Fifth-Generation Computing System
I was really excited about this initiative at the time, just starting my computer science undergrad degree.
Hardware that ran Prolog as close to bare metal as possible.
Thanks for the reminder. 40 years ago.
by watersb