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The revival of Medley/Interlisp: An elegant weapon from a more civilised age is getting sharpened up again. Restoration project headed up by Steve Kaisler is gathering steam ← by me on the Register (www.theregister.com)

submitted 10 months ago by lproven@alien.top to c/lisp

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[–] theangeryemacsshibe@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago (5 children)

But the thing that unites these tools is that they are grafts: they are Lisp tools that run inside C-based OSes which come from a profoundly different school of computer design.

Please stop with this rubbish narrative - you even say later that Medley supports Common Lisp, and the Maclisp Lisp machine lineage did too. They're all von Neumann, so not that profoundly different either. (See prior on RISC and high level languages too.)

[–] lproven@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago (3 children)

Please stop with this rubbish narrative

Let me explain the general context here, because I don't think this is rubbish at all.

What I am talking about is the general design of Lisp-based OSes, such as OpenGenera and Medley, or indeed Smalltalk, as compared to OSes built from statically-compiled languages such as C, C++, Modula-2, Oberon, and so on.

This is the same thing Steve Yegge was talking about in a different blog post of his:

https://steve-yegge.blogspot.com/2007/01/pinocchio-problem.html

Which happened to come up today here:

https://www.scattered-thoughts.net/writing/there-are-no-strings-on-me/

It's also one of the overarching themes of loper-os.org.

If one is using Emacs on a Lisp OS, and one changes the definition of a function that, say, displays a window title bar or something, then the whole OS reflects that immediately, Emacs included.

If you did it in, say, Linux with TWM, nothing changes until you recompile and reboot.

On a Lisp OS, Emacs was just part of the whole, and you could change something in Emacs and the OS reflected it.

But if you are on Linux using Emacs with SLIME to edit some SBCL code, when you change the Emacs Lisp code, nothing happens to your SBCL code. Change the SBCL code and nothing changes in Emacs.

They are in little isolated boxes, which can talk but are not interconnected... even if Emacs is the editor used by SBCL.

Interlisp is perhaps the only extant FOSS Lisp environment where this can still be observed. That's why I mentioned it.

[–] corbasai@alien.top 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

I definitely Agree (despite to our CL-locals). But Lisp Machines may(must) have some analogs of Jail|chroot|zones with stable ABI. Versioned or tagged. It is not rocket science. Look at Mirage OS,... not the same... but it works

[–] zyni-moe@alien.top 1 points 9 months ago

But Lisp Machines may(must) have some analogs of Jail|chroot|zones with stable ABI

No they did not have any of that.

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