emacs vs lisp machines (was: What have we lost?)

[Javier]

eMacs is the modern Lisp Machine. How is it not?

I agree. But elisp, the dialect it uses, has its limitations.

Quoting from the elisp manual:

GNU Emacs Lisp is largely inspired by Maclisp, and a little by Common
Lisp. If you know Common Lisp, you will notice many similarities.
However, many features of Common Lisp have been omitted or simplified in
order to reduce the memory requirements of GNU Emacs. Sometimes the
simplifications are so drastic that a Common Lisp user might be very
confused. We will occasionally point out how GNU Emacs Lisp differs
from Common Lisp. If you don’t know Common Lisp, don’t worry about it;
this manual is self-contained.

A certain amount of Common Lisp emulation is available via the
‘cl-lib’ library. *Note Overview: (cl)Top.

Perhaps somebody who has worked with real lisp machines can comment further.

[Stefan Monnier]

Post by Javier

eMacs is the modern Lisp Machine. How is it not?

I agree. But elisp, the dialect it uses, has its limitations.
GNU Emacs Lisp is largely inspired by Maclisp, and a little by Common
Lisp. If you know Common Lisp, you will notice many similarities.
However, many features of Common Lisp have been omitted or simplified in
order to reduce the memory requirements of GNU Emacs. Sometimes the
simplifications are so drastic that a Common Lisp user might be very
confused. We will occasionally point out how GNU Emacs Lisp differs
from Common Lisp. If you don’t know Common Lisp, don’t worry about it;
this manual is self-contained.
A certain amount of Common Lisp emulation is available via the
‘cl-lib’ library. *Note Overview: (cl)Top.
Perhaps somebody who has worked with real lisp machines can comment further.

Nowadays most of the language-level functionality of Lisp Machines is
available in ELisp either "in the core" or via libraries that are
bundled with Emacs.

What is lacking is the lower-level support, i.e. the ability to hack
on the internals without leaving the Lisp world: in Emacs, a lot of the
lower-level details are written in C.


Stefan

[Jeff Barnett]

Post by Javier

eMacs is the modern Lisp Machine. How is it not?

I agree. But elisp, the dialect it uses, has its limitations.
GNU Emacs Lisp is largely inspired by Maclisp, and a little by Common
Lisp. If you know Common Lisp, you will notice many similarities.
However, many features of Common Lisp have been omitted or simplified in
order to reduce the memory requirements of GNU Emacs. Sometimes the
simplifications are so drastic that a Common Lisp user might be very
confused. We will occasionally point out how GNU Emacs Lisp differs
from Common Lisp. If you don’t know Common Lisp, don’t worry about it;
this manual is self-contained.
A certain amount of Common Lisp emulation is available via the
‘cl-lib’ library. *Note Overview: (cl)Top.
Perhaps somebody who has worked with real lisp machines can comment further.

One thing I miss entirely was the Symbolics keyboard: layout, action,
and integration with Lisp. Another thing lacking in most (if not all)
modern Lisp providers is robustness. We had one Lisp machine that was
used as a development machine as well as the namespace server for about
8-10 other machines. In one stretch it was up, continuously, for a
little over two years - the computer room was shut down for some
electronics work over the Xmas holiday and that capped the uptime. Since
the machine "OS" was build in the same language and shared flavor
(latter CL objects) you could do almost anything without leaving the
Lisp abstraction. It felt clumsy returning to the world were Emacs was
twi

[steve g]

Post by Javier

eMacs is the modern Lisp Machine. How is it not?

I agree. But elisp, the dialect it uses, has its limitations.
GNU Emacs Lisp is largely inspired by Maclisp, and a little by Common
Lisp. If you know Common Lisp, you will notice many similarities.
However, many features of Common Lisp have been omitted or simplified

< Perhaps somebody who has worked with real lisp machines can comment
< further.

I still have a symbolics from 1986. it runs fine. The biggest difference is
the hardware. the bitmapped display uses all PROMS. it needs to compile when
starting.

the mouse was ``taken by mistake'', with the manual. If you want pictures
let me know she is awesome but old.

the biggest difference with common lisp is lexical scope and namespaces.

[HASM]

I still have a symbolics from 1986. it runs fine. ...
If you want pictures let me know she is awesome but old.

Like these?

https://www.ifis.uni-luebeck.de/~moeller/symbolics-info/family.html

-- HASM