[Openmcl-devel] talk on CCL

[Craig Lanning]

As someone that has used a Lisp Machine for over two decades and owns
one (XL1201) even now, I would say that MBA's had more to do with the
death of the Lisp Machine (specifically Symbolics as a company) than
any specific Common Lisp implementation. Before you can talk about
replacing LispM's you need to know what the hardware was capable of
doing. A Mac is not even close. I developed a system on a Symbolics
3620 and then deployed that 3620 to the customer site. It was used by
more than just our direct customer. I would not have attempted to
deploy a Mac to do that job.

Symbolics had an interactive interface builder on their Lisp Machines
for building Dynamic Windows interfaces. The builder application was
called Frame Up.

Craig Lanning

P.S. I have actually find Clozure CL to be slower than even SBCL.
Clozure CL is slower because it spends most of its time in the GC.

On Sun, 2018-10-21 at 21:31 -0700, Chris Hanson wrote:
> As someone who’s studied their history, I seriously think that
> CCL/MCL is an under-acknowledged participant in the death of Lisp
> Machines: When you could use a Macintosh for development nearly as
> effectively as a Lisp Machine for barely a tenth the cost (or even
> less), and deploy on Macintosh as well, why spend all that money on
> specialized hardware? Especially since by the 1990s the Lisp Machines
> were falling far behind on performance.
> 
>   -- Chris
> 
> > On Oct 19, 2018, at 8:55 AM, Ron Garret <ron at flownet.com> wrote:
> > 
> > " an intrepid band of hackers formed a little company called Coral
> > Software. And Coral Common Lisp was their product that they managed
> > to put together, and it came out in 1987, and … they had a Common
> > Lisp (it didn’t have CLOS, so it was CLTL1), [which] ran on a 1MB
> > Macintosh Plus, this incredibly weak hardware. So that was a real
> > accomplishment.”
> > 
> > Not only did they have a CL that ran on a 1MB Mac Plus, it had an
> > IDE!  And not only did it have an IDE, it had one of the best IDEs
> > ever.  You can still run it on emulators today, and it is still
> > usable — even competitive — today.  It had an interactive interface
> > builder that is still to this day superior to anything I have seen
> > anywhere.  I still miss it.  (I used the original CCL to do my
> > masters thesis back in 1987 and it spoiled me on IDEs for
> > life.  I’ve been a grumpy old man ever since.)
> > 
> > I would rank the original CCL as a technical achievement on a par
> > with the Macintosh itself.
> > 
> > rg
> > 
> > 
> > On Oct 18, 2018, at 5:12 PM, R. Matthew Emerson <rme at acm.org>
> > wrote:
> > 
> > > I was invited to give a talk at this year’s European Lisp
> > > Symposium in Marbella, Spain.  It was a great conference.  I
> > > highly recommend that you try to attend next the next one if you
> > > possibly can.  It will be in Genoa, Italy.  See 
> > > https://european-lisp-symposium.org.
> > > 
> > > Anyway, I prepared a web site that contains a video of the talk
> > > and also a written transcript with slides included in the text in
> > > the appropriate places.
> > > 
> > > The link is http://thisoldlisp.com/talks/els-2018/
> > > 
> > > It’s not really very technical in nature (it’s meant to be
> > > entertaining and encouraging), but maybe some of you would enjoy
> > > it.
> > > 
> > > 
> > > _______________________________________________
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> > > Openmcl-devel at clozure.com
> > > https://lists.clozure.com/mailman/listinfo/openmcl-devel
> > 
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