[Openmcl-devel] talk on CCL

[Robert Goldman]

In my experience, thinking back to the 90s, it was not Macs or other 
stock PCs that killed the lisp machines: it was a combination of Lucid 
Common Lisp (and perhaps to a lesser extent, Allegro), and Sun 
workstations on the competitive front, and the first big AI Winter on 
the demand front.

There was a AAAI Conference in Seattle in 1987 where there was a huge 
blowout, and the winter came rushing in quite soon after that.  There 
was a huge contrast between the lavishness of AAAI-87, and the following 
conferences.

On 4 Jan 2020, at 15:57, Craig Lanning wrote:

> 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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>>>
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